Caroming Charge needs clarification but not nerfing

[Flames of Chaos]

After several discussions with my DM and trying out the feat for the first time, I would love to get something to the Paizo devs:

Caroming Charge is really fun, but it has the potential to be busted if the wording isn't changed. RAI seems to be "pinball through everyone you can get to once and do some amount of stunt damage as you pass them", and as it's currently worded, you can effectively do the same potential damage as a level 20 swashbuckler hitting with a finisher strike without any need for a saving throw just by running through the same target over and over with your speed. Obviously this is only if the DM doesn't correctly see the way this could be abused, but it still exists. IMHO the fix is to add language somewhere in the text of the feat to say "You move between your foes and batter them as you pass by.You Stride twice. You can move through enemies as part of this movement, and you deal stunt damage to each enemy you move through once." or add something like "You deal this stunt damage only once to each enemy, no matter how many times you move through their space."

Otherwise, this feat is really fun, and it doesn't need to be nerfed as the admission price is already established as it can't be the first action as you have to do something to gain adrenaline first, and it kinda is really only great if you have a large crowd of opponents and a high movement speed. Thank you for taking the time to read this and sorry if someone's already pointed this out somehow on here.

[YuriP]

Yes, my tests agree with you.

Since the Stunt Damage isn't that impressive and Caroming Charge puts the daredevil at risk of triggering multiple reactions, in practice it doesn't prove as OP as it seems on paper.

That said, I miss a test so enemies can do something. Automatically dealing damage without a chance of failure, in my opinion, even goes against the concept of risk in the class. Maybe a basic Reflex save or something like that.

The other point about Caroming Charge is that it's too strong for a level 2 feat. It should probably be a level 4 or 6 feat.

As for not being able to deal the same damage multiple times, we already have the general rule about duplicate effects; people just forget it.

[Mathmuse]

The wording of Caroming Charge is, "you deal stunt damage to each enemy you move through." Technically, it counts enemies rather than the times moved-through, so it is once per enemy. However, this thread demonstrates that the wording needs to be more blatant.

I miss having a test against each enemy, too.

[moosher12]

YuriP wrote:

Since the Stunt Damage isn't that impressive and Caroming Charge puts the daredevil at risk of triggering multiple reactions, in practice it doesn't prove as OP as it seems on paper.

Honestly, "no reactions" is very dependent on the fight. During my playtest, none of the encounters, even the martial ones, had a reactive strike to trigger, and few creatures have this opportunity in 2e to begin with. You're largely safe to assume you can do it.

My thoughts on the matter is making it either an acrobatics check per enemy you move through, or granting each enemy a basic reflex saving throw against the damage. I'd lean toward the latter, personally.

In my experience, Caroming Charge only gets these downsides if the GM modifies encounters to grant Reactive Strike to groups that don't normally have it, as in practicum, very few encounters have it. Like, it's rare enough that in a given adventure, you have a decent chance of encountering resistance more often then you'll encounter Reactive Strike. It's just not a stat I see come up very often when coding NPCs into Roll20 from adventure paths.

[YuriP]

It depends on the level and the adventure.

For example, I'm currently testing by replaying level 6 encounters from Cult of Cinders, and almost all encounters at this level have at least one creature with movement-triggered reactions. And I know that number tends to increase as the level goes up.

[moosher12]

I guess that's where the issue is. In the case of my playtest, I made a custom one where I put together thematic monsters, but none of them happened to have Reactive Strike, which means I would have had to build the encounters specifically to counter the Daredevil, which is just gonna look sus to my players. When I ran Kingmaker, the swaths of time where you don't run into Reactive Strike are very large. I feel like having an ability that is only tempered when movement reactions are available does not feel like a nerf where campaigns exist where you can go multiple levels without seeing reactive strike once.

It's like the "Flying shouldn't be allowed" argument. If the average vanilla book is not equipped to deal with the mechanic existing without the GM changing encounters, the ability is probably too powerful. Some adventures may be equipped for it, but some simply are not. Because players aren't gonna take so kindly to, "Yeah, well these witchwargs have Reactive Strike because the Daredevil's ability is too good." That just risks reawakening the PF1E problem of the normal players getting punished for the existence of the one overtuned character.

[Squiggit]

... The comparison seems a little over the top. Flying characters completely redefine how you have to approach a variety of encounters. Charge is... a small amount of damage on a two action adrenaline activity.

[moosher12]

It's a small amount of damage in a vacuum, until you realize there is no limit to the amount of times the damage can be applied if there is a lot of monsters. You can only do it once per enemy, yes, but there is no limit to the amount of enemies. My player's daredevil just spammed it against my witchwarg encounter each turn. When there is no way for them to reduce the damage or dodge it, the damage adds up. Because the effective damage is multiplied by the amount of times it is applied. Area damage is less, typically, yes. But there is a miss chance. You're basically taking AoE damage, and then removing the miss chance, making it net-better, because it is unavoidably consistent.

This is 1d6 (3.5) damage at level 1, 2d6 (7) at level 5, 3d6 (10.5) at level 9, 4d6 (14) at level 13, and 5d6 (17.5) at level 17.All plus Strength, which can be built up.

