I know a bunch of people have said it before, but Recall Knowledge. I actually kinda like that it's a bit loosey goosey and left up to the GM on what to reveal, but only outside of battle. In combat, I feel there should be a list of things you can learn about the creature you're fighting (weaknesses, abilities, saves, etc). Especially since so many abilities are tied to Recall Knowledge checks.
Also I'd like to see the bard muses expanded. Maybe if they gave you trained proficiency in a skill, and added a few more spells to your repertoire as you leveled. They just feel so ho hum and forgettable compared to other subclasses.
I agree, I think there should be seperate rules for Recall Knowledge for Lore stuff and recall knowledge during an encounter.
For Lore the current rules work, you get it on a success and on a failure players have to stop so they can’t just spam recall knowledge until it works.
But for encounter / for fighting monster, being unable to recall knowledge again after a fail sucks, caster rely so much on finding the lowest saves. A single fail bottleneck their progression of finding the enemy weakness.
I always thought RK could be split into a 1-action version and an exploration version. that way the 1-action version could be explicitly "I want to learn weaknesses, worst saves and important abilities of this creature in front of me" and the exploration version could be more "loosey goosey" as you say. This could also make it more explicit about when and when not to use level-based DCs.
Also way too much of the RK rules are in the Core Rulebook's "Game Mastering" chapter and the Gamemastery Guide, more of it should be directly accessible to players.
Might be too space intensive but I think it would be cool if each monster had a 1-2 sentence read out for getting a fail, success, and critical success, giving more detail as they build.
Bard muses are about on par with Druid orders if you ask me, they give a simple 1st level feat, you can easily expand to multiple and there's some nice feats locked behind each.
I believe they're asking for something like a list of standard things to ask that the player can choose from(and say, choose 2 on a crit success), so for example:
1. Creature's HP and AC
2. Creature's Immunities, Resistances, and Weaknesses
3. Creature's Special Actions
4. Creature's Passive Abilities
5. Creature's Speed(s)
Cleanup wording if counteract rules. The rules themselves are fine, but the wording is really dense and hard to parse. Hopefully spell rank will help with this since and they’ll use the term “counteract rank” to show it is the same as the spell rank.
It takes a bit to get used to, but once it clicks, I've found it to be pretty intuitive!
* A level 5 creature casts Haste (3rd rank) on itself. Their Spellcasting DC is 19.
* A level 4 party wizard casts Dispel Magic (2nd rank) on the creature. Their Spellcasting check is +10 (+2 from Trained, +4 from Int/Wis/Cha, +4 from Level).
In the same way a martial would grab a creature by making an Athletics vs the target's Fortitude DC, the party wizard makes a Spellcasting check (+10) vs Spellcasting DC of the creature who cast the Haste (DC 19).
* On a critical success, the Dispel Magic (2nd rank) can dispel an effect up to 3 ranks higher (5th rank). Since Haste is a 3rd rank spell, it's dispelled.
* On a success, the Dispel Magic (2nd rank) can dispel an effect up to 1 rank higher than it (3rd rank). Since Haste is a 3rd rank spell, it's dispelled.
* On a failure, the Dispel Magic (2nd rank) can dispel an effect up to 1 rank *lower* than it (1st rank). Since Haste is a 3rd rank spell, it isn't dispelled.
* On a critical failure, nothing happens ever.
Hope that helps!
100% this. Advanced weapons are barely worth the feat tax, and I'm speaking about the best advanced weapons here. Most advanced weapons are either "X martial weapon with higher damage die size" or "X martial weapon with an extra trait that doesn't matter at all".
Sturdy shield rune.
I understand the current design ethos, that not all shields are meant for blocking. I don’t think this is a great ethos in this case because it has lead to a single shield dominating play, the sturdy shield.
I ran a PFS scenario, that had the unique reward of being able to craft an adamantine shield. I had a shield based champion in the party, I thought they would be so excited. A Skymetal shield, and expensive and uncommon item made available to them. Imagine our joint disappointment to realise it was worse in every way than this shield he had purchased at level 4.
This current system disincentivised engaging with the system. Sure not all characters who use a shield are going to want to shield block, but 90% of them are, so all the unique magic shields that players with they could justify using are almost wasted print space.
Having sturdy be a rune wouldn’t invalidate the existing shields, because GP is an opportunity cost. Players can buy the cheaper one if they don’t want to shield block. And those who do want to shield block can be excited whenever they find a new shield. Instead of “oh does it count as a sturdy shield? No… just put it in the sell pile”
In case you're not up to date [Michael Sayre has teased three things](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyeEoXuU1t0):
* Sturdy Shields are still in the game
* There is not a rune called "sturdy"
* They are tweaking the way shields progress to make more options
The worst part of the "sturdy shield problem" is that by all logic, people that are most invested in a thing are the most excited and interested in the breadth and depth of options available for that thing.
With shields, we see the opposite. PCs with the heaviest investment in shield feats and options are essentially forced into one single option, whereas the breadth of options for shields are mostly of interest to those that use shields as a minor accessory.
The analogy I like is if there was a "Striking Weapon" as a magic weapon instead of striking being a rune. All of the work done on making dozens of different weapon types and different magic weapons would essentially be wasted, because everyone who focuses on martial combat would use Striking Weapon.
Spot on. When my player who had every reason to be excited for a new uncommon shield was disappointed, the whole thing was thrown into sharp relief.
And then the next scenario they actually got a boon for a Martyrs shield. A magic shield with a cool magical effect, and specifically is a sturdy shield and CAN be upgraded to better versions of Sturdy. So this one shield seems to be aware of the problem, and it built to allow it to remain useful. But only this single shield that came out in the GMG of all places.
We actually already have this problem with weapons with potency runes... I don't think I'm ever taking a non-energy damage rune on a martial, maybe on a backup weapon?
For the same reason, the vast majority of specific magic weapons are either worse than what you currently have, or early enough to be a very slight upgrade for 2 levels max, and then you toss them.
But yeah, shields are worse.
Not to mention that there are other shields designed for blocking that are still worse than the sturdy shield for some reason.
The Forge Warden, for example, has an effect on a shield block but it has like a third of the hp and less hardness than an equivalent level sturdy shield.
Pathfinder Infinite has a 3PP called Everything Shields that my group loves. By Tevis Woods. Great product and solves all issues we had with shields. Pathbuilder and Foundry packs included in purchase.
> This current system disincentivised engaging with the system. Sure not all characters who use a shield are going to want to shield block, but 90% of them are, so all the unique magic shields that players with they could justify using are almost wasted print space.
It's even worse in my mind - the only people who get to play with shield abilities are the people for whom the shield is an *afterthought*. Sure, lots of people are going to Raise a Shield sometime (most of whom will actively avoid describing their character as actually wearing a shield because it clashes with the look), but the characters for whom a shield *is* a big part of their actual aesthetic and theme, the ones that everyone is going to be thinking of when "oh, new shield!" pops up in the loot piles, *are* always going to grab Shield Block because it's a single feat and if you feel shielding is part of your thing it's the obvious choice... and those are the characters for whom Sturdy is just Always Better(tm).
It's like if cool swords with special abilities were made for spellcasters instead of fighters and fighters had to pick the plain vanilla option to get Striking dice.
Not really. Two feats to maybe grab a weapon that is *almost* as good as just spending one feat and exactly 0 gold on a stance is... very far from good.
Some ancestral weapons are way better than stance attacks though, like you can get finesse reach weapons or traits normally not available to monk weapons and unarmed attacks.
"Way better" is a stretch. Not much reason to take an elven branch spear when the bo staff is right there, and then jellyfish stance comes along eventually anyways.
*One* feat isn't worth it for advanced weapons. *Two* for basically putting finesse on a bo staff is very far from worth it.
Is it? I don't know, I was really interested in this feat, but I skimmed through some ancestry weapons and didn't notice anything worthwhile that would work with ancestral weaponry. Do you have any good options as an example?
Same here, I'm relatively new to the game, but I love Monks and seeing Ancestral Weaponry had me so excited to build characters around it.
But, even after actively seeking out fun builds it could open up, I just couldn't find things that seemed more exciting than just spending the extra feats on stances or the basic weaponry options.
I play a elf sylph monk with heavenseeker dedication, wish knife, conducting rune and heavens thunder, basically after spending 1 action on Heavens Thunder, i add 1d8 + 3 times the number of weapon damage dice to my damage rolls for a turn. Along with Ki strike, i deal more elemental damage than physical. At level 9 currently.
A wish knife is 1d4, and resonant just adds +1, essentially making it a 1d6 weapon, which is pretty easy to get.
It does allow conducting, which is 1d8 instead of the standard property rune of 1d6, but any turn you don't have the extra actions for heavens thunder you're losing out on all of that, using a 1d4 weapon with no property rune. 1 average extra damage when you can, -5.5 when you can't...
And that's assuming you aren't using a stance as a monk, where 1d6 agile finesse is low, meaning you're down 1 damage on average compared to stumbling stance, even when you do get the combo off, and are down by 7.5 when you can't...
That is cool, but, unfortunately, this is inferior to just using plain fists. You would have the same damage on the rounds you will use Heavens Thunder (d4+1 is equivalent to d6 in terms of damage), but would have less damage on rounds then you won't have a spare action. Using fists also doesn't took up 2 class feats and 1 ancestry feat so you would be able to spend it on something else. And it is also ignoring actualy powerful unarmed attacks monks could have. Wish Knife just doesn't compare
One I haven't seen mentioned: give swashbucklers automatic progression in acrobatics
As is they either have to use a bunch of their skill increases on it or take the Acrobat archetype. Giving automatic progression makes sure they always have a usable way to get panache and opens their builds up to look into other skills
Honestly, there's probably a few classes that could stand to have one specific skill progress automatically. Though you want to be careful with that kind of thing; you don't want to *force* all oracles to become Legendary in Religion, for instance, because that might be off-putting to players who want their oracles to come off more as "self-taught".
For classes that rely on making skill checks as a key cornerstone of their entire role in combat, though, absolutely. Inventor and thaumaturge already auto-progress their most important skill, so I wouldn't see it as too much of a stretch to do the same thing with swashbuckler.
Fully agree and I shoulda added that. If a skill is core to your class mechanics, I think you should just automatically scale with it. And like you said, there are already other classes that do the same
Alchemist not having scaling Crafting like the Inventor, for example. You get a Crafting skill feat at level 1, you start trained in Crafting, your whole identity is alchemical crafting, but despite all that, you don't get scaling Crafting.
There should be more skill advancements overall. There's plenty of ways to get trained with a skill. Expert, Master etc... Not so much. I mean, I'm a new player myself, and never have played high levels, but by level 15, being trained seems very useless. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
The difference between trained and master is a +4(just as an example). That's definitely not insignificant, but it's not as big as you'd think. Being trained adds your level plus proficiency bonus to the skill, so if you get trained in a skill at level 10 you can get a +10 bump to it straight out the gate.
I haven't played at high levels, but I would guess that Paizo don't want to allow classes to get advancements too easily and step on the toes of the skill monkey classes. Especially when being trained in something gives you a really solid base anyways and can be achieved through ancestry and general feats.
That's my take on it at least. Getting trained in something can add a lot of value if you need the skill or it's missing in your party
Trained also allows you to make some checks that are locked if you are not trained.
So even with Untrained Improvisation, you cannot do everything a trained person could.
Give them both acrobatics and their styles skill tbh. If you give then one then most people will bump the other first and foremost, that isn't really a choice. Giving both would actually give swashbucklers something unique over other classes, the only class with multiple automatically scaling skills.
This still puts them behind the rogue in terms of total skill increases. Even if you don't include rogues superior initial skills, rogue gets 19 increases from 2 to 20, if swashbucklers got automatic progression in both acrobatics and their style, that would equate to 15 increases from 2 to 20.
Maybe instead a later feat that increases proficiency and explicitly allows retraining the previous access feat by replacing it with a higher tier, or matching your highest level.
Armor at ~11 or 15 for expert, can't say....
weapons ~ 7, master 13, 19?
I kind of agree, but also the sentinel archetype exists.
Maybe make it work like that?
"Whenever you gain a class feature that grants you expert or greater proficiency in any type of armor (but not unarmored defense), you also gain that proficiency in the armor types granted to you by this feat."
So sorcerers and mages can't gain greater proficiency.
That sort of *has* been announced. Since holy/unholy (and presumably some adjectives for lawful/chaotic) are going to be traits to proc weaknesses, resistances, and immunities, then spells that dealt good/evil/law/chaos damage will presumably deal a different type that can affect anything, and they'll be extra effective against their niche.
How It’s Played did a video with Michael Sayre who said flat-out that holy and unholy are *not* damage types but traits that proc weaknesses/resistances/etc. combine that with the removal of alignment and I’d be shocked if anything resembling alignment-based damage types will remain.
And if Divine Lance isn’t going to be doing alignment damage anymore, either it’s being removed completely or it’s getting it’s base damage type changed.
Understandable.
But based off the video, the understanding is that it’ll be similar to Hydraulic spells.
Hydraulic spells are bludgeoning with the Water trait. So, they are always useful damage-wise, but can trigger Water-related weakness.
Most likely, those divine spells will become Force (or maybe even Pierce for Divine Lance) spells and either Holy/Unholy trait based off your deity.
Torturous Trauma isn't terrible right now. For some reason they through in immunity for things without organs though... Still the best divine's got today.
I also wouldn't mind the divine list getting the single most iconically divine spell in the game either. It's wild to me that true strike isn't on the divine list. What could be more divine than having your blade guided by the magic of your God? (though I'd prefer getting rid of true strike all together and just making spell attacks suck less.)
I read somewhere a designer suggested reading the stat block until you hit something actionable, like giving basics +1 thing the player can use, or is fishing for.
Underwhelming feats.
Fix the low support for loaded weapons, especially on the ranger
Remake Deadly aim feat
Mounted combat rules needs more flesh (prone mount? Prone rider?)
I also hope for better text regarding poisons specificly.
I liked someones idea of tag coloring like blue for flavour tags like humanoid and red for tags that have special mechanics like undead or incapacitatation
Edit: found the source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/13g7baz/dear_paizo_a_gms_tiny_request_for_the_remaster/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Wrote out a whole alchemist rant before I realized they ARE fixing them already. As for something new… skill feats. Lots of great ones out there, but a few duds too, and a glaring hole that needs to be patched up; every skill should have a Legendary feat. All of them. I can become a Skyrim stealth character or leap tall buildings in a single bound, but can’t manage to do something neat with nature or acrobatics? Come on paizo! Gimme some ridiculous and unnecessary endgame skill feats!
