Pathfinder Is Still Bad

[Lago PARANOIA]

Well, I have done some theory-crafting with Mystic Theurge... and my conclusion is that the spell-like ability entrance requirement significantly raises the class's usability. However, it's not like super-powerful or anything. An optimized Mystic Theurge that uses a non-delayed caster scheme (which sadly rules out Empyreon-WIS Sorcerer/Divine Class) will perform at around the same level of competence as an average-case full-caster.

Some things to think about:
1.) If you go Mystic Theurge at all, you're going in as a Wizard paired up with a Cleric or Shaman. As nice as it would be to go Oracle / Sorcerer and not have to worry about buying scrolls to fill up your spellbook or split your stats, a Half-Elf Oracle 1 / Sorcerer 2 / Mystic Theurge 7 is a CR 10 character that tops out at 4th level spells and has no other class features. That is not cutting the mustard; you know what we call a level 10 caster with 4th level spells? A fucking bard.

2.) The Mystic Theurge buy-in is a class that gives its power in the mid-game, around character levels 11-15. If you game starts or ends outside of its range it's not really worth it; the hit to caster level is brutal and the compensation you get (a pile of level 1-3 spells) is not really worth it. However, 11-15 is where a lot of serious long-term campaigns end so the biggest long-term downside to Mystic Theurge using only Pathfinder rules (you only get 10 levels of your class) is a price you'll almost never have to pay.

3.) The only reason that you want to go Mystic Theurge is because you want to be a utility caster. Pure DPR blasters want to go straight sorcerer if they're okay with being nothing but a fire-damage beatstick or wizard if they want a combo platter of utility. Summoners want to go straight wizard or Occultist Arcanist because the CR gap is brutal if you're behind on Summon Monster spells. Beatdown casters want to go straight cleric, oracle, shaman, or even druid to avoid the BAB dings and get passive class features. Control casters don't want to divide up their casting stats and MT control casters miss out on some extremely nice class features if they don't stick to their base casting levels -- and cleric or shaman control casters want to go Veiled Illusionist.

The problem with going utility caster, of course, is that Pathfinder released a lot of ways for cross-list plundering. If you wanted to combine the versatility of the cleric list with the wizard list, why not instead go as a Shaman with the Spirit Talker: Lore: Arcane Enlightenment feat, the Dreamed Secrets feat, and the Speaker For the Past archetype? You get a butt-ton of wizard spells and as a human or half-elf you can use the favored class class feature to plunder cleric spells, at the cost of giving up no caster levels and having a full assortment of hexes and revelations to choose from.

Mystic Theurge's only real trump card over a cross-list plundering build is that you get a buttload of medium-level spells. That is in fact a pretty huge advantage if the action clog doesn't bother you. For example, you're preparing a bunch of quickened spells in your primary casting list or your DM regularly puts your party through five-encounter workdays. But for 95% of tables, you'd be better off with a 'pure' full caster. Even with early-entry methods Mystic Theurge still really hurts your casting for much of the game and even when you're in your element you're not super-better than non-MTs.

[Archmage Joda]

What are some good cleric spells to add with the shaman favored class bonus?

[ishy]

If you go for Mystic Theurge ask your GM if you can join one of those pathfinder guild from inner sea magic and get this nifty bonus

Eclectic Training (5 Fame): Guilds often require members to master and train in different subjects. When your Fame score in a guild reaches 5, choose one spellcasting class you have at least 1 level in—you increase your effective caster level in that class (including the number of spells you know and can cast per day) by +1, to a maximum caster level equal to your total Hit Dice. Single-classed spellcasters should still pick a class to which this bonus applies, since this bonus is retroactive.

Esoteric Training (35 Fame): The bonus to caster level you gain from Eclectic Training increases to +3 (but is still limited by your total Hit Dice). You may select a second spellcasting class to gain a +1 bonus to effective caster level.

[rasmuswagner]

Mystic Theurge, IMO, goes Wizard 2/Cleric 1/MT X, using racial abilities to qualify on the rcane side and the Trickery domain in the other side. You lose 1 level of wizard casting + school abilities, and have to maintain a decent (not stellar) Wis score.

[Orca]

As for why I keep bothering with such things as mystic theurgism, it's because I want to play a character who is a veritable god of magic, able to go above and beyond what the average wizard can do, to have as much magic as I possibly can. And something that lets me have both wizardry and divine magic seems to me like a good step in that direction, though I could easily be wrong...