Then lets look at a martial's weapon. Sure, an early weapon might be higher if you get a 1d8 or bigger weapon. And it'll last like this up until about level 8. At level 9 though. You're still at 2d6/8/10/12 (7/9/11/13) while the stunt damage is at 3d6. Only the d10 and d12 can compete. At level 12, you've got 3d6/8/10/12 (10.5/13.5/16.5/19.5), and again, only the d10 and d12 pull ahead. At level 16, you're at the same numbers, and only the d12 is competing. Finally at level 19 you're at 4d6/8/10/12 (14/18/22/26), and sure, d8 + competes. But guess what? To do that, you had to pay 40,000 gp. The Daredevil gets it free. On top of that, you only get that damage once per action. The daredevil spends two and gets it once per target, to any number of targets within their speed. On top of that, you gotta roll to hit and deal with multi-attack penalty if you want so much as a second hit, the daredevil does not, as the miss chance is zero.

The deal may seem small when you compare it to a spell. But as an unlimited-use ability to be compared with Strikes with a weapon by a martial, the benefits becomes quite clear real quick. I'd imagine if you proposed to the fighter that if he used a shortsword, he could have a 100% chance to hit, could not crit, and could hit as many people as he could move through per turn, once per turn, while the short sword could scale to mythic rune damage, for free, I don't think he's gonna drop that offer without some consideration.

[Unicore]

Caroming charge is two actions and requires adrenaline. If a dare devil starts a turn prone, they can’t caroming charge (unless maybe rebounding fall stunt can be done from prone. Grabbed is another condition that can make it exceedingly difficult to do a 2 action activity that requires adrenaline and is not risky.

[yellowpete]

The no-save thing is good design for this ability. I roll my eyes every time the game asks me to make a save against e.g. a lightly damaging aura to determine whether it's going to take 0, 1, 2 or 4% of my HP this round. That taxes the mental load budget of running/playing encounters a lot for very little added excitement.

Charge does roughly your level in damage. That's very low – the weapon dice comparison is apples to oranges, as you almost never deal weapon dice damage only by itself. Additionally, it's a repeatable ability, which further lowers the value of assigning a save to it (the more rolls are made, the further the overall result will trend towards the mean anyways). Paizo did this right with Thermal Nimbus, I hope they stick to their guns here.

[moosher12]

Daring Stunt only requires you to move up to an enemy to gain Adrenaline. There is no requirement to attempt to grapple, reposition, shove, or trip. You are given the option to, but you are not required to, to get the adrenaline. Then on the remaining actions, as I had said.

[Unicore]

moosher12 wrote:

Daring Stunt only requires you to move up to an enemy to gain Adrenaline. There is no requirement to attempt to grapple, reposition, shove, or trip. You are given the option to, but you are not required to, to get the adrenaline. Then on the remaining actions, as I had said.

If you start your turn prone, you can’t use daring stunt to move and have 2 actions to use caroming charge. You can’t stride from prone

[YuriP]

Yes, Caroming Charge is easy to execute due to Daring Stunt's high efficiency in providing adrenaline. However, as Unicore correctly pointed out, if you need to do anything else during your turn, you won't be able to execute it. Therefore, conditions like Prone and Grabbed easily limit Caroming Charge.

The rarity of these conditions largely depends on whether you were lucky enough to avoid a critical failure with your Daring Stunt (except for Relocate attempts). That said, it's quite rare for a Daring Stunt to critically fail, except against stronger creatures.

[Unicore]

I was more responding to the idea that the ability as is leaves the GM helpless in encounters where lots of creatures are just getting run over by a daredevil with the ability. It seems pretty reasonable for a group of monsters to respond after it happens once by trying to trip or grab the enemy that is doing lots of damage to their group. It is not really any different of a situation than if a caster hit 4 party members with a chain lightning spell. “We need to stop that from happening again” is a very natural response with in world logic to back it up. “Make the fast enemy that runs through us like a recking ball have problems spending his action moving through us so quickly” will provide a defense against it.

[Teridax]

The claim that Caroming Charge stops working if you're prone itself stops holding water after level 8, where Kip Up solves that issue completely (that, and Rebounding Fall Stunt at level 1 with a little less reliability). Although I agree that the Daredevil is action-taxed by adrenaline in a way that shouldn't exist, I don't think that justifies the complete lack of interaction in this feat's mechanics. I would much rather the feat were made to include the rolls you'd usually get from trying to move through an enemy's space or deal damage to them (they could in fact be the same roll), and make the feat better in exchange: in particular, stunt damage is currently infamously weak, and I don't think much of the defense of this feat would hold if stunt damage were buffed to be as good as people want it to be.

I'd also like to point out that including a roll may actually improve the feat for its primary use case: rolling against crowds of weaker enemies means you'd be very likely to get a success to begin with, and would be more likely as well to trigger whichever critical success effect would come from the roll, like doubled stunt damage or whatever. Right now, the problem with the feat is that, as the OP points out, its best use case is to just move through a single enemy as many times as possible, and deal guaranteed stunt damage each time by bypassing that enemy's defenses completely. Even if that edge case were ironed out of the feat, including some kind of roll would in my opinion still be an improvement.

