Pathfinder Is Still Bad

[GâtFromKI]

You're right.

I guess potion of invisibility don't exist anymore - they announced somewhere they don't want potion to be simple spell, and i can't see a single reason for the vanishing coin to exist if you can drink a potion instead.

[GâtFromKI]

Someone on the messageboard has the same problem as me with the coin, and there's an answer from a designer :

On the Cloak "freebie" Invisibility activation "if you were sneaking",
is that even useful in the non-advanced(4th level/greater invis) version?
You were already sneaking, so you effectively have invisibility anyways.
Since it's not great invis, it will break at first attack anyways, so what does it actually add?
Does basic Invisibility work differently now re: attack cancelation?

Do you mean the coin?

There are a lot of times that you might be sneaking around but still want invisibility. For instance, if you are noticed (probably the #1 reason), or if the battle includes regions where you would otherwise be exposed if you entered them.

That's amazing.

So you can use use Stealth for init even when you're noticed, ie when you failed at being stealthy. I can't understand how the initiative works; I guess you roll your highest skill and call it a day. A wizard can probably say "I was thinking about basketweaving" at the start of a fight and use Lore (basketweaving) for init - this isn't more stupid than the rogue using Stealth because he failed at Stealth.

And now, I learn a battlemap may include "regions where you would otherwise be exposed if you entered them" even if you're a "master" in Stealth. I guess the "master" of stealth can't be stealthy if the light is on. Behold the great stealth master! Open the light and you'll see him immediately with no roll!

... The first item presented in the preview (the cloak of elvenkind) is a level 10 item offering a passive bonus of +3 Stealth - as much as the "legendary" skill bonus, more than the "master" skill bonus. And invisibility X/day on top of that - a level 2 spell more efficient than the "mastery" of Stealth. Why should anyone bother about their overly complicated skill system that accomplishes nothing when a random peon with a magic item can do more?

[Slade]

So Rangers have even better dual wielding than any others: they lower additional attacks vs their hunt target by 1 (stacks with agile).

So, they will likely crit more often than the others even Fighters. Not sure, why I would want to be a Fighter now in PF 2.
But Rangers no have spells by default. They are trying that "Trapper" archetype as a class feats.
Snares seem okay, but cost money to place down...

Rangers seems a good 1st level dip for any martial class.

[GâtFromKI]

So Rangers have even better dual wielding than any others: they lower additional attacks vs their hunt target by 1 (stacks with agile).

From what i've heard, the specificity of dual wielding is to ignore the multi-attack penalty on the second attack (... in other words, for two action you make two attacks with no penalty). And yet, they are explaining there is synergy in reducing a penalty you're ignoring.

Even if what I've heard is false, reducing the multi-attack penalty isn't more efficient with dual wielding than with with two-handed weapons.

[GâtFromKI]

Oh, and rangers have a feat to gain +1 on one unique attack roll (the opponent is immune after the first attack) if he roll a critical success on his lore check to identify the monster.

And the timing for this feat is strange : you have to set the monster as you prey beforehand. Making it your prey cost one action and you have to see or hear the monster. So :
1/ You see something.
2/ You quickly close your eyes and hears, otherwise you may accidentally identify the monster.
3/ You roll init and wait for your turn.
4/ You quickly open your eyes and make the thing you've barely seen your prey.
5/ you look at the monster, roll your Lore check and hope for a critical success.

... Also, making the monster your prey gives a bonus at tracking. But you have to see it or hear it beforehand. So:
1/ Some monster capture the mayor's daughter or something.
2/ You find its tracks and follow it.
3/ You find the monster and combat music starts.
4/ You define it as your prey. Now you have a bonus to track it !

[Ice9]

I was expecting a lot of these feats to be crap, as many of the PF1 feats are, but "+1 to a single attack roll on a critical success" is even more amazingly crap than I was expecting. Even if you can give it to your party, that's still pretty lousy.

[Axebird]

It's been implied that using "Recall Knowledge" takes an action, too, which is just... amazing, really. The solution to monster knowledge being so vaguely defined people just peek at the bestiary when the GM isn't looking is apparently to make it even harder to use.

[GâtFromKI]

I was expecting a lot of these feats to be crap, as many of the PF1 feats are, but "+1 to a single attack roll on a critical success" is even more amazingly crap than I was expecting.

You shouldn't expect anything about Pathfinder. Paizo seems to be in limbo mode, going lower every preview.

[tussock]

Read through the whole lot again. So as I understand it ...

3 actions per turn. To "simplify" the game so you move and then hit twice, or move-hit-move, and it covers a lot of 3e ground.