Here's the mistake you're making. 'God of Magic' is the wizard's shtick. Your cleric spells are not more powerful than the wizard spells. Versatility is what the wizard does, you don't add much by adding some cleric spells a spell level behind, many of which you could cover via items anyway.

This is pathfinder, the most magic you can possibly have is to stay single classed as a pure spellcaster.

[Orca]

The Ecclesitheurge is probably going to be buffed before it's nerfed too. The text makes a reference to an ability it doesn't have (blessing of the faithful) and people on the Paizo boards seriously think it trades away more than it gets.

Errata preview

Harmless enough buff I guess. You're generally going to have something better to do in combat than that, and it's no bigger than aid another out of combat.

[Windjammer]

Anyone taken a look at the Mythic Rules thing they are planning now? I think they dropped a preview on some blog.

My predictions:
[*]The lower mythic "levels" will get playtested way more than the higher mythic "levels", as usual with D&D.
[*]In the past, people have complained that Paizo's adventure paths have gone from fighting Kyuss and Demogorgon to fighting generic wizards and bards and stuff, and the explanation is that they would need epic rules to properly run an adventure path with a really powerful bad guy. (This is notwithstanding the fact that the adventure paths featuring Kyuss and Demogorgon used little or nothing from the Epic Level Handbook.) I predict that when they come out with their mythic adventure path, their mythic bad guys will almost certainly be beatable by a party of non-mythic adventurers.

I'm rescucitating this post by hogarth from 2012, since it's one of the entirely accurate predictions on this board. The proximate cause is a review of the adventure path that was meant to showcase the mythic rules, and now that certain groups have made it to the end, the verdict is in:

http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2rt0k?Mythi ... ath-of-the

Executive summary (but the whole thread, certainly page 1, is worth reading):

So, what went wrong? At my best guess, nobody of the developers thought to test high level combat under mythic conditions. At all. Otherwise they simply could not have missed that the monsters and opponents they thought up simply couldn’t match in HP the damage output player character could provide with single critical hit. If there was one single high-level game playtest at Paizo of Mythic Adventures, I would be incredibly surprised (unless they did it after publishing it or with martial characters which took the “flavor options” over the obvious ones).

Be that because of time constraints or lack of care, we are left with a broken product. Anyone who wants to experience the story, I recommend that you don’t use Mythic Adventures to tell it or at least a very heavily nerfed version of it. Very heavily nerfed. Way harder than I did.
I managed to finish the campaign because I hate the idea of abandoning a campaign once started. Many other GM’s who posted on this AP’s sub-board, people who were as excited or more than me about this AP, dropped it midway through. I personally would counsel against playing this AP, because of its corrosive way of undermining trust in Paizos developers and also raising expectations that the game will always be so broken even without the use of Mythic Adventures.

May the developers learn something and stop rushing out products. I understand the time constraints of having a constant output of published work, but the stellar reputation Paizo has among many gamers also depends on them publishing polished and well-written supplements. I have noticed that the care the writers seemed to have earlier in the lifecycle of this edition seems to have vanished ever more with the addition of new splatbooks. How Mythic Adventures destroyed Wrath of the Righteous is so far the greatest example of the tendency of Paizo developers to not think their new rules through to the end and publish new sub-systems without a proper playtest in-house. If I can give any advice to the writers, it is “stop adding new sub-systems to AP’s, they make the experience almost always worse”.

And, in response to a meak rejoinder from James Jacobs,

[Y]ou guys really got to do better on testing out how new rules affect gameplay. The reputation of Paizo depends very much on the quality of your work and when it becomes clear that said work doesn't really function as intended, that reputation takes attrition damage, which is accumulating dangerously over the last years.

Since it apparently isn't possible to fix those problems afterwards in a satisfactory fashion (for the explained reasons of not wanting to change page orders in published books and, again, lack of time), getting it right on the first is very important. IMO, you need to invest more time into playtesting new systems before publishing them and that includes also taking more feedback from the mathematical theorycrafting types, who sadly have a problem expressing themselves amicably when they find errors.