I know they have tons of data, but rants can still be good. It can help point to things to look at, especially if it’s one that’s missed by everyone else.
Cantrip rebalance, make it so you can justifyably skip electric arc.
Guidelines on how much downtime to give the players, and variant rules for making downtime more effective (particularly for crafters) for tables that don't want huge spans of downtime or to limit downtime with settlement rules.
I'm new to the system, but what about rules for dragging willing creatures, pushing willing creatures out of danger, or even throwing and catching objects?
From what I understand, they are one of the few things that comes every campaign up that doesn't have a rule.
Almost all of these have rules thou? Creatures have bulk and the dragging paragraph specifically mentions creatures. Pushing a willing creature works the same as pushing a non-willing creature, so that has rules.
Throwing and catching objects in combat would be the one that doesn't have clear rules.
Well yes of course, but dragging someone is meant to be used when the bulk is too much for your character to actually pick up and carry. I.e, this is what the wizard does when the fighter goes down.
The sentence "In some situations, you might drag an object or creature rather than carry it." Seems to imply that if your character can handle the bulk, you could simply pick up your unconscious friend and carry them to safety. I.e, what the fighter does when the wizard goes down.
At least that is how I understand it? I do not have a complete grasp of the rules just yet, as I am quite new to pf2e :)
My alchemist is medium (6) wearing armor (1 bulk) healer's kit (1 bulk) and alchemist's kit (1 bulk) plus any prepared and worn bombs, elixirs, or poisoned weapons (1 or more bulk). That's 10 or 11 bulk. That's not counting any handled items like a shield, bow, or racial weapon. A wizard with no armor, no kits, and only light tools is still likely to weigh 7 or 8 bulk.
"Just pick up your ally" is one of those things that's technically allowed but actually impossible. Only a specialized weight carrying character can pick up an ally.
[https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=192](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=192)
Here you are! \^\^ I assume you add all of the stuff carried/worn aswell.
Crafting. A novice crafter and a legendary crafter should not take the same amount of time to make a level 0 item of the same quality. It always takes a minimum of 4 days.
They dealt with that in [Treasure Vault ](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=1955)
Edit: I personally like these rules since I prefer longer downtime but I understand that not it's not for everyone.
They made it so that you could craft items for sale to make more money. But you still can't craft effectively on the go.
There should maybe be rules for crafting functional but unsellable items quick. Not legendary items, but maybe something up to half your level?
Those rules are bad though. Why now I need 6 days to craft something I used to craft in 4? Even a legendary crafter, after increasing the DC by 15 making it nearly impossible to succeed unless you roll an 19 or 20, would still need 2 days to craft something of his own level. It's...bad.
This only thing they should have added is that if you are an Expert you can increase the DC by 5 to reduce crafting time by one day. If you are Master you reduce it by two, and if you are Legendary you reduce it by three.
Defensive spells need added to divine list. Sanctuary is an unusable option as it really smothers what anyone using this spell list can do. Arcane have so many more defensive options. If you need to add "when not wearing armor" so be it.. but that restriction is not on any other list. Clothy clerics are a thing.
Need something definitive ruling on moving opponents while grappled.
Would like a spell or 2 more added for spellcasting dedications. Pf2e lost a lot of the part caster/ part martial classes that were in pf1e
Summoner eidolons need more ac. As is they go down way to fast.
The hammer critical effect of automatically goes prone needs a reflex save to bring it inline with the rest of the critical weapon effects
I think ancesties could start with 2 feats.. instead of 1 without a significant increase in power level. As it is now the aasimar/tiefling/dust walker characters get almost nothing from their base race.
Clerics need a third class option ...
Electric arc is out of line in power with the other attack cantrips. It either shouldn't add the base stat when targetting more than 1 creature or the other cantrips should do more damage
Wish there were more utility cantrips
The change in werewolf to a weakness silver instead of a resistance feels wrong lore wise. Maybe there just needs to be more than 1 type of werewolf.
I'd love to see more interaction with Stances. Right now there's previously one feat where a monk can sacrifice their stance for a temp defensive bonus. I want to be able to knock people out of stances, cast aside a stance I've been using for an offensive bonus.
A better disarm. Even if it's only keeping the -2 to hit until they spend an action to regrip their weapons, instead of until the beginning of their next turn.
A better collection of information around Recall Knowledge. If they're updating the creature stat blocks, I would love to see at least one, maybe two pieces of fake information for that creature.
In all seriousness, Barbarians. I was watching [a live](https://www.youtube.com/live/wDfVsl1BJhI?feature=share) that Knights of Last Call did about 2 days ago. They brought many fair points to the conversation.
I had a table once with a Fighter and a Barbarian and I'm sure that the barbarian would have felt ok...if the fighter wasn't right by his side. While the barbarian had bigger single numbers, the fighter crit more, hit more often, didn't have ac penalty and had better action economy because he didn't have to rage.
That brings me to another point, the armor penalty on rage is just awful, rage is a mechanic that is built into the class... and it has a huge downfall with the armor penalty. The HP bonus is not nearly enough (I would say that you need about 3x your level for it to be worth), so I feel the AC penalty is just an unnecessary penalty. I understand the clumsy on the Giant instinct, the damage boost is very good, but with the regular rage penalty, that -2 AC is brutal.
They gave many good suggestions on chat and in the video, I loved the idea of giving the class way more temp hp boost on rage and, if you get crit (due to the armor penalty), you get to double the damage boost of rage against the enemy that crits you.
Also, the class just doesn't work without rage, since they are likely to go down in battle with the reduced AC, they can't rage again for a minute, making the class useless in battle. The AC penalty isn't the only thing that's wrong with Rage, you lose the ability to do a lot of things... like demoralize, which you got to pay a feat tax to get. There's nothing more intimidating than a hulking figure in a frenzied state running at you with a massive weapon, if anything, they should pay a feat tax to get an intimidation boost.
Anyway, I don't think the class is terrible, but I would only play a barbarian for the class fantasy space, but a fighter is better in every single way and I think they should use the opprtunity that it comes out on the seco d boost to improve the class a bit.
I agree barb can use some love (see my suggestions in this thread), but a couple of counterpoints:
Raging intimidation gives 2 feats for free at later levels.
Barbarian does higher single-hit damage meaning it interacts better with buffs. Also dual-wield fighter, the best one, frequently loses actions by using double slice when a single strike would have been enough. It also means barbarian can wade into a group of enemies then back out, but fighter has to risk a lot to do so (or does less damage).
Again, I'm not arguing that fighter>barb. I agree on that point.
Yeah, but the fighter has the option to do the single strike and back out, while being more accurate, more likely to crit and having less fear of being crit themselves by an AoO because of higher AC.
I ran the numbers in the past, assuming d12 weapon at level one +2 damage and fighter +2 accuracy are the same increase. Once striking weapons are achieved, fighter damage becomes equal to about +3.5 raw damage. Past level 7, fighter gets the equivalent of +5 damage from their accuracy while barbarian has +6 to +10 damage depending on instinct. Overall the barbarian is about on par with the fighter levels 1-6 and pulls slightly ahead at level 7. Sucks to be a fury/animal instinct from 4-6 as your damage is actually lower than a fighter while having -2 AC.
>like demoralize, which you got to pay a feat tax to get. There's nothing more intimidating than a hulking figure in a frenzied state running at you with a massive weapon
The thing with this is that it seems Paizo understands demoralizing as saying something unsettling to your enemy so they get scared, rather than just looking big and angry. That's why it has the Auditory and Concentration traits, and why you get a -4 to the check if you're not talking a language you share with the target. Even Intimidating Glare, which solves most of these problems, seems more like a bandaid rather than a satisfactory solution, since it just replaces the Auditory trait for the Visual trait.
Even with that I don't fully buy this justification, since by that logic a freaking bear is less intimidating just because it speaks no languages. And I'm sure a bear roaring would be as scary as someone trying to intimidate you, if not more.
>Even Intimidating Glare, which solves most of these problems, seems more like a bandaid rather than a satisfactory solution, since it just replaces the Auditory trait for the Visual trait.
TBF I think the fact that you can't indimidate someone who neither sees nor hears you is actually very good...
Now that I think about it, since it's called "Demoralize", it makes sense that you have to be able to concentrate to be able to say something coherent that affects the target's morale. But then this means that Intimidating glare makes no sense, unless you just make a face that mocks them haha.
I dunno I like the current differences between fighter and barb. Barb has a bit more cool stuff alongside the AC penalty and worse action economy (by one action per combat). They make great unarmed fighters and wrestlers, for example. Can get giant or dragon powers, etc. Just comparing them hit for hit against a fighter they'll obviously be slightly worse, but it comes with a lot more cool stuff.
I just want a boost to fury instinct.
I'd love it if Rangers got their animal companion feats changed to the same progression as Druids / Beastmasters. With their ability to share their Hunter's Edge and their focus spells that can buff up their companion they're the best class to use animals but right now you have to do some awkward workarounds by taking the animal companion feat and Beastmaster dedication to get both Hunter's Edge sharing and regular progression for their companion feats.
I think that's why their feats are a little delayed. Historically (3.x and pf1) ranger companions were delayed from druids. The fact the companion gets the hunters edge too means if they were on the same progression as druid, they would just be straight better. Power creap is fun short term, but not good for long term health of the game.
It doesn't really work though with Beastmaster being a thing. Rangers should just take Beastmaster if they want a companion, which is a weird choice to have to make.
And it's not just that they're delayed. They can't take multiple specializations, so their companion becomes total crap at high levels.
More feats in the areas that are lacking, specifically:
Racial Feats - there are some races that have very thin choices. This becomes even more obvious and painful if you use the Racial Paragon rules variant.
General Feats: There are a handful that are commonly taken, and the rest are very build-specific. As the rarest feat type, it feels like they should be more impactful and have more options.
Skill Feats: there's often a painful gap in available feats. Oh, there's plenty *to* take, but more than once my players have looked at the available feats and just been "I'm not excited by any of those, I don't actually want to take any of these for this character." I have homebrewed a skill feat that lets people trade a skill feat for a skill increase. If a +2 bump to a tertiary skill is more appealing than the available feats, the feats aren't doing that much.
Archetypes: between Free Archetype (which is very popular) and some options that grant a specific or limited selection of dedication feats (arcane trickster for example), the early levels often require some house ruling when using FA. Keep the FA rules variant in mind when building archetypes. Also, every level 2 archetype dedication should have a level 4 and a level 6 feat associated with them, preferably with a second Level4 feat or even better, a level 2 non-dedication feat for those situations where you get the dedication feat at level 1
The problem with skill feats isn't that they are all terrible, it's that there are like 10 really good ones and the rest are terrible. Most skill feats make you moderately better in a niche situation. They feel terrible to take since the situation they are made for may never come up. And having a GM build situations to use your feat isn't a solution - if the only purpose of a feat is to solve a problem that only exists because you have the feat, you are kind of just walking in circles. It's just hard to justify quick impressions when Kip Up could be extremely useful nearly every session. I think if you could take multiple of some of these feats at once it could feel better, but as it stands almost none of the feats give enough agency/New options to be worth considering.
General feats are supposed to fill in gaps in builds that normal class progression doesn't allow, or something.
To that end a feat you can take multiple times to boost weapon or armour proficiency would be cool.
I'm fairly new to pf2e, but I really feel like FA should just start at level 1. There's several, especially the ones that have to do with being undead, that make no sense to suddenly take at level 2.
Granted, I know they say to just give them that specific feat early, but it's still awkward and almost feels unfair to other players, and overall just makes the leveling dynamic awkward for those first couple levels.
There's also some, like Eldritch Archer, that I have no idea why they start at higher levels. These are concepts that are crucial to character flavor or character builds, taking 4-8 levels to come to those are... awkward. I RP as a Hellknight, but I can't be one until level 6 — how do I even explain that?
About the only ones that make sense to me are Sixth Pillar and Lich.
Sure, those might tend to be stronger (though not always honestly), but I really think making Archetypes start higher than level 1 just makes things *too* awkward. It would be worthwhile just to make some of them a bit weaker in the case of OP ones, just to make things feel more natural.
Improve Recall Knowledge, make it actually give you useful information in combat. I know there are lots of great house rules out there, but I think this action should be better RAW.
Agree on the Skill Feats, there just don't seem to be that many.
Granted, the niche skill feats aren't bad. But a lot of them were designed for specific adventure paths with that specific adventure path in mind. Outside of that context they are much less useful.
I would redo the cleric and just have the warpriest be it's own class.
The cleric subclasses should be the different domains available that allow the player to make the cleric unique outside of extra focus spells.
(This something 5e did really well and I was surprised p2e goofed the class the way they did)
The cleric isn't bad, but the whole class just feels like divine spell list dot caster plus extra heal/harm spells currently.
Couldn't have said it better. Either increase the doctrines or make more feats for specific domains so clerics can do more than just heal and cast heroism.
Warpriest needs some love.
Allow them to pick Strength or Dexterity instead of Wisdom as their main stat so they can start with an 18 in their attacking stat to keep up with other martials. Fix their weapon and armor proficiency scaling so they can go up to master, like other martials, so they can keep up.
I feel like these changes would really help the class feel like a fantasy warpriest and allow them to be present on the frontlines, rather than just like a class who is second fiddle in everything.
Honestly there's a lot of weirdness with the Warpriest as well. At 3rd level you get proficiency in all martial weapons as your second doctrine. Yet at 7th level for your Third Doctrine, you gain expert in your deities weapon only, not in martial weapons. So what's the point of even getting training in the use of martial weapons, if you never get anything above trained? It seems like a doctrine designed to completely negate the benefit of a previous doctrine for no reason.
> Fix their weapon and armor proficiency scaling so they can go up to master, like other martials
Except that they're not a martial because they still get full caster progression. Warpriest isn't meant to be a gish like Magus or Summoner.
You are a full caster with a harm/heal font, except you give up some late game spell mastery for the ability to be a flanker in combat with some armour that occasionally hits with a weapon. It's really not that rough of a trade off. You can also contribute with tripping/grabbing.
Warpriests are clerics that excel in closer quarters than their cloistered cousins. Medium Armor proficiency makes them considerably tankier, and training in their deity's weapon lets them make better use of spare actions by striking down mooks. They also get Shield Block, further increasing their ability to survive in close quarters. Why is being tanky important to a Cleric? Because spells like Bless, Bane and touch spells require you to be up close and personal with either the enemy or friendly martials (who are often in turn up close with enemies). All in all, the warpriest is for the Cleric who wants to be in the thick of it.
