Pathfinder Is Still Bad

[GâtFromKI]

Admittedly my skimming of the Paizo boards is pretty shallow, but every time I do, I see people holding up melee types as 'perfectly fine and viable characters.' And the people who argue with this viewpoint are shouted down as overly negative, including by SKR and other 'designers.'

Amusingly, they are shouted down because "they only consider some narrow circumstances" and "they only consider the combat portion of the game".

Because you know, considering everything else than damages is "considering some narrow circumstances". I mean, fuck, the magus is far from being the best class in the game, but he's able to fly, teleport, move and full attack... And still, paizils explain that in non-narrow circumstances, the magus is in par with the figther because the latter deals marginally more damages if he's able to go into melee.

How much damage does the Brawler need to deal in order to keep up by say level 10?

A character who is only able to deal damage at short range must be able to one-turn any level-appropriate opponent; otherwise, it isn't worse the trouble to babysit him during the whole adventure.

[JonSetanta]

Admittedly my skimming of the Paizo boards is pretty shallow, but every time I do, I see people holding up melee types as 'perfectly fine and viable characters.' And the people who argue with this viewpoint are shouted down as overly negative, including by SKR and other 'designers.'

There are times such as being stuck in a box with a closet troll and an antimagic field that being a melee warrior is a good thing, but I'd assume everyone else did their best to avoid situations such as that.

[Cyberzombie]

There are times such as being stuck in a box with a closet troll and an antimagic field that being a melee warrior is a good thing, but I'd assume everyone else did their best to avoid situations such as that.

Even then you're not really in great shape. Without magic items, any kind of closet troll is going to destroy a fighter anyway.

The problem is that fighters are still almost as dependent on the magic power source as everyone else, they just don't get as big benefits from it.

[ishy]

The new arcanist:
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2qel1?Offic ... n-Arcanist

Lots of shitty blasts that you're supposed to ignore and some decent features like immediate action counterspell and increasing duration of a spell by 50% (quite nice if you do it multiple times for a Frank cheat).

[K]

The new arcanist:
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2qel1?Offic ... n-Arcanist

Wow. Not content to make the Arcanist more powerful and versatile than the Sorcerer and Wizard, Jason has decided to give it the Psionicist Problem by letting you convert low level spells for pool points to metamagic up all your high-level spells.

JB has now unlocked the Worst Designer Ever achievement.

I don't even feel the need to talk about the four other massive exploits.

[icyshadowlord]

Should we be surprised about that, K ?

[Voss]

I was going to point out that it had a bit of a MAD problem, but in all honesty it doesn't, since the charisma dependent exploits suck in comparison to the 'be awesome' exploits.

The lower spells per day and spell progression speedbump kind of suck, but being able to push DCs up to absurd levels and jink about with counterspells (though the speedbump is a problem for that) and metamagic makes up for that. As does farming crappy second level spell wands.

Yet somehow in all this he didn't even address the big problem: there is still no flavor to this class. It is still a giant bag of even more better spellcaster mechanics.

[ishy]

Jason has decided to give it the Psionicist Problem by letting you convert low level spells for pool points to metamagic up all your high-level spells.

Unless you're talking about the lvl 20 ability (haven't read that one), if you use the metamixing ability, the spell level is increased as normal, the only benefit is that the casting time is not increased to a full round action.

[Mask_De_H]

Jason has decided to give it the Psionicist Problem by letting you convert low level spells for pool points to metamagic up all your high-level spells.

Unless you're talking about the lvl 20 ability (haven't read that one), if you use the metamixing ability, the spell level is increased as normal, the only benefit is that the casting time is not increased to a full round action.

The level 20 ability allows you to get bonuses for doing that, but you can still burn low level slots for the points to Metamix a non-metamagic'd spell at normal speed instead. If you finagle the Arcane Bloodline Heritage's Metamagic Adept ability onto an Arcanist, shit just gets dumb.

[ishy]

Yeah, but you can just prepare them with metamagic without a cast time increase or just suffer not having a move action sometimes as well. Don't see that as broken in anyway.
Metamagic is only really good if you can find a way to not pay the spell level increase, though dazing spell can be really nice.

[Voss]

Not my intent to do cross forum posts, but this seemed significant of the Paizo process for pathfinder.

We would really like to avoid creating a new spell list for any of these classes, which is why none of them have unique spell lists (they all use the spell list of another class). Every time we create a new class spell list, we have to (1) spend a lot of lines in the book re-listing all of the existing spells that should be on that list, and (2) add to the amount of text in a spell stat block to call out which classes the spell belongs to.