But three attacks is to much at low level so follow up attacks are at -5 and -10. Unless you're a monster with Claw/Claw/Bite and then arbitrarium steps in. Which math-wise increases the variance of results in combat for players, but not monsters.

Real spells take 2-3 actions, while shit ones take 1 action so you can also move and hit something.

Combined, this means one shit spell takes the same place of an attack at -10, or an average spell takes the -5 and -10 attacks, but leaves the full BAB one, which is obviously a bad deal for Fighters.

So Fighters get bonuses to follow up attacks in terms of to hit and damage mods and critical bla bla bla because of course it's pointlessly complicated, but maybe only if they hit (or critically hit) with the first one. And rangers get less penalties on follow up attacks. And special cases for everyone else that's actually supposed to fight, so maybe one of them will work by accident (and thus get nerfed).

Which with a +1 sword doing 2d8+Str, and a +3 sword doing 4d8+Str, and lots of bonus damage potential on top, that is collosal amounts of damage for Fighters, 40-50 in a round fairly common at low level, probably up around 200 at high level if I'm reading it right, looks like two attacks per action comes in later, and it's mega-important how big your plus is on your sword.

Damage spells are ... wait for it, nerfed. Like, no standard damage progression, you want more dice, you burn actions (instead of zapping a wand and some other "more spells pls" action) and upgrade the spell level. Magic Missile in a 9th level slot does 50 damage. While fucking Ogres have 60 hit points.
Note that because you do max damage with three actions, damage casters can't even move, let alone swing a sword!

I'm gunna take a moment to be offended that they use "irreligious" as the word for creatures that are repelled by holy symbols. It's cool it's not just zombies, but come on, don't be like that. I'm genuinely not afraid or impressed by your "I'm the real victim here" symbol. Like, are they actually gunna ban atheist characters?

--

And there's just a huge bunch of D&D stuff they're struggling hard to fit into the three action paradigm, like things you do outside of combat for impending combat is obviously a clusterfuck, because it's all an action and you only get those after initiative. Then classic six armed plus tail monsters don't even work at all, they just use arbitrarium-made actions (or 2-3 actions ?) to allow the use of any of it.

Which implies that creative use of bits and pieces won't work well, there's no underlying system to fall back on for things that don't have an explicit rule, so like 4e, if a Marilish picks up a club the game kinda divides by zero and fails to exit gracefully.

--

And in general, if damage spells are useless, which they appear to be, then either spellcasters are useless, or all the damage classes are. There's very little room for compromise there. It may well be spellcasters are useless this time around and that one more beatstick solves all problems.

[Wiseman]

Are there still save vs. lose spells?

[GâtFromKI]

I'm gunna take a moment to be offended that they use "irreligious" as the word for creatures that are repelled by holy symbols.

Redcaps are afraid by holy symbol, but only if you use an interact action to brandish it. If you brandish your holy symbol to channel energy or to cast a spell, they aren't afraid. Because something.

Are there still save vs. lose spells?

The save pattern for SoL is : critical succes you're not affected at all, success you suffer a small debuff, failure you suffer a heavy debuff or you're out of the fight for 1 or 2 round, critical failure you lose.

Maybe this is a part of the new system that is better than 3.5. More probably they made a shitty implementation of the idea and it doesn't work.

[Wiseman]

It sounds like a good idea, but knowing pathfinder...

[tussock]

The thing with everything being a critical success, which can seemingly chain into mega damage or just fucking kills stuff for a spell, if you hit by ten, and there being many things that provide you with attack bonuses, well, obviously crit fishing will be a thing.

Maybe it'll be the only thing, or maybe it'll be a side show. We shall see.

I did things with saves for a while in a campaign where save by ten was nullification instead of reduced effect. It's one of those ideas that seems so elegant and then it turns out you're asking people to compare more numbers every time an already complex event happens.

I decided after that, at some point, that if I wanted 3 outcomes, there'd be 2 dice rolled. It's just better, don't even have to roll the 2nd one in the majority of cases if it's structured right.

Plenty of room in a D&D clone to have spells with an attack roll and a saving throw, for instance, as a way of having null outcome, weak outcome, and strong outcome, and no one's having to do multiple comparison operations against number and number+10, it's more interactive, feels fairer, it's just better.

[Slade]

So Sorcerers can be any class list now based on bloodline.

They know 3 1st spells at 1st (1 bloodline, 2 choice) and have same spells/day as Wizards. Only benefit is no preparing choices. No stunted growth for casting now. Sorcerers learned 2nd level spells at 3rd.