[Unicore]

Will most daredevils eventually have Kip up? Probably. They will go for it faster the first time their character gets knocked prone and can’t caroming charge when they would have like to. Letting that be a win for the player serverql times is great GMing. Having enemies sometimes grab instead or after realizing prone isn’t good enough is also great GMing.

Also, I am not sure Kip up alone is worth racing for over getting athletics to master, so it might be more like level 10, or 8 levels of not having it before it solves that one response.

I originally wanted stunt damage boosted in some fashion but have walked back on that in higher level play testing. Caroming charge is the one place where what happens with stunt damage is going to matter the most. It is hard to advocate what the activity should be like without knowing how that will change. Not having to roll a whole bunch for it is kind of nice from a game play perspective, if like almost every other maneuver ability, the damage doesn’t double on a crit. If the damage will double on a crit, then I think that gets tricky for establishing whether it will crit in other instances that trigger it. There is a danger of making stunt damage only matter with caroming charge if it is the only way to get double stunt damage.

[graystone]

Unicore wrote:

Also, I am not sure Kip up alone is worth racing for over getting athletics to master, so it might be more like level 10, or 8 levels of not having it before it solves that one response.

Taking Acrobat Dedication gets you scaling Acrobatics. I imagine it'd be quite popular way to get both athletics and acrobatics increases as soon as they are available for a single 2nd level feat [especially in free archetype games].

[moosher12]

Unicore wrote:

moosher12 wrote:

Daring Stunt only requires you to move up to an enemy to gain Adrenaline. There is no requirement to attempt to grapple, reposition, shove, or trip. You are given the option to, but you are not required to, to get the adrenaline. Then on the remaining actions, as I had said.

If you start your turn prone, you can’t use daring stunt to move and have 2 actions to use caroming charge. You can’t stride from prone

How often are you gonna be prone though?

YuriP wrote:

Yes, Caroming Charge is easy to execute due to Daring Stunt's high efficiency in providing adrenaline. However, as Unicore correctly pointed out, if you need to do anything else during your turn, you won't be able to execute it. Therefore, conditions like Prone and Grabbed easily limit Caroming Charge.

The rarity of these conditions largely depends on whether you were lucky enough to avoid a critical failure with your Daring Stunt (except for Relocate attempts). That said, it's quite rare for a Daring Stunt to critically fail, except against stronger creatures.

This actually leads into my point. The problem with Daredevil is, you're assuming the Daredevil is actually using their maneuvers. The daredevil in my game did not use Maneuvers a single time. All they did throughout all combats was throw improvised weapons with Breakaway Attack and Caroming Charge. They didn't touch any of the risk mechanics at all. And not only that, their character succeeded, and was doing the most damage of the party.

Unicore wrote:

I was more responding to the idea that the ability as is leaves the GM helpless in encounters where lots of creatures are just getting run over by a daredevil with the ability. It seems pretty reasonable for a group of monsters to respond after it happens once by trying to trip or grab the enemy that is doing lots of damage to their group. It is not really any different of a situation than if a caster hit 4 party members with a chain lightning spell. “We need to stop that from happening again” is a very natural response with in world logic to back it up. “Make the fast enemy that runs through us like a recking ball have problems spending his action moving through us so quickly” will provide a defense against it.

This works for intelligent enemies, but when dealing with dumber NPCs, you're not supposed to have otherwise dim creatures suddenly thinking with higher-level tactics. Trip doesn't come up so often. Though at the very least Grapple is a lot more common.

[Teridax]

Unicore wrote:

Also, I am not sure Kip up alone is worth racing for over getting athletics to master, so it might be more like level 10, or 8 levels of not having it before it solves that one response.

As graystone mentions, it is possible to get scaling Acrobatics on an archetype that offers numerous other interesting benefits for the class, so it is in fact possible to get Kip Up at level 8 without sacrificing Athletics. It is also my personal belief that the class ought to get auto-scaling skill increases to Athletics at the very least, given how important it is for them as you also mention.

As for stunt damage, holding it back because of this one feat I think is looking at it completely backwards: stunt damage by itself is disappointing and ought to change, and Caroming Charge ought to adapt to it. It is my personal belief that stunt damage ought to scale effectively like a d6 fist Strike, property runes and all, and should be able to deal double damage on critical successes. I don't consider not having to roll "kind of nice from a gameplay perspective," as noninteraction is not why I play games with other people, and players would be screaming bloody murder if a NPC could use an ability like this against the party.

[Unicore]

graystone wrote:

Unicore wrote:

Also, I am not sure Kip up alone is worth racing for over getting athletics to master, so it might be more like level 10, or 8 levels of not having it before it solves that one response.

Taking Acrobat Dedication gets you scaling Acrobatics. I imagine it'd be quite popular way to get both athletics and acrobatics increases as soon as they are available for a single 2nd level feat [especially in free archetype games].

Acrobat as an archetype is pretty terrible for daredevil beyond getting scaling acrobatics. The rest of the feats do not synergize with your play style at all, not being press abilities and doing things you have class feats to do better already. It seems like it would be a pretty bad FA as you’d be stuck taking multiple feats you will basically never use to get out of it, to get a skill feat two levels early. If it is that important to the player to Kip up, they should just probably prioritize acrobatics first, especially if they are never using any maneuvers and just wanting to throw rocks and caroming charge.