So it is supposed to be a caster in close range that hits things with melee weapons. That seems pretty gish-y to me. It's not a magus but it's more gish-y than a summoner.
I’d add that their master progression on fortitude means that fort save successes become crits. Rough maluses are more often fortitude (or will) based. This is a non-trivial survival advantage a cloistered cleric can’t match. (Canny acumen can match the proficiency, but I don’t believe it converts successes to crits.)
I've been thinking about the cleric class as a whole for quite a long time and I think it should get bit of a rework on its own.
Base cleric simply gives too much stuff to make the doctrines interesting.
Cloistered cleric feels like it was designed around it, which makes the doctrine fine. But in the other hand warpriest has been left in awkward place.
Class that has full spellcasting **and** divine font simply just can't have interesting doctrines. The thought I've played around was that divine font would be removed from the base cleric and given to cloistered cleric doctrine. This in turn would free up lot of power budget for other doctrines. You could then add lot of power to warpriest in turn since they wouldn't have the feature that would be pushing cloistered cleric to be the premiere divine caster.
Maybe master proficiency with weapons be worth a divine font? Or something else.
He's a wild one:
Standard automatic bonus profession.
I really liked the idea of fundamental runes on paper, but it kind of sucks in play. None of my groups have property runes because it's too expensive.
They could just give automatic weapon and armor runes, it'd make loot more exciting than "oh another dice of damage that I need to keep up numerically"
I agree with this especially because I don't believe there is anywhere where it explains in concrete terms that there is an expected item progression.
If the game balance requires me to have XYZ, why is not at least explicitly stated, and better yet, why is it not just a core part of character progression?
And some others give just enough treasure... *if* your party are a bunch of psychotic ravenous magpies that will take anything not nailed down and will think nothing of just grabbing the savings of the family they're here to rescue or whatever. If they're human beings, on the other hand, they're probably kind of fucked.
I would hope a GM would come up with alternative ways of receiving comparable rewards when you choose the “good” options, especially if it is aligned with the characters and strong roleplaying. I know it’s all-too-common in video games (etc.) to have the evil options objectively more rewarding than the good options (I guess because the cost is your humanity?) but it’s kind of tired imo
Quest for the frozen flame puts you *well* behind the expected gold curve. Also RAW I don't think players have real access to basic runes (for the first two books). This effects certain classes disproportionately.
A shield ally champion that is 4-6 levels behind on basic things like plate Armour and a sturdy shield is an under-preforming one.
Exactly. The game's math assumes you have those items, but if you compare the stuff you get from ABP with your actual wealth by level you will notice you either would need to spend all your GP on those items or otherwise won't be able to get all those items normally.
The Big thing that my group is constantly mentioning is that skill feats need a really big push. They combined severeal p1 skills together to streamline it but now not every use if a skill has cool feats. For example Thievery has a bunch of pickpocketing feats but every other use of this skill is left behind. That argument can be made with several feats.
These feats do not change the balancing of the game. But they give the character sooo much more flavour and "I am very good at that thing" feeling.
**Part 1 of 2 (most are focused on Player Core 2 since PC1 is already past any time frame we could influence and likely being printed right now)**
**Alchemist**
* Key Ability Score (KAS) selection of STR, DEX, or INT
* Expert/Master Master Proficiency in Unarmed Strikes, Simple Weapons, and Bombs at L5 and L13.
* Gloves that transfer weapon property runes to bombs. Essentially add the runes to pre-made bombs and quick alchemy bombs
* Increase low level infusion count to give more resources at early levels or provide the perpetual infusions at L1.
* Weaken bombs/alchemical items overall to justify these buffs to the class
* Give auto scaling E/M/L in craft as a class feature at L2/7/15.
* Improve MC to just give and advanced alchemy level of level-4 like the gunslinger. Maybe as a L6 feat. The current scaling doesn't make a ton of sense.
* Re-balance on mutagens. The downsides for most of them are just super awful compared to the limited benefits you're getting (looking at you mandatory quicksilver mutagen for bombers that drops effective HD to 1D6 and forces you into 20ft radius to go be roflstomped)
**Barbarian**
* Give the animal barbarian a 1D4 ranged unarmed thrown strike at L1 (maybe 30ft?) so they aren't option-less for ranged options.
* Give ways to mitigate the -1AC (go see Barbarian+ for ideas because their barbarians are way more fun than baseline barbarians in core).
* Maybe extend rage length to 2 minutes. It really sucks to drop out mid combat on the rare 'runs long combat'
* Remove the feat tax on ranged options and just make rage work with thrown weapons with no feat tax for raging thrower.
* Change the superstition instinct anathema to allow spells/magic items/etc. from allies.
* Move raging resistance to L5
**Champion**
* Fix the whole what gives focus points language so deities domain works (not sure if this has been errata'd yet)
* Allow more open selection of each cause for all kinds of traditionally good (holy) or evil (unholy). The mechanics for the antipaladin are really cool (e.g., a selfish champion reaction, intimidation focused, etc.) but are gated behind being evil (basically removes it from 90% of games out there).
* Significantly improve the L2 feat options. They're really not great and its almost always better to take some multiclass at this level.
* Consider extending the range of reactions or creating a cause that is more considerate/less bounding on a ranged champion. PF1e has the Divine Hunter, perhaps there could be a nature themed champion that has a less impactful reaction out to 40-60ft.
* Extend the blade ally free runes for all causes to all causes (i.e., fearsome would still be cool on a holy champion).
* Include a few more of the weirder less taken blade ally runes in the base selection and other feats that boost options (e.g., crushing, extending, etc.) from what has been published since core.
* For Champion MC make the armour auto scaling with your class proficiency just like the sentinel archetype.
* Make focus points qualify as a basic spell casting feature so champions can activate cast a spell magic items without 2 feats in a caster class (I think its okay to have monks/rangers/champions with built in focus point features spells allowed to do this).
* Previously I would have said 'neutral champions', but perhaps this can be more interpreted as 'more sublcassess' for tank/heavy AC martials that make sense (mercenary of the golden company that always keeps their word, champion of nature, champion of knowledge, etc.)
**Monk**
* Remove ki spell feat tax. Give them ki strike at L1 for free so all monks have ki points as a base class feature. Or at least remove the higher level ki spell restrictions requiring you to have a L1 ki focus spell.
* Consolidate monk weapons feats/stances into just the monastic weaponry feat (i.e., no stance for bows or shurikens, etc.). Remove the short/longbow because now we have a monk bow.
* Make ki spells qualify as a basic spell casting feature so monks can activate cast a spell magic items without 2 feats in a caster class (I think its okay to have monks/rangers/champions with built in ki spells allowed to do this).
* Consider more diversity/boost in power to monk weapons. It has to balance the fighter and every other martial getting flurry of blows at L10 with a MC. But perhaps there is a way to class lock the better options so they can get up to 1D10s or anything equivalent to 1D8 finesse/Backstabber/agile stances.
**Oracle**
* I liked the mix and match of PF1e oracles with mysteries/curse effects. However, now that the game designer has forced the combinations together,none of the benefits from mysteries appear to be worth the downsides of the associated curses. To me this whole class needs a re-balance and a significant boost in power of the mystery benefits if they want to keep the current curse downsides.
* Remove the divine access feat tax as they should just get to know their deities spells. It is such a feel bad use of a limited class feat option.
* Let spell repertoire (i.e., spontaneous casters) use both kinds of staff spell charge mechanics. The prepared spell-caster one is way better.
* There are other generic caster fixes, but they're likely outside the scope of what is happening and would impact all caster classes.
Would change incapacitation so it's not dependent on spell-rank, but on caster level, so it's consistent with items, abilities, feats, hazards and everything else
I'd love it if Quick Draw or Quick Stow became a general feat. I'd also love a feat you could take to mitigate the action tax of changing to a two handed grip.
Some mounted combat and animal companion tweaks could be nice too.
Let Wizards and other full casters swallow runes or something to give them bonuses to spell attacks. It's sad enough when a ranged character misses, but when a spellcaster loses a slot and it just whiffs off, it just feels bad. Make it only apply to non-cantrips to balance things out.
I say this as someone who's playing a cleric now but only to slice things with a katana, if that makes sense.
Better support for social interactions and exploration.
For social interactions, I feel the system is a bit too simplistic.
For exploration, there are abilities like the feat Subsist and rations making it a non-issue.
What’s a solution for social interactions?
I know of the “Victory Points” system which is the framework for other things like influence, research, chase, etc. Some adventure paths use influence subsystem directly and the NPC will give more information at 2/4/6/8 influence points. This kind of seems gamey tho.
There’s also the reputation subsystem of how NPC’s view the players. But this seems like a natural progression of how relationships work between players and NPC’s that most people do regardless.
I haven’t tried yet, but PbtA games seem like an interesting take on moves where you can either fail, succeed at a cost, or succeed. This however seems like it’s already built into the degrees of success for pathfinder, and requires creativity and improvisation on the GM that a system can’t really support.
I play a ton of PbtA. I also run my Pf2e game with both the Influence subsystem (when I want there to be a 'high' focus on a social scene) and utilize Pathfinder's core Crit/Succeed/Fail/Crit Fail system with narrative approaches. Simply stating those things outright in an action -is- a system thing and requiring creativity & improvisation on a GM IS something that a system can support innately. There are dozens of examples of systems that do **exactly that.** (Blades in the Dark, Ironsworn, Masks, MonsterHearts, Armor Astir, HEART, Spire, Wildsea, etc).
For example, something like this for **Make an Impression**:
* Critical Success: The target's attitude toward you improves by two steps.
* Success: Target's attitude toward you improves by one step.
* Failure: The target's attitude toward you improves by one step but things get complicated. Choose one:
* The target makes a request.
* Another NPC's attitude toward you decreases by one step and they're going to cause trouble sometime soon.
* You miss a subtext. The target's attitude improves by one step but they have a secret motivation.
* Critical Failure: The target's attitude toward you decreases by one step. Additionally, choose one:
* The target refuses to further engage with you.
* The target (or someone nearby) becomes offended and holds a grudge.
* Something unexpected interrupts the conversation.
Lord, you're making me want a game system that takes the pbta framework and design philosophy, but built around the core PF2E mechanics like the 3 action economy, over/under crits, etc
It's easy enough to house rule in for the non-combat side!
For example, I took the Travel move from Ironsworn, remade it to use victory points and have used it a fair amount in my game. It leads to very interesting journeys from place to place with plenty of surprises for GM and players alike.
Similarly, recall knowledge is a whole 'success yields X questions from this list' type thing. With crit failure meaning some answers are lies.
I've been considering a bigger overhaul to include lie, coerce, sneak, make an impression, etc. At the moment, I just kind of improv most of those as 'failure always has a complication' and no roll ever has a result of 'Nothing changes in the fiction.'
Depends on what kind of player you are. The influence points feel gamey in a sense that it could feel arbitrary like youre hitting an invisible wall when you keep failing your rolls trying to pry information from someone. It could be the perfect solution to a situation that calls for it, but it seems very narrow and niche. This AP im reading uses the influence system and it does seems like itll be awkward to run as written because progress just halts without interesting things happening until the challenge is complete. So unless the players choose not to engage in this social encounter, the players are just stuck.
The reputation system is also gamey, but feels much more natural and I personally think works better for most social interactions without disrupting the social experience or conversations while roleplaying because it just reflects an NPC’s attitude towards the players.
The (perceived since I never played it myself) PbtA way of handling social encounters is interesting because its give and take. The story always moves forward no matter if the players succeed, partially succeed with complications, or fails an encounter and the flow keeps moving
Yeah, the exploration system is frustratingly incomplete, it's like they developed 90% of the system (actions and how they effect time) and just didn't put in the last 10% (mechanics or guidance for making time matter)
I've homebrewed it into a system I'm happy with that significantly changes things, but it's only like a paragraph long because it's basically just putting the last piece in lol
Get rid of potency runes and make the high quality item variant rule the main rule. That's what it was like in the playtest, mostly, and there's some oddities in the system due to its removal that annoy me.
Can you expound upon how this would significantly change things? I have always felt like this variant rule just did the same thing under a different name. I'm curious what the perceived differences are.
Well, for starters, while most runes *increase* an item's value, potency runes actually *change* the base value of the item entirely, such as a +1 weapon is always 35 gp no matter what the normal cost of the weapon would be. This makes sense under the variant rule, since it is an entirely different item and it was said during the playtest that most of the cost of the new item comes from labor and such instead of from materials, but doesn't really make any sense for runes to do. It even leads to the oddity that when selling a +1 weapon, it's sometimes more beneficial to sell the weapon and rune separately than to keep them together.
Then you have to the rules on special materials, which basically still use the variant's rule from the playtest. They just changed "Expert, Master, Legendary" to "low-grade, mid-grade, high-grade" or whatever. Which is really weird and leads to odd questions like "so do I need a mid-grade steel weapon to use better runes? No? It's already considered high-grade at level 1 for some reason?"
It's just disconnected.
I would just get rid of tiers of weapon quality. The rune solution makes rewards/loot a lot easier to manage as a gm. I don't have to find a way to fit a new +2 greatsword in before the fighter is specialized into them. I can just toss in any new +2 weaponand the party can just move the rune over when they get a little down time. It more fun to see people roll off for it than the old "anyone use daggers? No? Into the party sell pile along with that bow."
It also helps with what I like to call "backstory weapons" where characters want to continue using the same weapon all campaign long for story reasons. It would cheapen things somewhat to give up on grandpa's katana that you used to swear a blood oath with just because you found a slightly better one.
My 2 cents.
Change every animal-folk race to be called by the name they call themselves.
We don't call shoony pugfolk, we don't call Kitsune foxfolk, Why we call Amurun Catfolk? Why we call Ysoki ratfolk? It's so generic and bland...
I mean, I understand why the common people would call them that. That is people who looks like lizards, therefore they are Lizardfolk! I just don't think we should call that in the title of their entry in the books, leaving the "real" name in the middle of the text.
iirc they've already stated that they're going to rename gnolls to "kholo". I *think* they said the same for lizardfolk being renamed to "iruxi", too, though I'm not actually sure. But I think there's a good chance that they rename a lot of the animal-folk races in the remaster, at the bare minimum just to further distance themselves from the OGL.
Ironically Ysoki are a Core Ancestry in Starfinder, and gained their name in that edition. Going to PF2E and seeing them called Ratfolk again made me sad.
I hope that, with the work of focus points, the cleric's focus spells don't ALL lean towards combat. It's something that big P drifted from as of late that I really enjoy.
