The Gaming Den

So, anyone read the Damnation feats?

So, in exchange for your immortal soul, you can take these feats.
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/damnation-feats

Signing a bargain with a dark power and agreeing to be damned. The more of them you have, the harder it is to bring you back from the dead -- i.e., if you have two, Raise Dead no longer works, at the third, Resurrection no longer works, and so forth. The book gives four feat chains of four feats each. Usually the first feat is pretty feeble, but then they get better.

The best feats are Soulless Gaze, Maleficium, and Fiendskin.
Mask of Virtue is only good when disguising alignment, but you can use Undetectable alignment (a 1st level spell) instead of your soul!

Soulless Gaze lets you with 2 feats: When you demoralize a creature
more than once using Intimidate, you can create stronger
fear conditions rather than increasing the duration of the
shaken condition.
4 feats: swift action, intimidate action.

Maleficium
One Damnation Feat: Add 1 to the DCs of all saving throws against spells with the evil descriptor that you cast.
Two Damnation Feats: When you apply a metamagic feat to a spell with the evil descriptor, that spell takes up a spell slot 1 level lower than normal (to a minimum of 1 level above the spell's actual level).

Fiendskin: resistance to an energy type later becomes immune if take enough of the feats.

These seem to be the few scaling feats of Pathfinder.

So, much like the feats for Aberrant, Devil-Touched, etc? But yes, those seems to actually be full-on scaling rather than plain numerical upgrades. The perma-death flaw seems misguided, and the set definitely favors Charisma casters.

The problem as with all Pathfinder feats is that you don't really have the feat slots to spare for fun stuff like this unless you are a full caster. I mean, I can totally see me taking a few damnation feats íf I'm playing a Diviner/Diabolist-Wizard, but as a Magus? Barbarian? Forget it.

Soulless Gaze would be quite good for a Barbarian, actually. You take that, Fiendskin, and the Cornugan Smash feat. Maybe the rage power that lets you Intimidate as a move-action also.

Now if you hit someone with three attacks (by being Hasted at 6th level, for instance), they go straight to Panicked. Even at low levels, you can hit someone for Shaken and then move-action Intimidate for Frightened. And if you also took Intimidating Prowess, your Intimidate check is enormous and you auto-succeed on it.

Or on a Rogue Alchemist who's using Enforcer + Sap Master + Merciful firearms. Even faster intimidation because you're either TWFing or using double-barreled guns (or both).

Double-barreled ain't that great post errata.

Soulless Gaze 2 opens up quite a bit of playspace at low levels in every PF campaign ever, letting all those "use intimidate to shake shake shake senora" abilities actually do something beyond inflicting a minor debuff.

Seeing as resurrection is not that much of a possibility at low levels anyway, it's not such a problem.

I imagine that 90% of the use Damnation feats will see will be Soulless Gaze + Skin or Maleficium+Skin, but whatever.

Well, given that they're scaling feats that scale to the number of feats of the same type you have, there is a certain encouragement to take all four. Even the fighter will consider taking Maleficium because the actual benefit is gives is not tiny boosts to your spellcasting, but another energy immunity, the ability to demoralize as a swift action, and immediate knowledge of any attempt to discern his alignment; and it doesn't actually require him to have any spell casting.

I think it's cute that they let your character barter away their revolving door into the afterlife, but the way they've got it rigged there is singularly degenerate. It's not that the feat's downsides are going to apply inconsistently, or even that the feats need a downside. The bar on resurrection elides a social contract, common at many tables, to accept the penalties for character death and buy yourself back into life anyway. These feats are a permission-slip to Greyhawk yourself instead.

Instead of deactivating resurrection spells completely, they should have attached a caveat to them, that if you came back via insufficiently powerful means, that your demonic contractee would remain in possession of your soul. Your character would maintain their free will, but be at the mercy of painful compulsions to further an agenda that wasn't their own. It's an additional narrative lever, and I'm attracted to the idea that your character could adventure to find the means of breaking the contract (and keeping feats anyway).

How'd they nerf double-barreled? Just does double base damage, not double everything? Admittedly, that one was so insane, I'm not complaining about a nerf.

And yeah, come to think of it, the downside is more of a penalty to campaign continuity than to the individual player. Live fast, die young, make lots of new characters.

Ice9 wrote:And yeah, come to think of it, the downside is more of a penalty to campaign continuity than to the individual player. Live fast, die young, make lots of new characters.

who then also have full suites of Damnation feats

Im new here, and I just want to ask the general consensus about Pathefinder.