[Unicore]

moosher12 wrote:

The problem with Daredevil is, you're assuming the Daredevil is actually using their maneuvers. The daredevil in my game did not use Maneuvers a single time. All they did throughout all combats was throw improvised weapons with Breakaway Attack and Caroming Charge. They didn't touch any of the risk mechanics at all. And not only that, their character succeeded, and was doing the most damage of the party.

Did they have fun playing this way? Or was it disappointing?

I don’t see caroming charge dealing the most damage out of the party that frequently in encounters of less than 3 enemies. Was your party large with lots of extra enemies in it? I do think it’s a feat that will do better in those circumstances.

It’s math is just not broken enough in standard encounters for me to worry that much about it and it seems like trying to get everyone is going to leave you getting wailed on pretty frequently by the enemies you just lightly bruised. It feels like an exploit that will occasionally be very effective and loads of fun, and often lack luster, but also leaving you very vulnerable. That fits pretty squarely within my vision of daredevil abilities.

Letting all abilities that do stunt damage double on a crit doesn’t really work because stunt damage is extra damage from moving an enemy into a wall. The critical result on the ability might have been what let the ability move the enemy enough to do stunt damage in the first place. Specific abilities could call out doubling it for crits but it shouldn’t double on a generic shove or especially not on something like getting pushed from having got hit with a weapon with a crit specialization that shoves or repositions (which currently requires going out of class to get, but is the easiest way to combine strike damage and stunt damage).

[graystone]

Unicore wrote:

graystone wrote:

Unicore wrote:

Also, I am not sure Kip up alone is worth racing for over getting athletics to master, so it might be more like level 10, or 8 levels of not having it before it solves that one response.

Taking Acrobat Dedication gets you scaling Acrobatics. I imagine it'd be quite popular way to get both athletics and acrobatics increases as soon as they are available for a single 2nd level feat [especially in free archetype games].

Acrobat as an archetype is pretty terrible for daredevil beyond getting scaling acrobatics. The rest of the feats do not synergize with your play style at all, not being press abilities and doing things you have class feats to do better already. It seems like it would be a pretty bad FA as you’d be stuck taking multiple feats you will basically never use to get out of it, to get a skill feat two levels early. If it is that important to the player to Kip up, they should just probably prioritize acrobatics first, especially if they are never using any maneuvers and just wanting to throw rocks and caroming charge.

I think you're looking at this the wrong way. Even if the ONLY thing it gives is scaling Acrobatics, it opens up another skill you can take to legendary which is more than enough for a 2nd level feat. Add to that that there is only a single attack in the archetype so it doesn't seem like that not having synergy is an issue; Heck, there is a skill feat in it too so you can get out of the archetype without needing 3 class feats. My point was never about rushing to get to Kip Up, but on you saying you had to pick either Athletics or Acrobatics to race to Master for: you can easily get both for a 2nd level feat.

[moosher12]

Unicore wrote:

moosher12 wrote:

The problem with Daredevil is, you're assuming the Daredevil is actually using their maneuvers. The daredevil in my game did not use Maneuvers a single time. All they did throughout all combats was throw improvised weapons with Breakaway Attack and Caroming Charge. They didn't touch any of the risk mechanics at all. And not only that, their character succeeded, and was doing the most damage of the party.

Did they have fun playing this way? Or was it disappointing?

I don’t see caroming charge dealing the most damage out of the party that frequently in encounters of less than 3 enemies. Was your party large with lots of extra enemies in it? I do think it’s a feat that will do better in those circumstances.

It’s math is just not broken enough in standard encounters for me to worry that much about it and it seems like trying to get everyone is going to leave you getting wailed on pretty frequently by the enemies you just lightly bruised. It feels like an exploit that will occasionally be very effective and loads of fun, and often lack luster, but also leaving you very vulnerable. That fits pretty squarely within my vision of daredevil abilities.

Letting all abilities that do stunt damage double on a crit doesn’t really work because stunt damage is extra damage from moving an enemy into a wall. The critical result on the ability might have been what let the ability move the enemy enough to do stunt damage in the first place. Specific abilities could call out doubling it for crits but it shouldn’t double on a generic shove or especially not on something like getting pushed from having got hit with a weapon with a crit specialization that shoves or repositions (which currently requires going out of class to get, but is the easiest way to combine strike damage and stunt damage).

They had a blast. they were laughing the whole way. They were especially giggly when Caroming Charge went online for the level 5 fight. Our party was a three-man. (4th couldn't show up, so I just applied weak modifiers to my encounters. One Automaton Daredevil, one Automaton Slayer, and one Human Runelord Wizard). Each of their encounters were Severe level encounters. The Daredevil did the most damage in all of the encounters, took the least damage in all of the encounters, and was having a blast with it. Even if the damage seems low, in the end, they still out-damaged the wizard and the slayer. Those are numbers that don't lie, could just be good luck, but in the end, they had a game where they were the most effective member of the party. The game was reduced to vanilla only, so no home rules or optional rules were allowed, and the encounters were as follows:

Severe 1: 1 Goblin Pyro and 4 Goblin Warriors (reduced to 3 with lost player)
Severe 5: 3 Witchwargs (weak modifiers applied due to lost player)
Severe 10: 3 Shield Archons (weak modifiers applied due to lost player)
Extreme 20: 1 level 24 lich.