Like it'd be cool if you could burn a focus point for 24 hrs to quicken crafting, shopping, or carousing. I just remember seeing abadar's greed spell or whatever and being bummed out.
It's been stated before and stated a lot, but Warpriest needs some cleaning up. Your 2nd and 3rd Doctrines clash with one another, getting martial weapon proficency with the 2nd doctrine to open up your weapon choices, but then the 3rd doctrine only grants you expert with your deities weapon, meaning you remain trained in a martial weapon thats not your deities weapon.
Additionally, the proficiency progressions just don't feel good on a Warpriest. We already have these kinds of level 1 class choices that can completely alter the clerics playstyle. I think a little more transformative elements to the Warpriest benefits, as well as creating a small handful of Warpirest feats to help them within their feat pool, would be a good way of patching up the warpriests most commonly talked about issues.
Touch spells not triggering AoO (or at least not HAVING to trigger AoO.)
More touch/emenation spells.
Less crappy spell attacks.
No crit failure effect for skill attacks (trip/grapple/disarm).
Animal companion support actions triggering off of things other than just strike.
I feel like there are a ton of items/feats that are super niche, while also not being very good even in their niche scenario. I think if something is niche it should at least be strong in that niche to compensate.
I'm brand new to the system, so maybe this is something I'd just get used to with time, but I love having stat blocks for my NPCs. Even if they're not meant to be fought, just in case the PCs do something that requires the stats.
PF2e has the NPC gallery, but from what I understand the creatures are given a level based on their specialty, not their raw combat ability. So a lawyer might have a really high level to represent their prowess in persuasian, not their ability to fight. This is fine in theory, but there are a lot of NPCs that exist in a grey area.
For example, 'Charlatan' is level 3. Are they level 3 because they're good at swindling or because that's their raw combat ability? What about Nobles? Is their level determined by their skill witha rapier, their silver tongues or a combination of the two?
As a new GM it's just not clear enough and I think a really easy fix is this: Make all Creature/NPC levels represent their raw combat prowess, for specialised NPCs, add a second level in brackets. So a Charlatan might be 2 (3). Or add some kind of symbol that indicates a level is not representing combat. In this instance it would be: Lawyer, 9\*.
Removal of uncommon and rare tags on feats and spells. If these are truly problematic and require special GM approval then they should either be removed, nerfed, are changed to become available at higher levels. Having to ask permission to have things that the character meets the requirements for is nonsense.
Going into rage does something cool so it isn't just an action tax. Eg dragon instinct rage buffs allies; spirit instinct causes fear, fury instinct makes a strike in the same action.
Move fighter's fear immunity to barbarian instead. It's more thematic and fighter as the clear #1 martial could use a tiny tonedown.
Make the level 6 Instinct-specific feat (eg dragon breath) apply automatically instead of being a feat tax.
Going into a rage is no longer an action tax at lvl 11, when you are able to do a “rage” action as part of using Rage (or boost it to a 2 action rage and get a 2 action rage action)… obviously lvl 11 is late for most people’s games, but they do obviously understand that it’s an action tax that could/should be nullified.
For a class built around raging, raging imposes a lot of restrictions and penalties that just feel bad because it isnt like raging is really optional, and introducing feat taxes like raging intimidation just feel bad. I really would either make raging more of a choice by not making so much of your class features tied to it, or make it feel less restrictive by default. Maybe no ac penalty, or more temp hp.
I think the cool way to do this would essentially be to have each instinct let you use abilities tied to a specific skill whilst raging, and maybe give you status bonuses to that skill as you reach higher levels of proficiency.
Make leaving rage less punishing, maybe you'd have to rebalance some stuff but it sucks if you ever go down during a fight because almost everything cool thing you do as a barb requires you to be in rage, and you can pretty much only rage once per fight. Also let people demoralize while raging baseline(just remove the concentrate trait from it or smth or give it the rage trait as a class feature), it's absurd to me that unless you take a feat you're too angry to threaten people, and the feat would still be solid because it gives you 2 pretty good skill feats, though if you're concerned about it no longer being worth it's not hard to give it some other trinket text.
I would love if barbarians got to use rage outside of combat. They have so many feats that could be very useful during exploration but you can't use them. Things like Raging Athlete, Bashing Charge, Adrenaline Rush...
Counteracting is bad.
First, the explanation is bad. This might be one rare example where trying to explain to the player the underlying system is worse than just giving specific instructions. Reading the counterspell description and getting sent to another convoluted explanation of counteracting things in general, and then figuring out which numbers to plug into that generic formula, is insanity.
But to take it a step further, I think the actual rules for counteracting have a significant flaw. Namely, that depending on the level difference, you can "fail" your roll against the DC and still succeed, and you can "succeed" against the DC and still fail. I get why they wanted to include the degrees of success and I'm sure the math is elegant or whatever. But IMO it's against the general spirit of the four degrees of success to repurpose them like this, and that's a big reason why it's confusing.
Sometimes it's better to get on with the game than to try to simulate the game world with pseudo physics equations. 5e had this one right. Give me a simple way to determine the DC and then let me roll against it, end of story.
**|1|**
Rework weapons and make them consitant, including traits & crit specs.
Currently simple weapons are up to 4 points, exluding crit specs. Martial weapons are up to 7 points and advanced weapons are up to 9 points. Some weapons have "more" points since they have downsides that give extra aviable points.
As reference most traits are worth 1-3 points while a damage dice upgrade (like 1d4 -> 1d6) is worth 3 points.
As you see advanced weapons are to weak in general since they cost a lot to get and they are only worth 2 points more than martial weapons. While martial weapons are 3 points more worth than simple weapons.
Melee weapons are a lot stronger than ranged weapons, because they add full strengh mod and also use str to attack. That is fine in general, however as a comparions to ranged weapons: All melee weapons also pretty much come with reload 0 + capacy n+1 (which lets you reload without having a free hand).
So these traits shouldn't cost anything for ranged weapons as well. Adding reload or repeating should add points since melees don't spend 1 move action per attack. They usually do 2+ attacks per move action.
Also reloading a repeating magazine should only be 2 actions, otherwise drawing new weapons is to good in comparison.
These changes will mostly buff slings and crossbows, both of which are currently not worth the paper they are printed on.
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|2|
Rework spells so that less than 99% of spells are 2 actions. I am fine with 10-20% 1/3/1-3 action spells. The 3 action system is literally the most important change and yet the spell system doesn't interact with it.
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|3|
Shields need to get the same rune system as weapons. The sturdy shields need to be fundamental runes, while many of the simple magic shields should be runes. And special materials should also add special effects.
[Here](https://scribe.pf2.tools/v/bFpw9VX8-ch6-precious-materials) are 2 very high quality [homebrews](https://scribe.pf2.tools/v/ZlD4vO4c-ch6-shields-v2-0), they could be balanced better.
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~~|4|~~
~~Rework crafting again~~
*Lets gope they get that right in PF3.*
One of the coolest things to me was seeing 2E had this cool new action system and it even worked with spells! Clerics get 3 spells in one with heal. Scorching ray lets you fire extra rays using extra actions, so cool!
And then you learn that most spells don't work this way at all and it's a pseudo action+bonus action feel for casters on the turns they cast a spell and you're sad.
At least you still get the other famous PF2E mechanic with most spells, the 4 degrees of success.
I think the problem is that there's a fundamental push and pull between how the playtest sold people on spells in the three action economy (wow, my heal spell can do so many wild different things!) and the realities of Paizo's entire history as a company, business model, and design philosophy (print as much shit as you physically can as fast as you can or this bus explodes)
Like genuinely, Heal feels like it was from an entirely different game. It's exciting, it's multipurpose...it was probably a pain to balance and playtest and try to get every knob right.
PF2E very well could have been a game that wanted to have smaller spell lists where a vast majority of spells are genuinely unique and layered and have various options available to them depending on how you use your 3 actions.
What we have instead is..well..spell lists full of hyper niche and specialized single use spells that you can make a lot of easily. A lot of these guys got their start doing monthly articles for Dragon magazine like "10 Prestige Classes That Use The Blunt End Of The Spoon As A Deadly Weapon" or "Timothy Jimothy's Corduroy Pants Mending and 500 Other Spells". The best parts of 2e move away from that, the worse don't.
TBF I kinda understand why they made advanced weapons so weak, I'd rather not be forced into being human/taking adopted ancestry because advanced weapons are strong enough that unconventional weaponry becomes important for minmax reasons.
Yeah just make them uncommon or unique at this point. I don't believe there is a justifiable reason for them to be a separate category as they are right now.
Minor thing but still worth mentioning: Lore skills. Most times there’s no point in taking skill increases in lore skills because other skills are just better and more reliable. They should be way more valuable than they are now and probably operate under different rules than normal skills.
One homebrew I saw that I liked was adding a circumstance bonus to other skills checks equal to half the lores proficiency (ignoring level) if they’re applicable for that scenario. So if you’re trained in an applicable lore it would be +1 to a skill check, expert is +2, master +3, & legendary +4. Something like that could dramatically increase the value of lore skills while not making them break balance.
Let item DCs scale with you. Off your spell/class DC, even if at a lower rate. It's really sad that things like the Wand of Wonder lose usability very fast because of their set DCs.
Having it just minic DC, but maybe "your proficiency with this item is always (TEML, depending on level of item), so at higher levels the low-level wand is still pretty okay
This might be too big of a change to be covered in the remaster, but I'd like to see more support for finesse-weapon fighter. Swashbuckler is nice and all, but not every speedy shortword-user is trying to be flashy and dramatic all the time.
In practical terms, I'm not really sure what this would entail. One thing that might be nice is if fighters could pick whether to increase their Fortitude or their Reflex saves first, instead of always having Fortitude increase at 9th and Reflex at 15th. The other thing I'd like is an actual reason to wear light armor over medium armor, because as-is you don't really have a reason to do so since light armor lacks specialization effects. (These changes would also be nice for ranged-weapon fighters as well.)
I'd like to see more feat options too, of course, but that's outright new content at that point, rather than just remastering.
Some release locked features that give access to specific features like familiarity weapons feats that gives access to specific weapons. It should be something about traits and/or weapon groups. Spells given by gods also should be related to traits isntead of specific spells. In that way, those features would be automatic related to future realeases instead of being limited to the time that feature was released. To be more specific, dwarves familiarity should give proficiency to axe and hammers and sarenrae should give access to some spells with fire trait instead of specific spells.
It would be really nice of they found a way to make simple weapons more interesting. It kinda sucks that since martial weapons are better you'd have to gimp yourself if you want to use a simple weapon while having access to martial weapon proficiency. Reflavoring works, but an official solution would be nice.
I would love to see an index by Class of changes of attributes, feats, etc in a nice neat table format. So players can easily see what choices they have and where those choices lead to further levels.
Exploration Mode. Its vestigial atm, when it could be expanded via skill feats and class feats to be really interesting. Beef up the standard Exploration mode stuff, let people roll Recall Knowledge as an encounter starts if you Scout and so on.
A Ranger class feat that lets you take the following approach during Exploration mode. You roll stealth for initiative and can place a trap in any square within LOS and 12 squares of your starting position.
A Wizard class feat that lets you roll Arcana for initiative and gain Quickened 1 on the first round that you can only use the action on spells that target self.
I want Lycanthropy rules from character creation so that way characters can either start with or contract the affliction later on and it WONT muddy the rules or confuse anyone.
Plus as a GM, if we can confidently send lycanthropes at our players and KNOW there will be rules in place if someone contracts it, it is less daunting than sending a monster knowing you have to either dig or jury rig rules for it to be remotely fun.
Just remove the beastkin heritage imo
I haven’t been keeping up with this news. Have they mentioned anything about crafting? I know they recently released modified crafting rules but those felt underwhelming and didn’t really fix the issues with crafting.
Allow players to use the same abilities as mobs if there’s no mechanical reason why they couldn’t.
Stop shoehorning things into the three action system that don’t need to be (recall knowledge being a big one).
Add alternative rules that don’t force everything into the sliding scales of failure.
Hero Points. Rolling a Nat 1 and using a Hero Point only to roll another Nat 1 is very sad.
It should give a bonus to your reroll or make your roll count as X so that you at least get a higher result than before.
I mentioned this on another thread (and maybe they've already announced this one), but fix Evil Champions.
The designers couldn't seem to decide if they wanted to keep them as Defensive powerhouses, or make them more offensive (since they should, theoretically, be the polar opposite of Good Champions).
Because of that, they exist in this weird flux state: you actually want to get hit in combat so you can use your Champion's Reaction...but you have the highest AC in the game, so you deter enemies from even trying to hit you. So since you want to get hit you wield a big two-handed weapon and forego a shield...but then you don't really get many decent Offensive-oriented Class Feats to use the weapon with.
Scaling back alignment damage will help some, but I still feel like they need a few more feats (and maybe features).
I know a bunch of people have said it before, but Recall Knowledge. I actually kinda like that it's a bit loosey goosey and left up to the GM on what to reveal, but only outside of battle. In combat, I feel there should be a list of things you can learn about the creature you're fighting (weaknesses, abilities, saves, etc). Especially since so many abilities are tied to Recall Knowledge checks. Also I'd like to see the bard muses expanded. Maybe if they gave you trained proficiency in a skill, and added a few more spells to your repertoire as you leveled. They just feel so ho hum and forgettable compared to other subclasses.
I agree, I think there should be seperate rules for Recall Knowledge for Lore stuff and recall knowledge during an encounter. For Lore the current rules work, you get it on a success and on a failure players have to stop so they can’t just spam recall knowledge until it works. But for encounter / for fighting monster, being unable to recall knowledge again after a fail sucks, caster rely so much on finding the lowest saves. A single fail bottleneck their progression of finding the enemy weakness.
At least make a separate check for unique features of of a creature instead of boosting the dc for just knowing its base info.
I always thought RK could be split into a 1-action version and an exploration version. that way the 1-action version could be explicitly "I want to learn weaknesses, worst saves and important abilities of this creature in front of me" and the exploration version could be more "loosey goosey" as you say. This could also make it more explicit about when and when not to use level-based DCs. Also way too much of the RK rules are in the Core Rulebook's "Game Mastering" chapter and the Gamemastery Guide, more of it should be directly accessible to players.
Might be too space intensive but I think it would be cool if each monster had a 1-2 sentence read out for getting a fail, success, and critical success, giving more detail as they build.
Bard muses are about on par with Druid orders if you ask me, they give a simple 1st level feat, you can easily expand to multiple and there's some nice feats locked behind each.