Spells are a vital portion of any class, so obviously the best thing to do is simply slap them with an existing spell list. Because fuck theme, balance, power, or any other consideration. It would take effort! Or thought! Or at least copypasta for specific items. A shaman is a oracle/witch hybrid and not a druid hybrid, so why would a shaman have any use for nature themed spells?
So yeah, the bloodrager, shaman, inquisitive and so on spell lists are that way because they didn't want to bother, as it wasn't important.

[Seerow]

Is it that much worse than the alternative of stuff like Wu-Jen, Hexblades, Duskblades, etc, never getting access to new spells ever because the designers couldn't be bothered to reference them in later books?

[virgil]

Couldn't they just do stuff like Frank & K have done with some of the classes; all Bard spells of the Necromancy school, all spells with the Scrying subschool, spells with gold as a material component, etc?

Hell, one awesome thing they could've done from the very beginning is to have applied more descriptors & subschools to the core spells. You could then create spell lists for any class without having to rewrite everything. It would even keep backwards compatibility.

[Voss]

Hell, one awesome thing they could've done from the very beginning is to have applied more descriptors & subschools to the core spells. You could then create spell lists for any class without having to rewrite everything. It would even keep backwards compatibility.

I think thats my issue with it*. They've got this really broad (and useless) classification scheme that doesn't actually filter anything (and has all sorts of crossovers anyway). It would be fairly easily (especially given their online presence for material) to divide things into subschools and/or spheres and divvy stuff out in a sensible and coherent manner. But it would take time and effort, so, fuck it. But the idea that the think of, say, protection from evil as a cleric spell and not part of a functional category of spells is really significant. It really shows off the blinders on their design process.

*well, and they're wildly inconsistent about this, which is absolutely maddening. The hunter gets druid spells but not ranger spells, which include all the weird ass archery bullshit spells that would actually make sense for a class called the fucking hunter. But the magus has its own damned spell list (which is used by the bloodrager for... reasons**), and summoner, and even the fucking anti-paladin.

**yeah, the barbarian/sorcerer uses a different class spell list (one that isn't the sorcerer's), but the oracle/witch (the later of which has its own damn custom list) shouldn't use the druid, witch or custom lists because the oracle uses cleric. Because apparently this shithole goes really deep and is actually worse than I first thought.

[andreww]

If you finagle the Arcane Bloodline Heritage's Metamagic Adept ability onto an Arcanist, shit just gets dumb.

This is a very stupid thing to do. It involves sinking 3 feats (Skill Focus, Eldritch Heritage, Improved Eldritch Heritage) and a chunk of stat build points (Cha15 instead of 7) to do something for free a small handful of times per day that you can get for 1 exploit and a single pool point.

Why would you do that to yourself?

I suppose you also get a familiar out of it which isn't that bad but is probably still just a +4 initiative modifier.

[Mask_De_H]

If you finagle the Arcane Bloodline Heritage's Metamagic Adept ability onto an Arcanist, shit just gets dumb.

This is a very stupid thing to do. It involves sinking 3 feats (Skill Focus, Eldritch Heritage, Improved Eldritch Heritage) and a chunk of stat build points (Cha15 instead of 7) to do something for free a small handful of times per day that you can get for 1 exploit and a single pool point.

Why would you do that to yourself?

I suppose you also get a familiar out of it which isn't that bad but is probably still just a +4 initiative modifier.

Because doing that a few times a day on top of that exploit, plus the DC bonus you get and the extra spontaneous spell/magic item (the fuck are you taking a familiar for) are worth the three sunk feats when there's really fuck-all else you need as a PF caster. And why aren't you dumping Strength?

[andreww]

Because doing that a few times a day on top of that exploit, plus the DC bonus you get and the extra spontaneous spell/magic item (the fuck are you taking a familiar for) are worth the three sunk feats when there's really fuck-all else you need as a PF caster. And why aren't you dumping Strength?

You don't get the DC bonus as that is the Bloodline Arcana which Eldritch Heritage DOES NOT GRANT.

The familiar is the first level bloodline power and is therefore the thing you get with the base Eldritch Heritage feat.

Obviously you are dumping strength but buying a starting 18 with 20pb is expensive. Dumping Str and Cha to 7 allows 18, 14, 14, 11, 7, 7. Having to have Cha 13 screws all that up.

You don't get any extra spontaneous spells unless you invest even further in picking up Greater Eldritch Heritage which requires 17 Cha and level 17 and you probably want School Power with that anyway.

So you are still sinking 3 feats and a load of point buy into getting an ability which you already have.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Pathfinder actually made familiars a pretty nice class feature to have (or rather, combo off of) beyond just the cynical bonus.