[Teridax]

Since when is Acrobat a bad archetype? Dodge Away and Tumbling Opportunist are both excellent on the Daredevil.

[Unicore]

The reason I think acrobat is a terrible archetype for a daredevil in a FA game is because free archetype games give you feats you have to take every 2 levels. To take Acrobat at level 2 to advance acobatics, in a free archetype game, means you are locking in to taking contortionist and dodge away as those are your only two options. That is incredibly restricting and not all that useful to my eyes. Scrambling Retreat is a much better option than dodge away. Having both would be pretty redundant and the later feats you can use with scrambling retreat are very good.

You can’t pick a free archetype that gives you a total of 3 feats you want spread out well past the early levels, especially when the purpose is to pick up a skill feat at level 8 instead of level 10. You can do so much better with a multiclass archetype it’s just not comparable, including just picking up the rogue MC which will get you kip up by level 8 if that is why you are doing this.

So if you are not taking acrobat with a free archetype, then you are choosing to give up your level 2 class feat for it. To me, this is the more reasonable way a daredevil might end up with the archetype, since you can just not take feats you don’t want instead of being forced to make bad choices. Between level 2 and level 4 I could see a lot of people picking acrobat over in house options, although I personally find the use cases of acrobatics in class to be worse than the use cases for athletics and the class gives you ways to use athletics for almost everything you’d use acrobatics for, except for balancing and squeezing. So maybe not as bad as it first appeared to me, but hardly worth taking to get acrobatics boosted when you can pretty much accomplish the same thing and more with the rogue archetype.

[Teridax]

Right, so it's not that the Acrobat is a terrible archetype for the Daredevil, so much that it... what, doesn't let you power game as hard on a FA character? Contortionist isn't a bad feat either, and making an opponent off-guard when Escaping is arguably better than their own Escape Shuffle feat. This is making me wonder what standard it is we're actually setting for what is and isn't good here.

[Mathmuse]

Teridax wrote:

Right, so it's not that the Acrobat is a terrible archetype for the Daredevil, so much that it... what, doesn't let you power game as hard on a FA character? Contortionist isn't a bad feat either, and making an opponent off-guard when Escaping is arguably better than their own Escape Shuffle feat. This is making me wonder what standard it is we're actually setting for what is and isn't good here.

The player would be taking Acrobat as their free archetype to fix the not-enough-skill-increases flaw in Daredevil class. They pass up other archetypes that would customize their character for more fun in roleplaying. Thus, they should instead have the fun of powergaming.

Another option with free archetype would be to take a fun archetype at 2nd level, take two more feats of that fun archetype at 4th and 6th level, and then take Acrobat Dedication as the free archetype feat at 8th level. That would be with a mostly-Athletic daredevil build that used the daredevil's 7th-level skill increase on master Athletics. Acrobat Dedication at 8th level would bounce the trained Acrobatics directly to master proficiency.

[Unicore]

I think the better measure of why Caroming charge might be broken is to look at the case of having a party of 4 daredevils that all use it every turn.

It is a level 2 feat, so we’ll ignore level 1. Level 2 creatures have a default of 38 hp. If all 4 dare devils have a +4 str and are built to exploit caroming charge, then they will do an average of 7.5 damage each, each turn. That is 30 hp. They can do this against any number of enemies (for theory’s sake) so even in a 4 in 4 equal level opponents, they will likely nearly kill every enemy in 1 round with just 2 of them needing to be able to do it against any number in round 2 to finish the encounter. That is too easy for a 50/50 encounter.

Against a solo level +3 creature (same xp value) the typical hp is 95, the odds of the DD team surviving 4 rounds (3 won’t finish it, even if all 4 make it to round 3) seems pretty slim. This is not a good tactic against higher level enemies.

Level 2 is an ideal level for this tactic. Let’s look at some other levels.

Level 4 is a bad level. The damage is exactly the same as level 2. The average enemy has 75 hp. In a 4 on 4 it is likely all the enemies are still standing after round 2. I am not factoring in anything but caroming charge here, so it is possible that the DD team focuses fire any brings down 1 of the enemies by the end of round 2, but it is still no where near as close to a win strategy as it was at level 2. Against a solo +3 enemy with 145 hp, the DD team is certainly getting TPK’d.

At level 5 the damage jumps to an average of 11 per daredevil. The level 5 enemies have 95 hp. This is still in the 3 turns range for caroming charge to finish, albeit more likely to have some good luck finish one or 2 off. This is better than the level 4 scenario, but significantly worse than than the level 2 situation. Against the level +3 enemy it is still in the 4 round range, or not great.

At level 8, the damage is the same so the 4 equal level enemies are going to take 4 rounds to bring down and the level +3 enemy is out in the 6 round area. This is getting worse and worse for the daredevils.

