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].