I know the game is poorly designed and led by hacks, but I always come back too it for some reason. I guess I enjoy 3rd party content it generates.

Does this make me a bad person?

Not really, no. I occasionally cannablize parts of pathfinder that don't suck completely for stuff to adapt into my games.

Also, could we get an actually straightforward reason for why pathfinder is bad? I don't feel like trawling through almost 300 pages to figure it out.

Frank laid it out pretty well here. http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=50083

The teal deer version is that PF is just 3.5 run through a worsening machine.

Shrieking Banshee wrote:Im new here, and I just want to ask the general consensus about Pathefinder.

I know the game is poorly designed and led by hacks, but I always come back too it for some reason. I guess I enjoy 3rd party content it generates.

As I understand it:
General consensus: it just like 3.5 but with 2 steps forward and 2 steps back. It made changes because...reasons (and ego). The new content has new dumb things added to the game.

Does this make me a bad person?

No, since you seem to recognise the flaws of the system.

Pathfinder is great as long as you ignore Paizo's classes and use the Dreamscarred Press ones instead.

I don't particularly like the Dreamscarred ones. I use other third party materials for my spellcasting to tone it down.

But of course I can't find decent martial arts replacements (And I don't care for Path of War).

Anybody got any ideas?

Shrieking Banshee wrote:I'm new here, and I just want to ask the general consensus about Pathfinder.

I know the game is poorly designed and led by hacks, but I always come back to it for some reason. I guess I enjoy 3rd party content it generates.

Does this make me a bad person?

I'd only say you're a bad person if you encourage people to play Pathfinder instead of playing 3.5e D&D, GURPS or other such games.

The new occult book is just, uggh. D8, no full BAB, 4 to 6 skill points a level, gimped quarter and 2/3 casting, fucking hell. It has a bunch of b.s. at every level and a trillion choices to make. Just a big dumpster dive.

Of course, they can't even retain fidelity to that sort of E6 but this one goes to 20 philosophy. There has to be d6 Intelligenced based full caster with prestige class quality stuff baked right in to shit on every other class in the book. It wouldn't be Casterfinder without the fullcaster fapfest. How in the world can they even print this gibberish and think it has a semblance of balance?

They are horrified of letting classes have open spell access.

Every Marine A Rifleman...Every new PF class a Monk or Bard or OP fullcaster master race.

Like look at the Mesmerist. Just look at that pile of book keeping and math juggling and resource management and a bazillion fiddly bits and all for what?Why would anybody play that over an actual full caster class like Beguiler, which was printed in 3.5's Player's Handbook II in the spring of 2006. The Mesmerist is a power and concept step backwards from what 3.5 did almost 10 years ago. Its crazy. Its a worse realization of a roguish trickster caster than a Tome Jester. Its also probably 20 times more complicated than a Tome Jester.

Occultist is inferior to Archivist, a 10 year old class from a 3.5 splatbook. Its fiddly bits out the wazoo for a big fat "meh" result.

Edit: Why would anybody play a Medium over a Nature's Fang Druid or an Oracle or a Shaman? Or even a Ranger or a Hunter or an Inquisitor with a Dire Wolf companion somehow? Feel the untapped, raw power of having Ranger style quarter casting that makes you pick Spells Known with two crappy saves and medium BAB and lower skills and an inferior skill list and no bonus feats while being encumbered with book keeping and roleplaying restrictions that are mechanically burdensome, too. Oooh, what a rush!

Yeah I have no idea what the fuck they're doing with this occult book. Every class in it is just a worse copy paste of something that already exists. Except the Kineticist I guess.

The medium is a worse binder with 4th level spells. Even worse is you can't even choose from your whole list. You gotta be in the right location for specific spirits. Why? Is unfettered access to your entire move list overpowered? Weird they don't give that restriction on real classes. Also those taboos get kinda fucky to the point of messing with your party. For example, the Archmage spirit MAKES you try to resist every single divine spell, even harmless. Hope you don't need heals. F-

Mesmerist: 6th level spellcaster trickster type with "trap card" effects. Also the ability to look so angry you hurt people's feelings. too much fucking paperwork for this shit honestly, I agree with insomniac here. D

Occultist: tl;dr. seriously so many fucking words for basically the essentia system all over. 6th level spells so your alright off but spending a daily pool of points to unlock power sets and then spending more points to use powers from said powerset is just byzantine. F

Psychic: 9th level spellcaster. Also you get limited points to be better because 9th level spells isn't enough. F for originally.