At level 9 the dare devils are up to 14.5 average damage each or 54 points of damage as a team. The level 9 enemies have 195 hp so still in that 4 round range. The level 12 enemy is in the 5 range. At level 10 the DD damage goes up by 1 so at level 12 the DD team is doing 58 points of damage against enemies with 270 hp. That is still in the 5 round range, with the level +3 enemy out in the 6 round range.

At level 13 the individual damage per daredevil is 19 or 76 together. That is still about 4 rounds per level 13 enemy and 5 for the level +3 enemy.

Overall, the ability really only looks out of line to me in the early levels. In the later levels, the two actions together only coming in at 6-7% of an average equal level enemies HP is really not out of line. Anything that reduces the accuracy of this otherwise automatic damage is going to have to be balanced against a pretty big increase in damage as this is not an overpowered ability by the mid levels as is.

[YuriP]

Unicore wrote:

I think the better measure of why Caroming charge might be broken is to look at the case of having a party of 4 daredevils that all use it every turn.

I'm playtesting this in a party with 3 Daredevils, all with Caroming Charge, which proves to be quite strong against multiple enemies. But honestly, it's not that absurd. If there were 3 or 4 Kineticists casting Flying Flame every round, it would have practically the same or greater effect.

The main point is that they can all end up out of the enemies' reach, forcing them to spend actions to get closer or focus on other characters. The Daredevils can easily start and end their turn far from the enemies thanks to the Daring Stunt + Caroming Charge combo.

That said, many enemies with counter-movement reactions appear, as I did in a fight against drakes.

[yellowpete]

Early game, everything is swingier though. At level 2, the DDs likewise get put down by 3 average hits of those level 2 foes if they have High damage, or 1 crit and 1 hit (assumption: no more than +2 CON and 8 ancestry HP on the DD). One of them could very conceivably not even make it to their first turn.

[Teridax]

Mathmuse wrote:

The player would be taking Acrobat as their free archetype to fix the not-enough-skill-increases flaw in Daredevil class. They pass up other archetypes that would customize their character for more fun in roleplaying. Thus, they should instead have the fun of powergaming.

Right, which as I point out is something they can do with the Acrobat archetype and the feats it offers, which are valuable even at levels 2-6. Just because the Acrobat isn't as busted as a MC Champion archetype or the like doesn't mean it is not an effective solution to the build problem being cited here.

[moosher12]

YuriP wrote:

Unicore wrote:

I think the better measure of why Caroming charge might be broken is to look at the case of having a party of 4 daredevils that all use it every turn.

I'm playtesting this in a party with 3 Daredevils, all with Caroming Charge, which proves to be quite strong against multiple enemies. But honestly, it's not that absurd. If there were 3 or 4 Kineticists casting Flying Flame every round, it would have practically the same or greater effect.

The main point is that they can all end up out of the enemies' reach, forcing them to spend actions to get closer or focus on other characters. The Daredevils can easily start and end their turn far from the enemies thanks to the Daring Stunt + Caroming Charge combo.

That said, many enemies with counter-movement reactions appear, as I did in a fight against drakes.

Flying Flame offers a basic reflex saving throw, on which enemies can get half to no damage. One of the reasons the Daredevil was more successful than the wizard was because the enemies were succeeding and critically succeeding against being fireballed, while taking full damage from the daredevil. Man, the wizard was so mad when they fireballed to two critical successes and a success. If I took the same encounter and swapped fireball for Flying Flame, the output would have been 1/6th the output from the Caroming Charge.

Therefore, if Flying Flame is fine, then it is fine to give Caroming Charge a basic Reflex saving throw against your class DC.

Also, as for the drake fight, from what adventure's encounter did you run. Because if you tailored a fight that does have reactive strike, that's not indicative of commonality, that's you tailoring a countered fight. Did you pick drakes because they had Reactive Strike, or did you pick drakes because the encounter called for drakes as a thematic element? Monster Core is showing 53 instances of Reactive Strike out of over 400, and Monster Core 2 is showing 46 instances out of over 300. What I'd ask you to do is pick up an adventure or adventure path, you typically like to run, and check how many instances of Reactive Strike appear in encounters in that adventure. AoN has 3669 NPCs in the bestiary. 479 of them mention reactive strike, of which an amount slightly less then them will actually have it. That's 13%. But the 13 percent only means so much, as it's dependent on whether an adventure is made with a lot of Reactive Strike monsters or not. Yes, when Reactive Strike is available, their capabilities will be diminished, but my point is, in a written adventure, how often will it be encountered? Of course there will be at least one, but is there even enough to encounter it at least once per level? If you're building encounters based on a story's progression, without regard to questions like, "I need something with Reactive Strike," how often do you get Reactive Strike?

[Unicore]

I assume we are talking about the 3 witch wars encounter vs the level 5 party? Being weak against fire but having a high reflex save is a pretty mean trick for a creature, isn’t it? (I wonder if that is an intentional design hack, not on the GM’s part, just that it seems to happen frequently that fire weak enemies have high reflex saves, the vastly most common way to do fire damage).