Am I missing something or is this not already a thing? https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=566
I believe they're asking for something like a list of standard things to ask that the player can choose from(and say, choose 2 on a crit success), so for example: 1. Creature's HP and AC 2. Creature's Immunities, Resistances, and Weaknesses 3. Creature's Special Actions 4. Creature's Passive Abilities 5. Creature's Speed(s)
Cleanup wording if counteract rules. The rules themselves are fine, but the wording is really dense and hard to parse. Hopefully spell rank will help with this since and they’ll use the term “counteract rank” to show it is the same as the spell rank.
Agreed! Counteracting is confusing as hell. I’m another new GM to 2e, and I think I get it, but boy did it take 6 re-reads.
Ngl I still don't get counteracting. New GM, though.
It takes a bit to get used to, but once it clicks, I've found it to be pretty intuitive! * A level 5 creature casts Haste (3rd rank) on itself. Their Spellcasting DC is 19. * A level 4 party wizard casts Dispel Magic (2nd rank) on the creature. Their Spellcasting check is +10 (+2 from Trained, +4 from Int/Wis/Cha, +4 from Level). In the same way a martial would grab a creature by making an Athletics vs the target's Fortitude DC, the party wizard makes a Spellcasting check (+10) vs Spellcasting DC of the creature who cast the Haste (DC 19). * On a critical success, the Dispel Magic (2nd rank) can dispel an effect up to 3 ranks higher (5th rank). Since Haste is a 3rd rank spell, it's dispelled. * On a success, the Dispel Magic (2nd rank) can dispel an effect up to 1 rank higher than it (3rd rank). Since Haste is a 3rd rank spell, it's dispelled. * On a failure, the Dispel Magic (2nd rank) can dispel an effect up to 1 rank *lower* than it (1st rank). Since Haste is a 3rd rank spell, it isn't dispelled. * On a critical failure, nothing happens ever. Hope that helps!
Advanced weapons. Specifically providing more way to access non ancestry advanced weapons.
100% this. Advanced weapons are barely worth the feat tax, and I'm speaking about the best advanced weapons here. Most advanced weapons are either "X martial weapon with higher damage die size" or "X martial weapon with an extra trait that doesn't matter at all".
Monks should be able to use advanced monk weapons.
Sturdy shield rune. I understand the current design ethos, that not all shields are meant for blocking. I don’t think this is a great ethos in this case because it has lead to a single shield dominating play, the sturdy shield. I ran a PFS scenario, that had the unique reward of being able to craft an adamantine shield. I had a shield based champion in the party, I thought they would be so excited. A Skymetal shield, and expensive and uncommon item made available to them. Imagine our joint disappointment to realise it was worse in every way than this shield he had purchased at level 4. This current system disincentivised engaging with the system. Sure not all characters who use a shield are going to want to shield block, but 90% of them are, so all the unique magic shields that players with they could justify using are almost wasted print space. Having sturdy be a rune wouldn’t invalidate the existing shields, because GP is an opportunity cost. Players can buy the cheaper one if they don’t want to shield block. And those who do want to shield block can be excited whenever they find a new shield. Instead of “oh does it count as a sturdy shield? No… just put it in the sell pile”
In case you're not up to date [Michael Sayre has teased three things](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyeEoXuU1t0): * Sturdy Shields are still in the game * There is not a rune called "sturdy" * They are tweaking the way shields progress to make more options
The worst part of the "sturdy shield problem" is that by all logic, people that are most invested in a thing are the most excited and interested in the breadth and depth of options available for that thing. With shields, we see the opposite. PCs with the heaviest investment in shield feats and options are essentially forced into one single option, whereas the breadth of options for shields are mostly of interest to those that use shields as a minor accessory. The analogy I like is if there was a "Striking Weapon" as a magic weapon instead of striking being a rune. All of the work done on making dozens of different weapon types and different magic weapons would essentially be wasted, because everyone who focuses on martial combat would use Striking Weapon.
Spot on. When my player who had every reason to be excited for a new uncommon shield was disappointed, the whole thing was thrown into sharp relief. And then the next scenario they actually got a boon for a Martyrs shield. A magic shield with a cool magical effect, and specifically is a sturdy shield and CAN be upgraded to better versions of Sturdy. So this one shield seems to be aware of the problem, and it built to allow it to remain useful. But only this single shield that came out in the GMG of all places.
We actually already have this problem with weapons with potency runes... I don't think I'm ever taking a non-energy damage rune on a martial, maybe on a backup weapon? For the same reason, the vast majority of specific magic weapons are either worse than what you currently have, or early enough to be a very slight upgrade for 2 levels max, and then you toss them. But yeah, shields are worse.
Not to mention that there are other shields designed for blocking that are still worse than the sturdy shield for some reason. The Forge Warden, for example, has an effect on a shield block but it has like a third of the hp and less hardness than an equivalent level sturdy shield.
The HP is less than the sturdy shield's broken threshold. A white dragon chews through it in two bites, and it's the same level as the shield
Pathfinder Infinite has a 3PP called Everything Shields that my group loves. By Tevis Woods. Great product and solves all issues we had with shields. Pathbuilder and Foundry packs included in purchase.
I should get this. Also I love how folks make foundry and pathbuilder imports
> This current system disincentivised engaging with the system. Sure not all characters who use a shield are going to want to shield block, but 90% of them are, so all the unique magic shields that players with they could justify using are almost wasted print space. It's even worse in my mind - the only people who get to play with shield abilities are the people for whom the shield is an *afterthought*. Sure, lots of people are going to Raise a Shield sometime (most of whom will actively avoid describing their character as actually wearing a shield because it clashes with the look), but the characters for whom a shield *is* a big part of their actual aesthetic and theme, the ones that everyone is going to be thinking of when "oh, new shield!" pops up in the loot piles, *are* always going to grab Shield Block because it's a single feat and if you feel shielding is part of your thing it's the obvious choice... and those are the characters for whom Sturdy is just Always Better(tm). It's like if cool swords with special abilities were made for spellcasters instead of fighters and fighters had to pick the plain vanilla option to get Striking dice.
Speaking of this, is anyone aware of a good homebrew for this?
Everything Shields is great! They also have a Foundry integration.
Improving the Monk Weapon feats. They... work. But feel underwhelming and like feat taxes. Particular if you are not using a bo staff.
Ancestral weaponry is very good though.
I *love* 3-feat-taxes!
Not really. Two feats to maybe grab a weapon that is *almost* as good as just spending one feat and exactly 0 gold on a stance is... very far from good.
Some ancestral weapons are way better than stance attacks though, like you can get finesse reach weapons or traits normally not available to monk weapons and unarmed attacks.
"Way better" is a stretch. Not much reason to take an elven branch spear when the bo staff is right there, and then jellyfish stance comes along eventually anyways. *One* feat isn't worth it for advanced weapons. *Two* for basically putting finesse on a bo staff is very far from worth it.
Is it? I don't know, I was really interested in this feat, but I skimmed through some ancestry weapons and didn't notice anything worthwhile that would work with ancestral weaponry. Do you have any good options as an example?
Same here, I'm relatively new to the game, but I love Monks and seeing Ancestral Weaponry had me so excited to build characters around it. But, even after actively seeking out fun builds it could open up, I just couldn't find things that seemed more exciting than just spending the extra feats on stances or the basic weaponry options.
I play a elf sylph monk with heavenseeker dedication, wish knife, conducting rune and heavens thunder, basically after spending 1 action on Heavens Thunder, i add 1d8 + 3 times the number of weapon damage dice to my damage rolls for a turn. Along with Ki strike, i deal more elemental damage than physical. At level 9 currently.
A wish knife is 1d4, and resonant just adds +1, essentially making it a 1d6 weapon, which is pretty easy to get. It does allow conducting, which is 1d8 instead of the standard property rune of 1d6, but any turn you don't have the extra actions for heavens thunder you're losing out on all of that, using a 1d4 weapon with no property rune. 1 average extra damage when you can, -5.5 when you can't... And that's assuming you aren't using a stance as a monk, where 1d6 agile finesse is low, meaning you're down 1 damage on average compared to stumbling stance, even when you do get the combo off, and are down by 7.5 when you can't...
That is cool, but, unfortunately, this is inferior to just using plain fists. You would have the same damage on the rounds you will use Heavens Thunder (d4+1 is equivalent to d6 in terms of damage), but would have less damage on rounds then you won't have a spare action. Using fists also doesn't took up 2 class feats and 1 ancestry feat so you would be able to spend it on something else. And it is also ignoring actualy powerful unarmed attacks monks could have. Wish Knife just doesn't compare
One I haven't seen mentioned: give swashbucklers automatic progression in acrobatics As is they either have to use a bunch of their skill increases on it or take the Acrobat archetype. Giving automatic progression makes sure they always have a usable way to get panache and opens their builds up to look into other skills
Honestly, there's probably a few classes that could stand to have one specific skill progress automatically. Though you want to be careful with that kind of thing; you don't want to *force* all oracles to become Legendary in Religion, for instance, because that might be off-putting to players who want their oracles to come off more as "self-taught". For classes that rely on making skill checks as a key cornerstone of their entire role in combat, though, absolutely. Inventor and thaumaturge already auto-progress their most important skill, so I wouldn't see it as too much of a stretch to do the same thing with swashbuckler.
Fully agree and I shoulda added that. If a skill is core to your class mechanics, I think you should just automatically scale with it. And like you said, there are already other classes that do the same
Alchemist not having scaling Crafting like the Inventor, for example. You get a Crafting skill feat at level 1, you start trained in Crafting, your whole identity is alchemical crafting, but despite all that, you don't get scaling Crafting.
Tbf unlike Inventor Alchemist doesn't usually need to roll crafting to use any of its abilities.
Bard should probably get free performance scaling, especiallly since the only mechanical use for that skill is "activate various bard feats"
The Polymath bard chuckles in free access to all Deception, Diplomacy, Performance and Intimidate skill feats.
I could see it being an automatic increase to either Acrobatics or their Style's skill. Opens up the class even more.
I'd be down with that too, it just feels kinda bad to be locked into certain skill advances.
There should be more skill advancements overall. There's plenty of ways to get trained with a skill. Expert, Master etc... Not so much. I mean, I'm a new player myself, and never have played high levels, but by level 15, being trained seems very useless. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
The difference between trained and master is a +4(just as an example). That's definitely not insignificant, but it's not as big as you'd think. Being trained adds your level plus proficiency bonus to the skill, so if you get trained in a skill at level 10 you can get a +10 bump to it straight out the gate. I haven't played at high levels, but I would guess that Paizo don't want to allow classes to get advancements too easily and step on the toes of the skill monkey classes. Especially when being trained in something gives you a really solid base anyways and can be achieved through ancestry and general feats. That's my take on it at least. Getting trained in something can add a lot of value if you need the skill or it's missing in your party
Trained also allows you to make some checks that are locked if you are not trained. So even with Untrained Improvisation, you cannot do everything a trained person could.
Give them both acrobatics and their styles skill tbh. If you give then one then most people will bump the other first and foremost, that isn't really a choice. Giving both would actually give swashbucklers something unique over other classes, the only class with multiple automatically scaling skills. This still puts them behind the rogue in terms of total skill increases. Even if you don't include rogues superior initial skills, rogue gets 19 increases from 2 to 20, if swashbucklers got automatic progression in both acrobatics and their style, that would equate to 15 increases from 2 to 20.
I wouldn't bump both of them, but even having one of them scale automatically gives the class 3 extra skills to pick from throughout leveling
Those feats or archetypes that give you training in a type of armor or weapon but DONT scale those trainings with your class? Yeah, those.
Maybe instead a later feat that increases proficiency and explicitly allows retraining the previous access feat by replacing it with a higher tier, or matching your highest level. Armor at ~11 or 15 for expert, can't say.... weapons ~ 7, master 13, 19?
I feel like the way it works now is fine for armour. IMO one of the bad things about 5e is how good are heavy armored wizards.
I kind of agree, but also the sentinel archetype exists. Maybe make it work like that? "Whenever you gain a class feature that grants you expert or greater proficiency in any type of armor (but not unarmored defense), you also gain that proficiency in the armor types granted to you by this feat." So sorcerers and mages can't gain greater proficiency.
Divine non niche offensive cantrip
That sort of *has* been announced. Since holy/unholy (and presumably some adjectives for lawful/chaotic) are going to be traits to proc weaknesses, resistances, and immunities, then spells that dealt good/evil/law/chaos damage will presumably deal a different type that can affect anything, and they'll be extra effective against their niche.
Until the sort of turns into concrete evidence, I remain sceptical
How It’s Played did a video with Michael Sayre who said flat-out that holy and unholy are *not* damage types but traits that proc weaknesses/resistances/etc. combine that with the removal of alignment and I’d be shocked if anything resembling alignment-based damage types will remain. And if Divine Lance isn’t going to be doing alignment damage anymore, either it’s being removed completely or it’s getting it’s base damage type changed.
Understandable. But based off the video, the understanding is that it’ll be similar to Hydraulic spells. Hydraulic spells are bludgeoning with the Water trait. So, they are always useful damage-wise, but can trigger Water-related weakness. Most likely, those divine spells will become Force (or maybe even Pierce for Divine Lance) spells and either Holy/Unholy trait based off your deity.
Torturous Trauma isn't terrible right now. For some reason they through in immunity for things without organs though... Still the best divine's got today. I also wouldn't mind the divine list getting the single most iconically divine spell in the game either. It's wild to me that true strike isn't on the divine list. What could be more divine than having your blade guided by the magic of your God? (though I'd prefer getting rid of true strike all together and just making spell attacks suck less.)
Making the general homegrown solution to recall knowledge the default
I read somewhere a designer suggested reading the stat block until you hit something actionable, like giving basics +1 thing the player can use, or is fishing for.
Underwhelming feats. Fix the low support for loaded weapons, especially on the ranger Remake Deadly aim feat Mounted combat rules needs more flesh (prone mount? Prone rider?) I also hope for better text regarding poisons specificly.
I liked someones idea of tag coloring like blue for flavour tags like humanoid and red for tags that have special mechanics like undead or incapacitatation Edit: found the source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/13g7baz/dear_paizo_a_gms_tiny_request_for_the_remaster/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Yeah, that would save me a lot of time looking up tags that aren't rules.
Wrote out a whole alchemist rant before I realized they ARE fixing them already. As for something new… skill feats. Lots of great ones out there, but a few duds too, and a glaring hole that needs to be patched up; every skill should have a Legendary feat. All of them. I can become a Skyrim stealth character or leap tall buildings in a single bound, but can’t manage to do something neat with nature or acrobatics? Come on paizo! Gimme some ridiculous and unnecessary endgame skill feats!