Spiritualist: A summoner. But instead of a weird spirit animal, you get a weird spirit spirit. Why does this exist? Couldn't this have been a summoner archetype? D

And Kineticist. The only class which is alright. Like its complete shit, but at least the idea is new. Like the idea of burn mechanics isnt new new, but its newish for a base pathfinder class. Unfortunately its so low powdered its going to struggle to punch at its own waste class unless you burn yourself to death doing it. D for power, C+ for originality. Blood mage types are kinda rare/don't exist in 3.5 or pathfinder off the top of my head, and I guess its about time. also has the last airbender vibe which is neat.

At this point I would ask why can't they just man up and make decent classes but I'd immediately have to stop myself and remember they probably cant.

Insomniac wrote: Why would anybody play a Medium over a Nature's Fang Druid or an Oracle or a Shaman? Or even a Ranger or a Hunter or an Inquisitor with a Dire Wolf companion somehow? Feel the untapped, raw power of having Ranger style quarter casting that makes you pick Spells Known with two crappy saves and medium BAB and lower skills and an inferior skill list and no bonus feats while being encumbered with book keeping and roleplaying restrictions that are mechanically burdensome, too. Oooh, what a rush!

Because people who are into pathfinder are idiots who love fluff and hate actual content.

If they do to the Core 8 or whatever (Wizard, Sorcerer, Cleric, Druid, Bard, Barbarian, Ranger, Paladin) what they did with this Occult stuff, yeesh.

Is this them trying out Pathfinder 2.0 concepts and being scared to have tolerable power and push new horizons in the game so they Nerfed it all into the ground or do they really think anybody should waste their time with this crap? The only one worth a glance is an Intelligence-based Arcane Full Caster which is just short hand for OP. I guess somebody could be bothered to learn all that weird crap or they could just play a Wizard, Witch, Arcanist or Sage archetype Sorcerer. Or a Psion from XPH or Dreamscarred Press. Whatever.

Whatever, ain't reading all that.

The occult classes are needlessly overcomplicated, but mostly their power level is OK. With odd excursions.

The kineticist is the worst. It looks like it might have been good in some pre-playtest form, before someone who is terrified of the power of warlocks got their hands on it. Even now at-will flight or invisibility or short-range teleport coupled with ranged attacks give it a niche. Plus, yeah you're playing a bender or a superhero.

The medium is next up. The ranger level casting is the minimum, if you choose to bind archmage or hierophant you get bard level casting. If you bind the champion you're OK in a melee, about at the level of one of the more martial 3/4 BAB types. Technically you're flexible day to day but the limitations of feats and ability scores mean that you can't actually do everything. The taboos are entirely optional and you get little enough for them that you can just say no and not have to worry.

The occultist (seems like even the English language is running out of synonyms for class names) is a flexible character which sort of works. They can choose which special powers they use each day, though the spells known are fixed. It's an int-based spontaneous caster with bard level casting, proficiency in martial weapons/medium armor and shields. I could see myself playing it.

The mesmerist starts off strong: swift action penalty to will saves + casting color spray + light armor + defensive tricks is hard to beat on a first level character. It doesn't build well on that but it'd be great if you're playing a low-level only game.

The psychic is a sorcerer with int casting and a themed spell list. Not much to say.

One more thing. All the occult casters get effectively silent and still spell for free, in exchange for not being able to cast while under hostile mental effects (like being shaken) and not being able to effectively cast defensively. That's arguably a fair trade, there are workarounds for the limitations - but the developers are now saying that there is no such thing as stealth spellcasting and never has been. Floating runes or whatever appear to allow observers to make those spellcraft checks to identify spells. A step away from casterfinder maybe but an amazingly annoying one!

So, just as a thought exercise I'm trying to put together a Pathfinder melee cleric. I have a couple of ways to close the raw damage gap with full-BAB classes (namely, Destruction domain + conductive weapon/Cavalier Variant Multiclassing + Chain Challenge) but what I'm really looking for is something like the Magus's Spell Combat.

There are a few things that come to mind: Quicken Spell, Spell-Storing property... but one thing that really caught my attention was the Ring of Vengeful Blood Magic. Being able to blood-rage isn't too hard, not with the Raging Blood feat. However, what I'm looking for is a way to reliably force an enemy to provoke AoOs without it getting in the way of your attack routine.

Any suggestions?