Still, with a weak template, the witch wargs’ reflex was only +13 vs the wizard’s save DC of 21. The odds of 2 critical successes and one success were under 1.5%. That was incredibly bad luck on the part of the wizard. The fireball, even on a success did more average damage than caroming charge by 140% (on a failed save it would have been around 230%). There was still only about a 30% chance of all 3 wargs succeeding on their save. It seems very likely this was an encounter headed to a TPK without the caroming charge damage contribution, even though the weak template brought the HP of the wargs down to that of a level 3 creature. If Caroming Charge counted as an attack, then it is likely the DD would have been shredded to pieces by the warg’s reaction (unless the wargs were scattering to avoid fireballs). With high AC and reflex and very low HP, weak witch wargs were kind of the absolute best case test scenario for caroming charge to shine. The slayer and the wizard were very likely to struggle with this encounter.

No judgements here! Just observations about the encounter.

[moosher12]

It does not help that that one player is notoriously cursed. If there was ever a cause to believe that hex magic was real, it'd be his difficulty rolling above a 5, and my difficulty rolling under a 16 with any roll concerning him. But yeah, that is tempering information, that it was just a freak rarity. It can happen, as it has happened, but you do have a point the chances of two crits and a success on a +13 aren't great.

The encounter actually was nearly a TPK. The first round of the encounter was done with the witchwarg's unweakened. And one of them charged the wizard, got a critical success on their first bite, and had the wizard one hit from being downed. Right after that turn, I decided the players weren't gonna be able to handle it after all (they initially said they were down to try the full encounter when I offered them the choice), and announced I'll apply the weak modifiers. Wargs were scattering for the fireballs. Because the Daredevil moved off to flank, one broke off to fight the daredevil, whereas the wizard and slayer stayed together, and were each approached by the remaining two witchwargs. Though the map turned out to be too cramped to use the reaction. The reaction only really works if you are flanked by a witchwarg, as witchwargs only have a 5-foot reach, and the PCs were largely attacking the witchwargs that were threatening them anyway, which won't trigger the reaction. And while I didn't get a chance to address the issue, a case can be made whether Caroming Charge counts as an attack on a witchwarg. As does an attack refer to an action with the attack trait, or any offensive maneuver.

Also, I misremembered, it was two successes and a critical success. What happened was they initially gave us a DC 17, which would have resulted in that, but I sanity checked that because the number sounded off (the player forgot to add their Int score), and it turned out to be a DC 21. The results were as follows: 26, 33, 28 against a DC 21. (Note: I'm glad Roll20 keeps roll logs after this long).

[YuriP]

moosher12 wrote:

YuriP wrote:

Unicore wrote:

I think the better measure of why Caroming charge might be broken is to look at the case of having a party of 4 daredevils that all use it every turn.

I'm playtesting this in a party with 3 Daredevils, all with Caroming Charge, which proves to be quite strong against multiple enemies. But honestly, it's not that absurd. If there were 3 or 4 Kineticists casting Flying Flame every round, it would have practically the same or greater effect.

The main point is that they can all end up out of the enemies' reach, forcing them to spend actions to get closer or focus on other characters. The Daredevils can easily start and end their turn far from the enemies thanks to the Daring Stunt + Caroming Charge combo.

That said, many enemies with counter-movement reactions appear, as I did in a fight against drakes.

Flying Flame offers a basic reflex saving throw, on which enemies can get half to no damage. One of the reasons the Daredevil was more successful than the wizard was because the enemies were succeeding and critically succeeding against being fireballed, while taking full damage from the daredevil. Man, the wizard was so mad when they fireballed to two critical successes and a success. If I took the same encounter and swapped fireball for Flying Flame, the output would have been 1/6th the output from the Caroming Charge.

Therefore, if Flying Flame is fine, then it is fine to give Caroming Charge a basic Reflex saving throw against your class DC.

It's because your Wizard was just unlucky. But Stunt Damage has such a poor damage progression for a 2-action activity that, as it progresses, it ends up being even weaker than a d6 Flaying Flame with a saving throw and everything.

Basically, a full Flying Flame with Impulse Junction and Aura Weakness already equals the average damage of a Caroming Charge at level 5 and surpasses it at subsequent levels. Even without Aura Weakness, a Flaying Flame with Impulse Junction also surpasses its average damage from level 7 onwards, and even a Flaying Flame using d6 equals the average damage of a Caroming Charge starting from level 16 and is stronger when you get levels 19 and 20.

moosher12 wrote:

Also, as for the drake fight, from what adventure's encounter did you run. Because if you tailored a fight that does have reactive strike, that's not indicative of commonality, that's you tailoring a countered fight. Did you pick drakes because they had Reactive Strike, or did you pick drakes because the encounter called for drakes as a thematic element? Monster Core is showing 53 instances of Reactive Strike out of over 400, and Monster Core 2 is showing 46 instances out of over 300. What I'd ask you to do is pick up an adventure or adventure path, you typically like to run, and check how many instances of Reactive Strike appear in encounters in that adventure. AoN has 3669 NPCs in the bestiary. 479 of them mention reactive strike, of which an amount slightly less then them will actually have it. That's 13%. But the 13 percent only means so much, as it's dependent on whether an adventure is made with a lot of Reactive Strike monsters or not. Yes, when Reactive Strike is available, their capabilities will be diminished, but my point is, in a written adventure, how often will it be encountered? Of course there will be at least one, but is there even enough to encounter it at least once per level? If you're building encounters based on a story's progression, without regard to questions like, "I need something with Reactive Strike," how often do you get Reactive Strike?