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-cl ... -archetype
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/general-f ... -item-slot
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/general-f ... -metamagic


But anyway, I'm with andreww. Unless you're playing a 25-point game or you're willing to play a blaster wizard with a pre-racial bonus 16 in intelligence, you just don't have the stats. Then again, the few Pathfinder games in which I played assumed 25-point buy. One of the few times in which 3E D&D->PF confusion can work for you.

Remember: the reason why the cleric archer is so good in most games is that you can make it work for you even with skimpy stats. The melee cleric can lay down a bigger beatdown in a lot of contexts (though that's because most DMs loathe to start combat at further than 1 round in closing the distance gap), but isn't really playable in a lot of games. Hell, 3.5E D&D made the cleric pretty much a single-stat class.

[Mask_De_H]

Totally forgot Eldritch Heritage didn't grant the bloodline arcana (and Improved Eldritch Heritage doesn't come online until 11th level), but taking the bonded item over the familiar gets you an extra wildcard spell, which is useful at lower levels. By the time you qualify for what I was talking about, you could bullshit your way to the right Cha if you went 16 int pre-racial, but it's not worth it.

Statement retracted.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Familiars can be nice when you have spell selection or skill ranks that let them take meaningful actions. Familiar-channeled Burning Gaze makes a nice Dazing Spell candidate. I really like using an Arbiter to effectively double party hit points against nonchaotic enemies. And having a pocket UMDer is nice if the party carries wands.

[K]

Mmmm, I guess I misread the Metamixing power.

Now I wonder if JB gets to keep his Worse Designer Ever achievement based just on the overpowered casting method, the infinite arcane points problem, the duration problem, the broken capstone power, and the minor problems with half of the exploits?

[andreww]

One interesting question might be whether or not the Arcanist can benefit from Expanded Arcana. Their spells entry says that anything which adds to their spells known instead adds to their number prepared. Expanded Arcana requires you to have a limited number of spells known.

If you can make use of it then adding two extra prepared spells given their limited list is probably a good deal, especially with retraining to keep them level appropriate.

[DragonChild]

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/combat-fe ... bat-goblin

This looks familiar.

[ubernoob]

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/combat-fe ... bat-goblin

This looks familiar.

Power Slide (Ex): If a 13th level Thief Acrobat takes damage from an attack, she may allow herself to be flung backwards, thereby lessening the impact. She may make a Balance check with a DC equal to the damage inflicted and if she succeeds, she suffers only half damage. This is a skill check, not a Saving Throw, so abilities such as Evasion do not apply. She is moved away from the source of damage by 5' for every 5 points of damage (or part there of) negated in this way. If there is not enough space for her to move, she suffers a d6 of damage for each square not moved. If she passes through an occupied square, the Thief Acrobat would have to make a tumble check to avoid attacks of opportunity.

Benefit: If you are struck by a melee weapon you can try to convert some or all of that damage into movement that sends you off in an uncontrolled bouncing roll. To do so, you must make an Acrobatics check (DC = 5 + the damage dealt from the attack) as an immediate action. If you succeed in this check, you take no damage from the actual attack but instead convert that damage into movement with each point equating to 1 foot of movement.

For example, if you would have taken 6 points of damage, you would convert that into 6 feet of movement. You immediately move in a straight line in a direction of your choice this number of feet (rounded up to the nearest 5-foot-square), halting if you reach a distance equal to your actual speed. If this movement would make you strike an object or creature of your size or larger, the movement immediately ends, you take 1d4 points of damage, and fall prone in that square. This involuntary movement provokes attacks of opportunity normally if you move through threatened squares, but does not provoke an attack of opportunity from the creature that struck you in the first place.

You are staggered for 1 round after you attempt to use this feat, whether or not you succeed.

Similar, but then again this is like Awesome Blow. Hitting someone so hard that they fly backwards is a common trope since visual storytelling began. Whether you put the ability on the attacker or the defender to represent that is a matter of taste.

[RobbyPants]

Similar, but then again this is like Awesome Blow. Hitting someone so hard that they fly backwards is a common trope since visual storytelling began. Whether you put the ability on the attacker or the defender to represent that is a matter of taste.

Not really. While it may look the same to a passive observer, Awesome Blow is an ability that gets added to an attack to simulate the big effect of the damage. Power Slide is an ability that is used defensively both to reduce the damage and to get out of melee reach. You don't even have to be hit hard for Power Slide to be useful. If anything, you can use it to break a full-attack sequence of many smaller attacks.