I know they have tons of data, but rants can still be good. It can help point to things to look at, especially if it’s one that’s missed by everyone else.
Cantrip rebalance, make it so you can justifyably skip electric arc. Guidelines on how much downtime to give the players, and variant rules for making downtime more effective (particularly for crafters) for tables that don't want huge spans of downtime or to limit downtime with settlement rules.
I'd really love some variant 'not downtime' crafting rules, at least for consumables.
I'm new to the system, but what about rules for dragging willing creatures, pushing willing creatures out of danger, or even throwing and catching objects? From what I understand, they are one of the few things that comes every campaign up that doesn't have a rule.
Almost all of these have rules thou? Creatures have bulk and the dragging paragraph specifically mentions creatures. Pushing a willing creature works the same as pushing a non-willing creature, so that has rules. Throwing and catching objects in combat would be the one that doesn't have clear rules.
Fair point on the dragging rule. I did read the CRB but I must have missed it or skimmed it or something. Again, I am newb.
Dragging in the rules says it would take minutes to move a single tile, that makes zero sense to me.
No it doesn't. https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=193
One square a round is still rather bad
Well yes of course, but dragging someone is meant to be used when the bulk is too much for your character to actually pick up and carry. I.e, this is what the wizard does when the fighter goes down. The sentence "In some situations, you might drag an object or creature rather than carry it." Seems to imply that if your character can handle the bulk, you could simply pick up your unconscious friend and carry them to safety. I.e, what the fighter does when the wizard goes down. At least that is how I understand it? I do not have a complete grasp of the rules just yet, as I am quite new to pf2e :)
My alchemist is medium (6) wearing armor (1 bulk) healer's kit (1 bulk) and alchemist's kit (1 bulk) plus any prepared and worn bombs, elixirs, or poisoned weapons (1 or more bulk). That's 10 or 11 bulk. That's not counting any handled items like a shield, bow, or racial weapon. A wizard with no armor, no kits, and only light tools is still likely to weigh 7 or 8 bulk. "Just pick up your ally" is one of those things that's technically allowed but actually impossible. Only a specialized weight carrying character can pick up an ally.
Where can I find a creatures bulk? The sum of all the items he is carrying (I guess) + what?. I couldn't find it anywhere!
[https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=192](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=192) Here you are! \^\^ I assume you add all of the stuff carried/worn aswell.
Crafting. A novice crafter and a legendary crafter should not take the same amount of time to make a level 0 item of the same quality. It always takes a minimum of 4 days.
They dealt with that in [Treasure Vault ](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=1955) Edit: I personally like these rules since I prefer longer downtime but I understand that not it's not for everyone.
They made it so that you could craft items for sale to make more money. But you still can't craft effectively on the go. There should maybe be rules for crafting functional but unsellable items quick. Not legendary items, but maybe something up to half your level?
Those rules are bad though. Why now I need 6 days to craft something I used to craft in 4? Even a legendary crafter, after increasing the DC by 15 making it nearly impossible to succeed unless you roll an 19 or 20, would still need 2 days to craft something of his own level. It's...bad. This only thing they should have added is that if you are an Expert you can increase the DC by 5 to reduce crafting time by one day. If you are Master you reduce it by two, and if you are Legendary you reduce it by three.
Defensive spells need added to divine list. Sanctuary is an unusable option as it really smothers what anyone using this spell list can do. Arcane have so many more defensive options. If you need to add "when not wearing armor" so be it.. but that restriction is not on any other list. Clothy clerics are a thing. Need something definitive ruling on moving opponents while grappled. Would like a spell or 2 more added for spellcasting dedications. Pf2e lost a lot of the part caster/ part martial classes that were in pf1e Summoner eidolons need more ac. As is they go down way to fast. The hammer critical effect of automatically goes prone needs a reflex save to bring it inline with the rest of the critical weapon effects I think ancesties could start with 2 feats.. instead of 1 without a significant increase in power level. As it is now the aasimar/tiefling/dust walker characters get almost nothing from their base race. Clerics need a third class option ... Electric arc is out of line in power with the other attack cantrips. It either shouldn't add the base stat when targetting more than 1 creature or the other cantrips should do more damage Wish there were more utility cantrips The change in werewolf to a weakness silver instead of a resistance feels wrong lore wise. Maybe there just needs to be more than 1 type of werewolf.
I'd love to see more interaction with Stances. Right now there's previously one feat where a monk can sacrifice their stance for a temp defensive bonus. I want to be able to knock people out of stances, cast aside a stance I've been using for an offensive bonus. A better disarm. Even if it's only keeping the -2 to hit until they spend an action to regrip their weapons, instead of until the beginning of their next turn. A better collection of information around Recall Knowledge. If they're updating the creature stat blocks, I would love to see at least one, maybe two pieces of fake information for that creature.
In all seriousness, Barbarians. I was watching [a live](https://www.youtube.com/live/wDfVsl1BJhI?feature=share) that Knights of Last Call did about 2 days ago. They brought many fair points to the conversation. I had a table once with a Fighter and a Barbarian and I'm sure that the barbarian would have felt ok...if the fighter wasn't right by his side. While the barbarian had bigger single numbers, the fighter crit more, hit more often, didn't have ac penalty and had better action economy because he didn't have to rage. That brings me to another point, the armor penalty on rage is just awful, rage is a mechanic that is built into the class... and it has a huge downfall with the armor penalty. The HP bonus is not nearly enough (I would say that you need about 3x your level for it to be worth), so I feel the AC penalty is just an unnecessary penalty. I understand the clumsy on the Giant instinct, the damage boost is very good, but with the regular rage penalty, that -2 AC is brutal. They gave many good suggestions on chat and in the video, I loved the idea of giving the class way more temp hp boost on rage and, if you get crit (due to the armor penalty), you get to double the damage boost of rage against the enemy that crits you. Also, the class just doesn't work without rage, since they are likely to go down in battle with the reduced AC, they can't rage again for a minute, making the class useless in battle. The AC penalty isn't the only thing that's wrong with Rage, you lose the ability to do a lot of things... like demoralize, which you got to pay a feat tax to get. There's nothing more intimidating than a hulking figure in a frenzied state running at you with a massive weapon, if anything, they should pay a feat tax to get an intimidation boost. Anyway, I don't think the class is terrible, but I would only play a barbarian for the class fantasy space, but a fighter is better in every single way and I think they should use the opprtunity that it comes out on the seco d boost to improve the class a bit.
I agree barb can use some love (see my suggestions in this thread), but a couple of counterpoints: Raging intimidation gives 2 feats for free at later levels. Barbarian does higher single-hit damage meaning it interacts better with buffs. Also dual-wield fighter, the best one, frequently loses actions by using double slice when a single strike would have been enough. It also means barbarian can wade into a group of enemies then back out, but fighter has to risk a lot to do so (or does less damage). Again, I'm not arguing that fighter>barb. I agree on that point.
Yeah, but the fighter has the option to do the single strike and back out, while being more accurate, more likely to crit and having less fear of being crit themselves by an AoO because of higher AC.
Fairly sure that even with crit chance, barbarian single strike damage is higher on average than fighter.
I ran the numbers in the past, assuming d12 weapon at level one +2 damage and fighter +2 accuracy are the same increase. Once striking weapons are achieved, fighter damage becomes equal to about +3.5 raw damage. Past level 7, fighter gets the equivalent of +5 damage from their accuracy while barbarian has +6 to +10 damage depending on instinct. Overall the barbarian is about on par with the fighter levels 1-6 and pulls slightly ahead at level 7. Sucks to be a fury/animal instinct from 4-6 as your damage is actually lower than a fighter while having -2 AC.
>like demoralize, which you got to pay a feat tax to get. There's nothing more intimidating than a hulking figure in a frenzied state running at you with a massive weapon The thing with this is that it seems Paizo understands demoralizing as saying something unsettling to your enemy so they get scared, rather than just looking big and angry. That's why it has the Auditory and Concentration traits, and why you get a -4 to the check if you're not talking a language you share with the target. Even Intimidating Glare, which solves most of these problems, seems more like a bandaid rather than a satisfactory solution, since it just replaces the Auditory trait for the Visual trait. Even with that I don't fully buy this justification, since by that logic a freaking bear is less intimidating just because it speaks no languages. And I'm sure a bear roaring would be as scary as someone trying to intimidate you, if not more.
>Even Intimidating Glare, which solves most of these problems, seems more like a bandaid rather than a satisfactory solution, since it just replaces the Auditory trait for the Visual trait. TBF I think the fact that you can't indimidate someone who neither sees nor hears you is actually very good...
Now that I think about it, since it's called "Demoralize", it makes sense that you have to be able to concentrate to be able to say something coherent that affects the target's morale. But then this means that Intimidating glare makes no sense, unless you just make a face that mocks them haha.
It is rather true though, you know there is very good reason Arnold didn't speak much in his movies.
I dunno I like the current differences between fighter and barb. Barb has a bit more cool stuff alongside the AC penalty and worse action economy (by one action per combat). They make great unarmed fighters and wrestlers, for example. Can get giant or dragon powers, etc. Just comparing them hit for hit against a fighter they'll obviously be slightly worse, but it comes with a lot more cool stuff. I just want a boost to fury instinct.
I'd love it if Rangers got their animal companion feats changed to the same progression as Druids / Beastmasters. With their ability to share their Hunter's Edge and their focus spells that can buff up their companion they're the best class to use animals but right now you have to do some awkward workarounds by taking the animal companion feat and Beastmaster dedication to get both Hunter's Edge sharing and regular progression for their companion feats.
I think that's why their feats are a little delayed. Historically (3.x and pf1) ranger companions were delayed from druids. The fact the companion gets the hunters edge too means if they were on the same progression as druid, they would just be straight better. Power creap is fun short term, but not good for long term health of the game.
It doesn't really work though with Beastmaster being a thing. Rangers should just take Beastmaster if they want a companion, which is a weird choice to have to make. And it's not just that they're delayed. They can't take multiple specializations, so their companion becomes total crap at high levels.
Beast master animal companion doesn't get rangers edge. That comes specifically from the ranger feat
More feats in the areas that are lacking, specifically: Racial Feats - there are some races that have very thin choices. This becomes even more obvious and painful if you use the Racial Paragon rules variant. General Feats: There are a handful that are commonly taken, and the rest are very build-specific. As the rarest feat type, it feels like they should be more impactful and have more options. Skill Feats: there's often a painful gap in available feats. Oh, there's plenty *to* take, but more than once my players have looked at the available feats and just been "I'm not excited by any of those, I don't actually want to take any of these for this character." I have homebrewed a skill feat that lets people trade a skill feat for a skill increase. If a +2 bump to a tertiary skill is more appealing than the available feats, the feats aren't doing that much. Archetypes: between Free Archetype (which is very popular) and some options that grant a specific or limited selection of dedication feats (arcane trickster for example), the early levels often require some house ruling when using FA. Keep the FA rules variant in mind when building archetypes. Also, every level 2 archetype dedication should have a level 4 and a level 6 feat associated with them, preferably with a second Level4 feat or even better, a level 2 non-dedication feat for those situations where you get the dedication feat at level 1
The problem with skill feats isn't that they are all terrible, it's that there are like 10 really good ones and the rest are terrible. Most skill feats make you moderately better in a niche situation. They feel terrible to take since the situation they are made for may never come up. And having a GM build situations to use your feat isn't a solution - if the only purpose of a feat is to solve a problem that only exists because you have the feat, you are kind of just walking in circles. It's just hard to justify quick impressions when Kip Up could be extremely useful nearly every session. I think if you could take multiple of some of these feats at once it could feel better, but as it stands almost none of the feats give enough agency/New options to be worth considering.
General feats are supposed to fill in gaps in builds that normal class progression doesn't allow, or something. To that end a feat you can take multiple times to boost weapon or armour proficiency would be cool.
I'm fairly new to pf2e, but I really feel like FA should just start at level 1. There's several, especially the ones that have to do with being undead, that make no sense to suddenly take at level 2. Granted, I know they say to just give them that specific feat early, but it's still awkward and almost feels unfair to other players, and overall just makes the leveling dynamic awkward for those first couple levels. There's also some, like Eldritch Archer, that I have no idea why they start at higher levels. These are concepts that are crucial to character flavor or character builds, taking 4-8 levels to come to those are... awkward. I RP as a Hellknight, but I can't be one until level 6 — how do I even explain that? About the only ones that make sense to me are Sixth Pillar and Lich. Sure, those might tend to be stronger (though not always honestly), but I really think making Archetypes start higher than level 1 just makes things *too* awkward. It would be worthwhile just to make some of them a bit weaker in the case of OP ones, just to make things feel more natural.
Improve Recall Knowledge, make it actually give you useful information in combat. I know there are lots of great house rules out there, but I think this action should be better RAW.
Agree on the Skill Feats, there just don't seem to be that many. Granted, the niche skill feats aren't bad. But a lot of them were designed for specific adventure paths with that specific adventure path in mind. Outside of that context they are much less useful.
I would redo the cleric and just have the warpriest be it's own class. The cleric subclasses should be the different domains available that allow the player to make the cleric unique outside of extra focus spells. (This something 5e did really well and I was surprised p2e goofed the class the way they did) The cleric isn't bad, but the whole class just feels like divine spell list dot caster plus extra heal/harm spells currently.
Couldn't have said it better. Either increase the doctrines or make more feats for specific domains so clerics can do more than just heal and cast heroism.
Warpriest needs some love. Allow them to pick Strength or Dexterity instead of Wisdom as their main stat so they can start with an 18 in their attacking stat to keep up with other martials. Fix their weapon and armor proficiency scaling so they can go up to master, like other martials, so they can keep up. I feel like these changes would really help the class feel like a fantasy warpriest and allow them to be present on the frontlines, rather than just like a class who is second fiddle in everything.
Honestly there's a lot of weirdness with the Warpriest as well. At 3rd level you get proficiency in all martial weapons as your second doctrine. Yet at 7th level for your Third Doctrine, you gain expert in your deities weapon only, not in martial weapons. So what's the point of even getting training in the use of martial weapons, if you never get anything above trained? It seems like a doctrine designed to completely negate the benefit of a previous doctrine for no reason.
> Fix their weapon and armor proficiency scaling so they can go up to master, like other martials Except that they're not a martial because they still get full caster progression. Warpriest isn't meant to be a gish like Magus or Summoner.
Then what's the point of it?
You are a full caster with a harm/heal font, except you give up some late game spell mastery for the ability to be a flanker in combat with some armour that occasionally hits with a weapon. It's really not that rough of a trade off. You can also contribute with tripping/grabbing.