There are 3 things to consider when talking about the proportion of monster reactions. The first is the difficulty of accurately determining this information. It's even easy to get a list of creatures that cause Reactive Strike; just go to AoN, search for Reactive Strike and Attack of Opportunity, and calculate the percentage from the total number of entries found. But the problem is that there are several other reactions with different names that function as movement reactions, such as the Twisting Tail of the "Green Dragons" or the Lurking Death of the "Deaths", which simply isn't easy to find in searches. There are a lot of movement-triggered reactions with different names in various creatures.

The other point is that this percentage is only applied to enemy types, but it's very common in APs and even in homebrew games for the GM to repeat the same creature type, especially martial NPCs, who tend to have this type of reaction quite often.

And lastly, there's the fact that the number of creatures with movement reactions increases significantly with level. While in total we have a little over 13%, when we compare level to level, this proportion is quite different, and that's only considering the standard RS/AoO:

- Against level 1 PCs (enemies levels -1 to 5): 81 out of 1377 have these reactions, that is, 6%.
- Against level 2 PCs (enemies levels -1 to 6): 108 out of 1607 have these reactions, that is, 7%.
- Against level 3 PCs (enemies levels -1 to 7): 139 out of 1846 have these reactions, that is, 7%.
- Against level 4 PCs (enemies levels 0 to 8): 169 out of 1989 have these reactions, that is, 8%.
- Against level 5 PCs (enemies levels 1 to 9): 193 out of 2110 have these reactions, that is, 9%.
- Against level 5 PCs (enemies levels 2 to 10): 209 out of 2047 have these reactions, that is, 10%.
- Against level 7 PCs (enemies levels 3 to 11): 213 out of 1953 have these reactions, or 11%.
- Against level 8 PCs (enemies levels 4 to 12): 221 out of 1850 have these reactions, that is, 12%.
- Against level 9 PCs (enemies levels 5 to 13): 229 out of 1765 have these reactions, that is, 13%.
- Against level 10 PCs (enemies levels 6 to 14): 241 out of 1661 have these reactions, that is, 14%.
- Against level 11 PCs (enemies levels 7 to 15): 244 out of 1555 have these reactions, that is, 16%.
- Against level 12 PCs (enemies levels 8 to 16): 243 out of 1417 have these reactions, or 17%.
- Against level 13 PCs (enemies levels 9 to 17): 231 out of 1264 have these reactions, that is, 18%.
- Against level 14 PCs (enemies levels 10 to 18): 223 out of 1156 have these reactions, that is, 19%.
- Against level 15 PCs (enemies levels 11 to 19): 206 out of 1048 have these reactions, that is, 20%.
- Against level 16 PCs (enemies levels 12 to 20): 203 out of 959 have these reactions, that is, 21%.
- Against level 17 PCs (enemies levels 13 to 21): 186 out of 857 have these reactions, or 22%.
- Against level 18 PCs (enemies levels 14 to 22): 167 out of 728 have these reactions, that is, 23%.
- Against level 19 PCs (enemies levels 15 to 23): 148 out of 617 have these reactions, that is, 24%.
- Against level 20 PCs (enemies levels 16 to 24): 124 out of 503 have these reactions, that is, 25%.

In other words, as you progress, the probability of the AP or GM having used one or more creatures with movement reactions gradually increases from a little over 1/20 of encounters to 1/4 of them, which consequently progressively hinders the effectiveness of the daredevil, who relies heavily on abilities that can trigger movement reactions.

[Flames of Chaos]

moosher12 wrote:

I guess that's where the issue is. In the case of my playtest, I made a custom one where I put together thematic monsters, but none of them happened to have Reactive Strike, which means I would have had to build the encounters specifically to counter the Daredevil, which is just gonna look sus to my players. When I ran Kingmaker, the swaths of time where you don't run into Reactive Strike are very large. I feel like having an ability that is only tempered when movement reactions are available does not feel like a nerf where campaigns exist where you can go multiple levels without seeing reactive strike once.

It's like the "Flying shouldn't be allowed" argument. If the average vanilla book is not equipped to deal with the mechanic existing without the GM changing encounters, the ability is probably too powerful. Some adventures may be equipped for it, but some simply are not. Because players aren't gonna take so kindly to, "Yeah, well these witchwargs have Reactive Strike because the Daredevil's ability is too good." That just risks reawakening the PF1E problem of the normal players getting punished for the existence of the one overtuned character.

I think that's honestly why the damage is just straight stunt damage. Giving up 2 actions to deal d6 once to each enemy in the room you can reach actually seems balanced to me as you're giving up potential big damage to get a little in on multiple enemies in a mob encounter; mob encounters aren't always going to happen. I'm playing Shades of Blood, and the number of times I've been able to justify doing this was roughly twice, and the second time was only so I could get to a good flanking position for the fightery types in the party as I would have had to spend two move actions either way. IMHO, the balancing factor comes in on the economy of action choice and the damage involved rather than potentially eating multiple reactive strikes - or not as the encounter provides. (shrugs)