I will add I'm currently, for the first time in 5 years, playing pathfinder, and the DM made the reasonable call to only allow the Core Rulebook and Advanced Player's Guide, since everything else doesn't just clog up the system but is utterly (and not just occasionally) un-play-tested. I find the above observations interesting in terms of the decline they document and proclaim. I wouldn't be surprised if the Pathfinder devs are currently in 'full on experimental' mode to see what they can and can't do for Edition 2, in the same sense that WotC threw random stuff at the wall like Tome of Magic to test the waters, but not the math (if you excuse the pun).

[Username17]

The idea that the big problem, or indeed any part of the problem is that the "theorycrafters" do not express themselves amicably when they find problems is retarded. James Jacobs has spent the last 7 years telling off theorycrafters. Paizo has said that there is an amount of feedback they will accept from people who can mathhammer problems, and that that amount is and always will be zero. It doesn't matter how well or poorly behaved theorycrafters are, James Jacobs has been shitting on any and all lines of communication between himself and people who can calculate average damage outputs since Bush was president of the United States.

Paizo has shat itself. They told people who were actually interested in doing destructive testing to fuck right off, and they've been coasting without any real testing in the QA cycle ever since. They started with the most exhaustively playtested and mathhammered version of D&D in history, but there hasn't been any scientific method since. And it is entirely the fault of the people in charge. They demanded that people not bother them when they were fucking up, and they've been fucking up the whole time.

Horses barn doors. And Seven. Fucking. Years.

I told them so.

-Username17

[Silent Wayfarer]

lolwut $5000 to own an online tavern.

And apparently it's $35 a month subscription. And they've had to beg people not to kill nubs.

Players, it's time to publish an official policy on this topic.

It is not ok to engage in PvP in NPC Settlements. That means Kindleburn, Marchmont, Ossian's Crossing, and Rathglen. You can gank away in Rotter's Hole. smile

I'm imposing this limit because the Thornguard AI is not strong enough yet to provide adequate defenses to the NPC Settlements and the new players that are inhabiting them. Until we have added enough tech to make the Thornguard able to intercede swiftly in PvP actions in NPC Settlements, we have to have a policy against it.

If you are in an NPC Settlement and you are attacked, please note the name of the character who attacked you and email customer.support@goblinworks.com with that information.

The only exception to this rule is that it is always OK to attack any character with a red name.

Thanks for everyone's understanding.

[Silent Wayfarer]

herp double post.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So. What's the endgame for Pathfinder, anyway?

It's obvious that they don't have a sophisticated enough methodology or sense of game design to make an edition that's substantially or even modestly better than Pathfinder as-it-is. So Paizo might be in for a 4E D&D-type implosion if they even try.

On the other hand, they can't implement their current strategy forever. People are eventually going to get bored of the same formula for classes and equipment and whatever and problems are going to continue to accumulate until they become impossible to ignore or errata away.

[CapnTthePirateG]

I'd be interested to see if it can outlast 5e D&D. Sure, the Pathfinder devs are bad and incompetent but they're at least building on a decent system.

On the other hand, 5e was created whole cloth by Mike Mearls.

Is it too early to hope for a decent D&D 6e?

[Dogbert]

I'd be interested to see if it can outlast 5e D&D.

I'm not sure "outlast" is the right word here given how all things point out to 5E being a "Schrödinger edition." A 6-months-long "extended launch" full of Flim-Flam, no splats or expansions, and no business plans beyond 2 adventure paths per year... it's like d&d had been demoted from "product line" to just selling merchandise for its own ghost.

d&d won 3 victories of Wixoss and became its own LRIG.

[FatR]

They started with the most exhaustively playtested and mathhammered version of D&D in history, but there hasn't been any scientific method since. And it is entirely the fault of the people in charge.

And thanks to this exhaustive playtesting and mathhammering Epic Level Handbook was not broken as all fuck to the point nobody wanted to touch it with a ten-foot pole? Oh wait, it was.

[MisterDee]

So. What's the endgame for Pathfinder, anyway?

The endgame is Pathfinder 2: Now without regular fighters (instead have swashbucklers/brawlers/armordudes), and with full-casters being NPC-only classes, with PCs limited to two-third casting classes or less.

It's not going to be as ubiquitous as 3.x, but there's probably enough people that just want to run obey-the-questgiver campaigns and APs to keep Paizo running with that kind of system.

[FatR]

So. What's the endgame for Pathfinder, anyway?