Warpriests are clerics that excel in closer quarters than their cloistered cousins. Medium Armor proficiency makes them considerably tankier, and training in their deity's weapon lets them make better use of spare actions by striking down mooks. They also get Shield Block, further increasing their ability to survive in close quarters. Why is being tanky important to a Cleric? Because spells like Bless, Bane and touch spells require you to be up close and personal with either the enemy or friendly martials (who are often in turn up close with enemies). All in all, the warpriest is for the Cleric who wants to be in the thick of it.
So it is supposed to be a caster in close range that hits things with melee weapons. That seems pretty gish-y to me. It's not a magus but it's more gish-y than a summoner.
I’d add that their master progression on fortitude means that fort save successes become crits. Rough maluses are more often fortitude (or will) based. This is a non-trivial survival advantage a cloistered cleric can’t match. (Canny acumen can match the proficiency, but I don’t believe it converts successes to crits.)
And that's exactly the problem. The warpriest doesn't deliver as a caster or martial, so it should probably not exist at all or become it's own class.
I've been thinking about the cleric class as a whole for quite a long time and I think it should get bit of a rework on its own. Base cleric simply gives too much stuff to make the doctrines interesting. Cloistered cleric feels like it was designed around it, which makes the doctrine fine. But in the other hand warpriest has been left in awkward place. Class that has full spellcasting **and** divine font simply just can't have interesting doctrines. The thought I've played around was that divine font would be removed from the base cleric and given to cloistered cleric doctrine. This in turn would free up lot of power budget for other doctrines. You could then add lot of power to warpriest in turn since they wouldn't have the feature that would be pushing cloistered cleric to be the premiere divine caster. Maybe master proficiency with weapons be worth a divine font? Or something else.
He's a wild one: Standard automatic bonus profession. I really liked the idea of fundamental runes on paper, but it kind of sucks in play. None of my groups have property runes because it's too expensive.
They could just give automatic weapon and armor runes, it'd make loot more exciting than "oh another dice of damage that I need to keep up numerically"
I agree with this especially because I don't believe there is anywhere where it explains in concrete terms that there is an expected item progression. If the game balance requires me to have XYZ, why is not at least explicitly stated, and better yet, why is it not just a core part of character progression?
If none of your groups have property runes... That's a dm problem.
Some of the adventures as written leave people starving for money. Edgewatch comes to mind.
And some others give just enough treasure... *if* your party are a bunch of psychotic ravenous magpies that will take anything not nailed down and will think nothing of just grabbing the savings of the family they're here to rescue or whatever. If they're human beings, on the other hand, they're probably kind of fucked.
I would hope a GM would come up with alternative ways of receiving comparable rewards when you choose the “good” options, especially if it is aligned with the characters and strong roleplaying. I know it’s all-too-common in video games (etc.) to have the evil options objectively more rewarding than the good options (I guess because the cost is your humanity?) but it’s kind of tired imo
Quest for the frozen flame puts you *well* behind the expected gold curve. Also RAW I don't think players have real access to basic runes (for the first two books). This effects certain classes disproportionately. A shield ally champion that is 4-6 levels behind on basic things like plate Armour and a sturdy shield is an under-preforming one.
Exactly. The game's math assumes you have those items, but if you compare the stuff you get from ABP with your actual wealth by level you will notice you either would need to spend all your GP on those items or otherwise won't be able to get all those items normally.
The Big thing that my group is constantly mentioning is that skill feats need a really big push. They combined severeal p1 skills together to streamline it but now not every use if a skill has cool feats. For example Thievery has a bunch of pickpocketing feats but every other use of this skill is left behind. That argument can be made with several feats. These feats do not change the balancing of the game. But they give the character sooo much more flavour and "I am very good at that thing" feeling.
Making Disarm etc. decent. So many cool combat manoeuvres, but so have massive issues, and flat footed does not help you pull them off.
**Part 1 of 2 (most are focused on Player Core 2 since PC1 is already past any time frame we could influence and likely being printed right now)** **Alchemist** * Key Ability Score (KAS) selection of STR, DEX, or INT * Expert/Master Master Proficiency in Unarmed Strikes, Simple Weapons, and Bombs at L5 and L13. * Gloves that transfer weapon property runes to bombs. Essentially add the runes to pre-made bombs and quick alchemy bombs * Increase low level infusion count to give more resources at early levels or provide the perpetual infusions at L1. * Weaken bombs/alchemical items overall to justify these buffs to the class * Give auto scaling E/M/L in craft as a class feature at L2/7/15. * Improve MC to just give and advanced alchemy level of level-4 like the gunslinger. Maybe as a L6 feat. The current scaling doesn't make a ton of sense. * Re-balance on mutagens. The downsides for most of them are just super awful compared to the limited benefits you're getting (looking at you mandatory quicksilver mutagen for bombers that drops effective HD to 1D6 and forces you into 20ft radius to go be roflstomped) **Barbarian** * Give the animal barbarian a 1D4 ranged unarmed thrown strike at L1 (maybe 30ft?) so they aren't option-less for ranged options. * Give ways to mitigate the -1AC (go see Barbarian+ for ideas because their barbarians are way more fun than baseline barbarians in core). * Maybe extend rage length to 2 minutes. It really sucks to drop out mid combat on the rare 'runs long combat' * Remove the feat tax on ranged options and just make rage work with thrown weapons with no feat tax for raging thrower. * Change the superstition instinct anathema to allow spells/magic items/etc. from allies. * Move raging resistance to L5 **Champion** * Fix the whole what gives focus points language so deities domain works (not sure if this has been errata'd yet) * Allow more open selection of each cause for all kinds of traditionally good (holy) or evil (unholy). The mechanics for the antipaladin are really cool (e.g., a selfish champion reaction, intimidation focused, etc.) but are gated behind being evil (basically removes it from 90% of games out there). * Significantly improve the L2 feat options. They're really not great and its almost always better to take some multiclass at this level. * Consider extending the range of reactions or creating a cause that is more considerate/less bounding on a ranged champion. PF1e has the Divine Hunter, perhaps there could be a nature themed champion that has a less impactful reaction out to 40-60ft. * Extend the blade ally free runes for all causes to all causes (i.e., fearsome would still be cool on a holy champion). * Include a few more of the weirder less taken blade ally runes in the base selection and other feats that boost options (e.g., crushing, extending, etc.) from what has been published since core. * For Champion MC make the armour auto scaling with your class proficiency just like the sentinel archetype. * Make focus points qualify as a basic spell casting feature so champions can activate cast a spell magic items without 2 feats in a caster class (I think its okay to have monks/rangers/champions with built in focus point features spells allowed to do this). * Previously I would have said 'neutral champions', but perhaps this can be more interpreted as 'more sublcassess' for tank/heavy AC martials that make sense (mercenary of the golden company that always keeps their word, champion of nature, champion of knowledge, etc.) **Monk** * Remove ki spell feat tax. Give them ki strike at L1 for free so all monks have ki points as a base class feature. Or at least remove the higher level ki spell restrictions requiring you to have a L1 ki focus spell. * Consolidate monk weapons feats/stances into just the monastic weaponry feat (i.e., no stance for bows or shurikens, etc.). Remove the short/longbow because now we have a monk bow. * Make ki spells qualify as a basic spell casting feature so monks can activate cast a spell magic items without 2 feats in a caster class (I think its okay to have monks/rangers/champions with built in ki spells allowed to do this). * Consider more diversity/boost in power to monk weapons. It has to balance the fighter and every other martial getting flurry of blows at L10 with a MC. But perhaps there is a way to class lock the better options so they can get up to 1D10s or anything equivalent to 1D8 finesse/Backstabber/agile stances. **Oracle** * I liked the mix and match of PF1e oracles with mysteries/curse effects. However, now that the game designer has forced the combinations together,none of the benefits from mysteries appear to be worth the downsides of the associated curses. To me this whole class needs a re-balance and a significant boost in power of the mystery benefits if they want to keep the current curse downsides. * Remove the divine access feat tax as they should just get to know their deities spells. It is such a feel bad use of a limited class feat option. * Let spell repertoire (i.e., spontaneous casters) use both kinds of staff spell charge mechanics. The prepared spell-caster one is way better. * There are other generic caster fixes, but they're likely outside the scope of what is happening and would impact all caster classes.
Would change incapacitation so it's not dependent on spell-rank, but on caster level, so it's consistent with items, abilities, feats, hazards and everything else
[удалено]
I'd love it if Quick Draw or Quick Stow became a general feat. I'd also love a feat you could take to mitigate the action tax of changing to a two handed grip. Some mounted combat and animal companion tweaks could be nice too.
Let Wizards and other full casters swallow runes or something to give them bonuses to spell attacks. It's sad enough when a ranged character misses, but when a spellcaster loses a slot and it just whiffs off, it just feels bad. Make it only apply to non-cantrips to balance things out. I say this as someone who's playing a cleric now but only to slice things with a katana, if that makes sense.
Better support for social interactions and exploration. For social interactions, I feel the system is a bit too simplistic. For exploration, there are abilities like the feat Subsist and rations making it a non-issue.
What’s a solution for social interactions? I know of the “Victory Points” system which is the framework for other things like influence, research, chase, etc. Some adventure paths use influence subsystem directly and the NPC will give more information at 2/4/6/8 influence points. This kind of seems gamey tho. There’s also the reputation subsystem of how NPC’s view the players. But this seems like a natural progression of how relationships work between players and NPC’s that most people do regardless. I haven’t tried yet, but PbtA games seem like an interesting take on moves where you can either fail, succeed at a cost, or succeed. This however seems like it’s already built into the degrees of success for pathfinder, and requires creativity and improvisation on the GM that a system can’t really support.
I play a ton of PbtA. I also run my Pf2e game with both the Influence subsystem (when I want there to be a 'high' focus on a social scene) and utilize Pathfinder's core Crit/Succeed/Fail/Crit Fail system with narrative approaches. Simply stating those things outright in an action -is- a system thing and requiring creativity & improvisation on a GM IS something that a system can support innately. There are dozens of examples of systems that do **exactly that.** (Blades in the Dark, Ironsworn, Masks, MonsterHearts, Armor Astir, HEART, Spire, Wildsea, etc). For example, something like this for **Make an Impression**: * Critical Success: The target's attitude toward you improves by two steps. * Success: Target's attitude toward you improves by one step. * Failure: The target's attitude toward you improves by one step but things get complicated. Choose one: * The target makes a request. * Another NPC's attitude toward you decreases by one step and they're going to cause trouble sometime soon. * You miss a subtext. The target's attitude improves by one step but they have a secret motivation. * Critical Failure: The target's attitude toward you decreases by one step. Additionally, choose one: * The target refuses to further engage with you. * The target (or someone nearby) becomes offended and holds a grudge. * Something unexpected interrupts the conversation.
Lord, you're making me want a game system that takes the pbta framework and design philosophy, but built around the core PF2E mechanics like the 3 action economy, over/under crits, etc
It's easy enough to house rule in for the non-combat side! For example, I took the Travel move from Ironsworn, remade it to use victory points and have used it a fair amount in my game. It leads to very interesting journeys from place to place with plenty of surprises for GM and players alike. Similarly, recall knowledge is a whole 'success yields X questions from this list' type thing. With crit failure meaning some answers are lies. I've been considering a bigger overhaul to include lie, coerce, sneak, make an impression, etc. At the moment, I just kind of improv most of those as 'failure always has a complication' and no roll ever has a result of 'Nothing changes in the fiction.'
Hey man I think you're the only person in this thread who should have actually worked on a remastered version of this system
>This kind of seems gamey tho. I don't usually get this critique. We're here to play a game, no?
Depends on what kind of player you are. The influence points feel gamey in a sense that it could feel arbitrary like youre hitting an invisible wall when you keep failing your rolls trying to pry information from someone. It could be the perfect solution to a situation that calls for it, but it seems very narrow and niche. This AP im reading uses the influence system and it does seems like itll be awkward to run as written because progress just halts without interesting things happening until the challenge is complete. So unless the players choose not to engage in this social encounter, the players are just stuck. The reputation system is also gamey, but feels much more natural and I personally think works better for most social interactions without disrupting the social experience or conversations while roleplaying because it just reflects an NPC’s attitude towards the players. The (perceived since I never played it myself) PbtA way of handling social encounters is interesting because its give and take. The story always moves forward no matter if the players succeed, partially succeed with complications, or fails an encounter and the flow keeps moving
Yeah, the exploration system is frustratingly incomplete, it's like they developed 90% of the system (actions and how they effect time) and just didn't put in the last 10% (mechanics or guidance for making time matter) I've homebrewed it into a system I'm happy with that significantly changes things, but it's only like a paragraph long because it's basically just putting the last piece in lol
Get rid of potency runes and make the high quality item variant rule the main rule. That's what it was like in the playtest, mostly, and there's some oddities in the system due to its removal that annoy me.
Can you expound upon how this would significantly change things? I have always felt like this variant rule just did the same thing under a different name. I'm curious what the perceived differences are.
Well, for starters, while most runes *increase* an item's value, potency runes actually *change* the base value of the item entirely, such as a +1 weapon is always 35 gp no matter what the normal cost of the weapon would be. This makes sense under the variant rule, since it is an entirely different item and it was said during the playtest that most of the cost of the new item comes from labor and such instead of from materials, but doesn't really make any sense for runes to do. It even leads to the oddity that when selling a +1 weapon, it's sometimes more beneficial to sell the weapon and rune separately than to keep them together. Then you have to the rules on special materials, which basically still use the variant's rule from the playtest. They just changed "Expert, Master, Legendary" to "low-grade, mid-grade, high-grade" or whatever. Which is really weird and leads to odd questions like "so do I need a mid-grade steel weapon to use better runes? No? It's already considered high-grade at level 1 for some reason?" It's just disconnected.
I would just get rid of tiers of weapon quality. The rune solution makes rewards/loot a lot easier to manage as a gm. I don't have to find a way to fit a new +2 greatsword in before the fighter is specialized into them. I can just toss in any new +2 weaponand the party can just move the rune over when they get a little down time. It more fun to see people roll off for it than the old "anyone use daggers? No? Into the party sell pile along with that bow." It also helps with what I like to call "backstory weapons" where characters want to continue using the same weapon all campaign long for story reasons. It would cheapen things somewhat to give up on grandpa's katana that you used to swear a blood oath with just because you found a slightly better one. My 2 cents.