Also, They can heighten a spell when they want (to highest possible) 1/day. Basically still using a 1st level slot, it gains effect of 2nd level spell if 3rd level caster.

Unsure how it will play in practice but I like them I think.

[GâtFromKI]

Real spells take 2-3 actions, while shit ones take 1 action so you can also move and hit something.

There's a preview of Kyra (the cleric) on ENworld. So Bless takes 2 actions. For a +1 to hit in an area. If there is a "aid another" action, it's probably more efficient than Bless.

Hence shit spells takes 2 action. As usual, Paizo makes a shitty implementation of a good idea.

Btw, Kyra is using a scimitar, which gives bonus when she attacks twice (+1 to hit and to damage on the second attack). Because obviously, since her main class feature (spells) prevents her from attacking twice, she wants a weapon with special abilities when she attacks twice.

[Axebird]

They've concocted a system where tiny modifiers to hit or saves can make a massive difference. The swing between hitting someone on a 10 and hitting the same target on a 7 is like +50% average damage output. So bonuses from buffs have to be bullshit small or they'll break things, but that also makes them kinda lame and the average player only notices that their abilities have smaller numbers now. It's really weird.

[OgreBattle]

This game they're making sounds like they read Fate Core, then did everything Fate had removed as fiddly waste.

[Mask_De_H]

This game they're making sounds like they read Fate Core, then did everything Fate had removed as fiddly waste.

Looking at Cypher and the 2nd ed CoFD system (and Genesys, to a lesser extent), "Fate Core, but with all the fiddly bullshit put back in" was a life choice for several elfgames in the 2010s.

[tussock]

Hence shit spells takes 2 action. As usual, Paizo makes a shitty implementation of a good idea.

Oh, sorry, right, I had assumed if one was to make VSM the labels for how long a spell took to cast, you'd obviously just make the crap ones V-only so people could use them, instead of just blindly copying over the old VSM labels from systems that used those labels as fluff.

But yeah, Paizo, there's no underlying rules for N natural attacks, or N independent brains, or anything, it's just throwing random shit and the wall of new action costs and not even pretending they can test that to find problems, let alone solve any of them.

[OPG]

I just came here to say that Pathfinder combat is boring as shit. I'm playing a tweaked Kingmaker campaign with some dudes and even though I enjoy the empire building (and even some of the fiddly resource/item management!), whenever it's time to roll initiative it's hard for me to stay awake.

[saithorthepyro]

Does anyone have links about how much the first pathfinder playtest was trying its best not to be an actual playtest? I’ve been tryin to find evidence of what Frank and others have said about it but have been unable to find anything.

[Username17]

Does anyone have links about how much the first pathfinder playtest was trying its best not to be an actual playtest? I’ve been tryin to find evidence of what Frank and others have said about it but have been unable to find anything.

The Pathfinder message boards were subjected to a series of rolling purges that memory holed discussion from the playtest period. Ostensibly it was to prevent version crosstalk - where new versions would institute new subforums with old version subforums being locked and then later erased - with the mods choosing a certain number of threads to migrate to the new subforums each time. In practice this was a rotating thread culling, where everything critical was left in the locked dungeons to then be quietly executed when it was convenient to do so. The migrated threads were universally booster threads, because fucking obviously.

I would be genuinely surprised if any of the 2008 threads that K and I started were archived on their system. Though I suppose it's possible that someone more skilled with the Wayback machine than I am could some of it in some backup archive elsewhere.

-Username17

[saithorthepyro]

Your thread on different playtest methods, along with using the Rogue Flask against some different CR encounters is still up. Unfortunately Buhlman is fairly reasonably in it, so it’s provided poor evidence for trying to convince others of Paizos playtest problems, since they want direct sources.

[GreatGreyShrike]

The pathfinder forums appear to be garbage for navigation; I don't know why. That said, I found the following via google:

List of K's Posts on the Paizo forums

List of Frank's Posts on the Paizo forums

You can find from these posts, a number of threads that Frank and K made at the time, and others they participated in.

These might be incomplete and have some deleted. But it does have some extremely harshly critical threads preserved, including e.g. New Fighter: Do Not Want!, found near the top of this forum. Based on this, I don't think that Paizo is competently trying to make their playtest look better by pruning out the existence of criticism; instead, I think they are just very very incompetent at building a navigable website.

[Whipstitch]

I like how the one dude immediately dismisses Frank's Fighter criticism a high level problem when Frank was already critiquing the game as if it were only 10 levels long.