Publish adventures and monster books indefinitely. Switching editions seems to be a commercial suicide at this point, when PFSRD exists on the net, and it is well known that half the audience still plays 3.5 (I personally moved to PF only this year and half the reason was PF being the system used in the group where I'm a player) and they already have more adventure and monster material published than the whole run of 3.X. Even an attempt to pull off 3.5 and just add a smattering of minor fixes may be risky.

In their place I'd start to work on new and less shitty settings too.

[TiaC]

They started with the most exhaustively playtested and mathhammered version of D&D in history, but there hasn't been any scientific method since. And it is entirely the fault of the people in charge.

And thanks to this exhaustive playtesting and mathhammering Epic Level Handbook was not broken as all fuck to the point nobody wanted to touch it with a ten-foot pole? Oh wait, it was.

Interestingly, this does not in fact contradict Frank's statement. Saying it's "the most exhaustively playtested and mathhammered version of D&D in history" is not all that impressive. Compare to 4e, which cut out the vast majority of the complexity and still had crap math.

[rasmuswagner]

So. What's the endgame for Pathfinder, anyway?

In their place I'd start to work on new and less shitty settings too.

They could launch a new setting where the Core classes don't exist. That solves Fighter, Rogue and Wizard right there AND forces people to buy splatbooks.

[ishy]

So. What's the endgame for Pathfinder, anyway?

It's obvious that they don't have a sophisticated enough methodology or sense of game design to make an edition that's substantially or even modestly better than Pathfinder as-it-is. So Paizo might be in for a 4E D&D-type implosion if they even try.

On the other hand, they can't implement their current strategy forever. People are eventually going to get bored of the same formula for classes and equipment and whatever and problems are going to continue to accumulate until they become impossible to ignore or errata away.

Well I have the feeling they do want a new edition. But not a 3.x -> 4th thing, but a 3.0 -> 3.5 thing. Enough changes so you can start over, some overhauls of specific systems, but not changing all that much either.

I do think they are really wary of change though. They can see what happened to 4th, they see what is going on with 5th and they know what happened to their own rewrite of the stealth minigame.

So it seems likely to me, they'll publish shit thrown against the wall that 'builds upon more than 15 years of system development and an Open Playtest featuring more than 50,000 gamers to create a cutting-edge RPG experience that brings the all-time best-selling set of fantasy rules into a new era'. Like pathfinder unchained

[radthemad4]

New versions of the barbarian, monk, rogue, and summoner classes, all revised to make them more balanced and easier to play.

Aw man... I liked the summoner. For the others, they hopefully intend to make them more 'balanced' by upgrading them at least.

Scaling magic items sounds cool though.

[name_here]

My experience with Summoner was opening up to its entry, thinking it looked kind of interesting, and then realizing one of the class features was literally useless as printed. It was an ability that let the Eidolon soak damage for you after you fell unconscious, except that would banish it instantly. Kind of put me off the class.

[Longes]

So. What's the endgame for Pathfinder, anyway?

The endgame is Pathfinder 2: Now without regular fighters (instead have swashbucklers/brawlers/armordudes), and with full-casters being NPC-only classes, with PCs limited to two-third casting classes or less.

It's not going to be as ubiquitous as 3.x, but there's probably enough people that just want to run obey-the-questgiver campaigns and APs to keep Paizo running with that kind of system.

Why have full casters at all, if you are not going to give them to PCs. GMs can dick whip people with gods, instead of throwing Elminster into the setting and saying "No, you can never be as good as he is".

[Axebird]

My experience with Summoner was opening up to its entry, thinking it looked kind of interesting, and then realizing one of the class features was literally useless as printed. It was an ability that let the Eidolon soak damage for you after you fell unconscious, except that would banish it instantly. Kind of put me off the class.

Sounds like you misread life bond or life link. Life link lets you burn hit points to keep your eidolon around, and life bond lets your eidolon burn hit points to keep you conscious.

[MGuy]

New versions of the barbarian, monk, rogue, and summoner classes, all revised to make them more balanced and easier to play.

Aw man... I liked the summoner. For the others, they hopefully intend to make them more 'balanced' by upgrading them at least.

Scaling magic items sounds cool though.

Lots of people hate the summoner because its pet summon makes fighters and the like feel small in the pants.

[infected slut princess]

.... and they know what happened to their own rewrite of the stealth minigame.

Pardon me, but what did Pathfucker do with the stealth minigame? I know they combined skills but did they actually change it to try and, I dunno, make it work at all? I'm out of the loop of Pathfucker stealth.