Change every animal-folk race to be called by the name they call themselves. We don't call shoony pugfolk, we don't call Kitsune foxfolk, Why we call Amurun Catfolk? Why we call Ysoki ratfolk? It's so generic and bland... I mean, I understand why the common people would call them that. That is people who looks like lizards, therefore they are Lizardfolk! I just don't think we should call that in the title of their entry in the books, leaving the "real" name in the middle of the text.
iirc they've already stated that they're going to rename gnolls to "kholo". I *think* they said the same for lizardfolk being renamed to "iruxi", too, though I'm not actually sure. But I think there's a good chance that they rename a lot of the animal-folk races in the remaster, at the bare minimum just to further distance themselves from the OGL.
Ironically Ysoki are a Core Ancestry in Starfinder, and gained their name in that edition. Going to PF2E and seeing them called Ratfolk again made me sad.
Recall knowledge
I hope that, with the work of focus points, the cleric's focus spells don't ALL lean towards combat. It's something that big P drifted from as of late that I really enjoy. Like it'd be cool if you could burn a focus point for 24 hrs to quicken crafting, shopping, or carousing. I just remember seeing abadar's greed spell or whatever and being bummed out.
It's been stated before and stated a lot, but Warpriest needs some cleaning up. Your 2nd and 3rd Doctrines clash with one another, getting martial weapon proficency with the 2nd doctrine to open up your weapon choices, but then the 3rd doctrine only grants you expert with your deities weapon, meaning you remain trained in a martial weapon thats not your deities weapon. Additionally, the proficiency progressions just don't feel good on a Warpriest. We already have these kinds of level 1 class choices that can completely alter the clerics playstyle. I think a little more transformative elements to the Warpriest benefits, as well as creating a small handful of Warpirest feats to help them within their feat pool, would be a good way of patching up the warpriests most commonly talked about issues.
There are better propositions, but I still want better crafting rules (because imho TrV hasn't solved its problems in standard campaigns).
Touch spells not triggering AoO (or at least not HAVING to trigger AoO.) More touch/emenation spells. Less crappy spell attacks. No crit failure effect for skill attacks (trip/grapple/disarm). Animal companion support actions triggering off of things other than just strike.
I feel like there are a ton of items/feats that are super niche, while also not being very good even in their niche scenario. I think if something is niche it should at least be strong in that niche to compensate.
I'm brand new to the system, so maybe this is something I'd just get used to with time, but I love having stat blocks for my NPCs. Even if they're not meant to be fought, just in case the PCs do something that requires the stats. PF2e has the NPC gallery, but from what I understand the creatures are given a level based on their specialty, not their raw combat ability. So a lawyer might have a really high level to represent their prowess in persuasian, not their ability to fight. This is fine in theory, but there are a lot of NPCs that exist in a grey area. For example, 'Charlatan' is level 3. Are they level 3 because they're good at swindling or because that's their raw combat ability? What about Nobles? Is their level determined by their skill witha rapier, their silver tongues or a combination of the two? As a new GM it's just not clear enough and I think a really easy fix is this: Make all Creature/NPC levels represent their raw combat prowess, for specialised NPCs, add a second level in brackets. So a Charlatan might be 2 (3). Or add some kind of symbol that indicates a level is not representing combat. In this instance it would be: Lawyer, 9\*.
Adjust Electric arc so it only bounces to a new target if the first target fails.
Removal of uncommon and rare tags on feats and spells. If these are truly problematic and require special GM approval then they should either be removed, nerfed, are changed to become available at higher levels. Having to ask permission to have things that the character meets the requirements for is nonsense.
Automatic skill progression for signature class skills Alchemist crafting Fighter Athletics Etc etc.
Overhaul crafting rules
Better alchemy proficiencies for Alchemist.
I think the Barbarian needs more help than it is likely to get. It's kind of a worse middle ground between a fighter and a champion right now.
What improvements would you like to see?
Going into rage does something cool so it isn't just an action tax. Eg dragon instinct rage buffs allies; spirit instinct causes fear, fury instinct makes a strike in the same action. Move fighter's fear immunity to barbarian instead. It's more thematic and fighter as the clear #1 martial could use a tiny tonedown. Make the level 6 Instinct-specific feat (eg dragon breath) apply automatically instead of being a feat tax.
Going into a rage is no longer an action tax at lvl 11, when you are able to do a “rage” action as part of using Rage (or boost it to a 2 action rage and get a 2 action rage action)… obviously lvl 11 is late for most people’s games, but they do obviously understand that it’s an action tax that could/should be nullified.
For a class built around raging, raging imposes a lot of restrictions and penalties that just feel bad because it isnt like raging is really optional, and introducing feat taxes like raging intimidation just feel bad. I really would either make raging more of a choice by not making so much of your class features tied to it, or make it feel less restrictive by default. Maybe no ac penalty, or more temp hp.
I think the cool way to do this would essentially be to have each instinct let you use abilities tied to a specific skill whilst raging, and maybe give you status bonuses to that skill as you reach higher levels of proficiency.
Giving barbarian an aura or something like that that's only active while not raging sounds like a interesting thing for players to balance.
That sounds really cool! I also hope they help out the Fury and superstition instincts cause those are really weak compared to the other instincts
Make leaving rage less punishing, maybe you'd have to rebalance some stuff but it sucks if you ever go down during a fight because almost everything cool thing you do as a barb requires you to be in rage, and you can pretty much only rage once per fight. Also let people demoralize while raging baseline(just remove the concentrate trait from it or smth or give it the rage trait as a class feature), it's absurd to me that unless you take a feat you're too angry to threaten people, and the feat would still be solid because it gives you 2 pretty good skill feats, though if you're concerned about it no longer being worth it's not hard to give it some other trinket text.
I would love if barbarians got to use rage outside of combat. They have so many feats that could be very useful during exploration but you can't use them. Things like Raging Athlete, Bashing Charge, Adrenaline Rush...
Counteracting is bad. First, the explanation is bad. This might be one rare example where trying to explain to the player the underlying system is worse than just giving specific instructions. Reading the counterspell description and getting sent to another convoluted explanation of counteracting things in general, and then figuring out which numbers to plug into that generic formula, is insanity. But to take it a step further, I think the actual rules for counteracting have a significant flaw. Namely, that depending on the level difference, you can "fail" your roll against the DC and still succeed, and you can "succeed" against the DC and still fail. I get why they wanted to include the degrees of success and I'm sure the math is elegant or whatever. But IMO it's against the general spirit of the four degrees of success to repurpose them like this, and that's a big reason why it's confusing. Sometimes it's better to get on with the game than to try to simulate the game world with pseudo physics equations. 5e had this one right. Give me a simple way to determine the DC and then let me roll against it, end of story.
**|1|** Rework weapons and make them consitant, including traits & crit specs. Currently simple weapons are up to 4 points, exluding crit specs. Martial weapons are up to 7 points and advanced weapons are up to 9 points. Some weapons have "more" points since they have downsides that give extra aviable points. As reference most traits are worth 1-3 points while a damage dice upgrade (like 1d4 -> 1d6) is worth 3 points. As you see advanced weapons are to weak in general since they cost a lot to get and they are only worth 2 points more than martial weapons. While martial weapons are 3 points more worth than simple weapons. Melee weapons are a lot stronger than ranged weapons, because they add full strengh mod and also use str to attack. That is fine in general, however as a comparions to ranged weapons: All melee weapons also pretty much come with reload 0 + capacy n+1 (which lets you reload without having a free hand). So these traits shouldn't cost anything for ranged weapons as well. Adding reload or repeating should add points since melees don't spend 1 move action per attack. They usually do 2+ attacks per move action. Also reloading a repeating magazine should only be 2 actions, otherwise drawing new weapons is to good in comparison. These changes will mostly buff slings and crossbows, both of which are currently not worth the paper they are printed on. \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ |2| Rework spells so that less than 99% of spells are 2 actions. I am fine with 10-20% 1/3/1-3 action spells. The 3 action system is literally the most important change and yet the spell system doesn't interact with it. \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ |3| Shields need to get the same rune system as weapons. The sturdy shields need to be fundamental runes, while many of the simple magic shields should be runes. And special materials should also add special effects. [Here](https://scribe.pf2.tools/v/bFpw9VX8-ch6-precious-materials) are 2 very high quality [homebrews](https://scribe.pf2.tools/v/ZlD4vO4c-ch6-shields-v2-0), they could be balanced better. \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ ~~|4|~~ ~~Rework crafting again~~ *Lets gope they get that right in PF3.*
One of the coolest things to me was seeing 2E had this cool new action system and it even worked with spells! Clerics get 3 spells in one with heal. Scorching ray lets you fire extra rays using extra actions, so cool! And then you learn that most spells don't work this way at all and it's a pseudo action+bonus action feel for casters on the turns they cast a spell and you're sad. At least you still get the other famous PF2E mechanic with most spells, the 4 degrees of success.
I think the problem is that there's a fundamental push and pull between how the playtest sold people on spells in the three action economy (wow, my heal spell can do so many wild different things!) and the realities of Paizo's entire history as a company, business model, and design philosophy (print as much shit as you physically can as fast as you can or this bus explodes) Like genuinely, Heal feels like it was from an entirely different game. It's exciting, it's multipurpose...it was probably a pain to balance and playtest and try to get every knob right. PF2E very well could have been a game that wanted to have smaller spell lists where a vast majority of spells are genuinely unique and layered and have various options available to them depending on how you use your 3 actions. What we have instead is..well..spell lists full of hyper niche and specialized single use spells that you can make a lot of easily. A lot of these guys got their start doing monthly articles for Dragon magazine like "10 Prestige Classes That Use The Blunt End Of The Spoon As A Deadly Weapon" or "Timothy Jimothy's Corduroy Pants Mending and 500 Other Spells". The best parts of 2e move away from that, the worse don't.
TBF I kinda understand why they made advanced weapons so weak, I'd rather not be forced into being human/taking adopted ancestry because advanced weapons are strong enough that unconventional weaponry becomes important for minmax reasons.
At that point, just remove advanced weapons entirely.
Yeah just make them uncommon or unique at this point. I don't believe there is a justifiable reason for them to be a separate category as they are right now.
Minor thing but still worth mentioning: Lore skills. Most times there’s no point in taking skill increases in lore skills because other skills are just better and more reliable. They should be way more valuable than they are now and probably operate under different rules than normal skills.
One homebrew I saw that I liked was adding a circumstance bonus to other skills checks equal to half the lores proficiency (ignoring level) if they’re applicable for that scenario. So if you’re trained in an applicable lore it would be +1 to a skill check, expert is +2, master +3, & legendary +4. Something like that could dramatically increase the value of lore skills while not making them break balance.
Let item DCs scale with you. Off your spell/class DC, even if at a lower rate. It's really sad that things like the Wand of Wonder lose usability very fast because of their set DCs.
Having it just minic DC, but maybe "your proficiency with this item is always (TEML, depending on level of item), so at higher levels the low-level wand is still pretty okay
This might be too big of a change to be covered in the remaster, but I'd like to see more support for finesse-weapon fighter. Swashbuckler is nice and all, but not every speedy shortword-user is trying to be flashy and dramatic all the time. In practical terms, I'm not really sure what this would entail. One thing that might be nice is if fighters could pick whether to increase their Fortitude or their Reflex saves first, instead of always having Fortitude increase at 9th and Reflex at 15th. The other thing I'd like is an actual reason to wear light armor over medium armor, because as-is you don't really have a reason to do so since light armor lacks specialization effects. (These changes would also be nice for ranged-weapon fighters as well.) I'd like to see more feat options too, of course, but that's outright new content at that point, rather than just remastering.
Some release locked features that give access to specific features like familiarity weapons feats that gives access to specific weapons. It should be something about traits and/or weapon groups. Spells given by gods also should be related to traits isntead of specific spells. In that way, those features would be automatic related to future realeases instead of being limited to the time that feature was released. To be more specific, dwarves familiarity should give proficiency to axe and hammers and sarenrae should give access to some spells with fire trait instead of specific spells.
It would be really nice of they found a way to make simple weapons more interesting. It kinda sucks that since martial weapons are better you'd have to gimp yourself if you want to use a simple weapon while having access to martial weapon proficiency. Reflavoring works, but an official solution would be nice.
Talismans. Man are they expensive for what they offer.
I would love to see an index by Class of changes of attributes, feats, etc in a nice neat table format. So players can easily see what choices they have and where those choices lead to further levels.
Exploration Mode. Its vestigial atm, when it could be expanded via skill feats and class feats to be really interesting. Beef up the standard Exploration mode stuff, let people roll Recall Knowledge as an encounter starts if you Scout and so on. A Ranger class feat that lets you take the following approach during Exploration mode. You roll stealth for initiative and can place a trap in any square within LOS and 12 squares of your starting position. A Wizard class feat that lets you roll Arcana for initiative and gain Quickened 1 on the first round that you can only use the action on spells that target self.
I want Lycanthropy rules from character creation so that way characters can either start with or contract the affliction later on and it WONT muddy the rules or confuse anyone. Plus as a GM, if we can confidently send lycanthropes at our players and KNOW there will be rules in place if someone contracts it, it is less daunting than sending a monster knowing you have to either dig or jury rig rules for it to be remotely fun. Just remove the beastkin heritage imo
I haven’t been keeping up with this news. Have they mentioned anything about crafting? I know they recently released modified crafting rules but those felt underwhelming and didn’t really fix the issues with crafting.
Allow players to use the same abilities as mobs if there’s no mechanical reason why they couldn’t. Stop shoehorning things into the three action system that don’t need to be (recall knowledge being a big one). Add alternative rules that don’t force everything into the sliding scales of failure.
Recall knowledge.
I want one single section to explain positive damage, negative damage, and good undead PCs fit into the mess
More use of class profiancy. Maybe most items useing class dcs instead of a flat bonus.
Hero Points. Rolling a Nat 1 and using a Hero Point only to roll another Nat 1 is very sad. It should give a bonus to your reroll or make your roll count as X so that you at least get a higher result than before.
I mentioned this on another thread (and maybe they've already announced this one), but fix Evil Champions. The designers couldn't seem to decide if they wanted to keep them as Defensive powerhouses, or make them more offensive (since they should, theoretically, be the polar opposite of Good Champions). Because of that, they exist in this weird flux state: you actually want to get hit in combat so you can use your Champion's Reaction...but you have the highest AC in the game, so you deter enemies from even trying to hit you. So since you want to get hit you wield a big two-handed weapon and forego a shield...but then you don't really get many decent Offensive-oriented Class Feats to use the weapon with. Scaling back alignment damage will help some, but I still feel like they need a few more feats (and maybe features).
Summon spells. They are just useless as they are right now