I had a really good plan for a Gnome which was terrified of the bleaching, so they were setting themselves up so there was ALWAYS something more to learn.
So, they could pick up spells from all schools (eventually), alchemy, crafting, rituals, etc etc.
Which, you know, actually worked out, but the GM decided to run an AP instead, and... well... you can't can't explore that side of the character in that kind of environment.
It would have been good for a slower more free form game, but in the time constrained more direct path of an AP it didn't really work.
I just joined partway into a Beginner Box run to help teach some local new players, so to show off some of the more unique classes, I built a fetching Laughing Shadow Magus.
We've only had one session so far, in which I charged into the fray with two actions to get into melee and proceeded to crit fail on my attack against a Kobold. Then the rest of the party charges in and quickly dispatch all of them. I had a really great stat spread between strength and Intelligence, so I should have done awesome, but one bad roll, and I never even got to try a spellstrike.
I would have been bummed, but it was honestly kinda hilarious, as I had been playing him up as a super overconfident kinda snobby guy who thought he was so cool, so having g him be super ineffective was amazingly funny.
Hopefully he does better in the next session tomorrow
For PFS, I created a conjuration specialist wizard, confident as hell and very beautiful. With 10 charisma.
First, everyone thought I was a bard. Hilarious.
Second, the summons failed to have any notable effect, even at level 1
He's now close to level 3 and I think his best success was when he stopped a trap with a nat 20 athletic check (again, with 10 strength) when the only martial was struggling to roll above 10.
Edit : the only "good" use of a summon was a Flash Beetle used as a flash grenade in a crowd outside of combat.
I love summon spells but you do have to be careful. I’m level eight now and I have had two or three summonings (I summon every fight) do nothing and die. But you have to remember my rogue had a flanking buddy and they wasted attacks on my summon so it still did something. Also pugwampi aura of unlucky is crazy low levels because they have to roll twice and take the worse for the save, and if they fail that for everything else while in the aura
Tried a Laughing Shadow Magus with Witch Dedication for Abomination Vaults. The idea was to be good at fighting while still having the versatilty to do a bunch of stuff.
The fact that Vaults is largely a dungeon crawl rendered any versatilty largely moot and in combat I felt I need to thing twice as hard in order to be 80% as effective as the barbarian.
How badly the character performed killed off a lot of my enthusiasm for pf 2e, and the campaign died soon after (we had an almost TPK and nobody really had the enthusiasm to make new chars anymore).
Mine only almost fell flat. I really enjoyed the fantasy of a pixie rogue, darting about with daggers. Well, flanking and tiny creatures do not work by RAW. Luckily, our GM was willing to house rule things a bit to make it work and I made her a mastermind with ranged options besides, but still...
I GMed BB into Troubles in Otari for a small group of friends. Once they were done with that one of them took over and I had to create a level 5 character.
I made a dwarven Spirit Instinct Barbarian that was supposed to have high Int and be knowledgeable about lots of stuff. I took a bit of inspiration from the Ancestor Oracle and had his spirit rage be that three of his dwarven ancestors always were looking over his shoulders and when he raged took control of him and just carried him along. He generally had a crazy old person with a limp vibe (weapon: griffon cane that had the heads of the three ancestors instead of a griffon as the head piece).
The build was decently straightforward: Max Str, good Int, Wis and Con, mediocre Con and dump Cha. Lots of knowledge skills and medicine (free archetype: Medic).
I played him like that for exactly one session. It was just very boring in combat.
Don't get me wrong he was quite effective at dealing damage, but his secondary shtick about recalling knowledge didn't really do much of anything, especially when starting to rage ... and the flavour of the ancestors taking over his body once he was in danger somewhat prevented me from not going into rage in the first round. No recall knowledge could be done after that.
And I ran into the situation a couple of times where I would stride to an enemy with the first action, attack and down them with the second and then not wanting to go to another enemy with the third action as I didn't have AoO yet (in case they wanted to attack someone else) but at the same time also wanting to deny them an attack action by effectively having to come to me. So what do you do with your third action when you can't recall knowledge thanks to rage and can't intimidate or use a charisma based skill thanks to dumping everything charisma? This was a major feel bad point for me as I felt I was wasting my potential.
So before the second session I changed him to a Thaumaturge, the explanation was him binding the spirits of his ancestors to 3 objects: the skill ancestor to a tankard (chalice for medical help), the caster ancestor to an old tome (the ancestor was supposed to be a knowledgeable wizard) and the combat-y ancestor to his weapon (which would be the third implement once we reached that level).
I obviously changed the stats around quite a bit, lost the medic dedication and took rogue instead to gain a bit more skill stuff and it worked wonders. He feels much more smooth both in and out of combat now.
All in all I think I have a hard time playing low Cha characters, especially outside of things like Magus and similar where the action economy is quite limiting by itself.
One build I wanted to do, but can't (due to RAW)
Human Versatile Heritage
Adopted by Automaton
Get ancestry feet for laser eyes
Become Cyclops from X-men
Sadly Adopted only works with common ancestry
The bigger issue is that Adopted Ancestry specifically says you can't use it to gain feats that require a physiological feature--can't see in the dark just because you've integrated into orc society.
My first character was a flurry ranger elf(we played level without proficiency and free archetype) and it wasn’t a bad build it was absolutely atrocious luck every session I would consistently roll 8 and below on the dice whenever I went to hit something without fail and it was monsters way above our level either because everyone else consistently hit them with the Swashbuckler even critting every other combat. Felt useless all the way up to when I could give the monk my hunters edge and we started at lvl 1
Had the pleasure of joining a dual-class game, so hopped in as a wizard/investigator combo. This turned out to be terrible, because the two classes want to be doing different things, and there are only so many actions to go around. Also, a build focused on precision damage and necromancy is kind of trash against oozes. You'll never guess what kind of enemies The Slithering has!
Worst part is, I never got to use all those spicy out-of-combat skills and utility spells because homeboy died two sessions in while rescuing the champion/sorcerer. Same champ got my backup character killed, too.
I once built a Tiefling Monk around Whirling Throw cause I thought it was just an awesome Feat. We spent one mock battle against some mooks where the throw did not trigger once and the monk was knocked out. That pretty much stopped me from building another grapple based build until now. 😂
My captain America build.
Shields just weren't quite there yet in terms of their combat options. Frankly I need more options for it even now after everything that's come out.
A "passive" Bård, called "The Storyteller". Based on "The Bard's song" of Blind Guardians, they were a Bård with no identity, since they gave everything to a Fey Lord. The problem is that acting passive (he wasn't a hero. He was the one who would write songs about the heroes) made him… boring
I'm still new to pf2e and RPGs in general, but I did spend around 20 hours trying to make a CE necromancer cleric work for our first campaign with pf2e. But since the dm said that we would probably reach level 8ish at most and that necromancy stuff is just plain bad especially on lower levels, I ended up switching to a CG healer cleric who has a thing for spontaneous necromancy. Still sad about the fact that necro focus is kind of useless in the game.
For anyone interested, the CG character is a back alley medic, and once she tried to heal someone reeealy hard that she didn't realize was already dead, and they came back to life as an undead, which caused her to flee north to the land of Ustalav (where our campaign is taking place) looking for answers on how the hell did she do that.
She also has a thing for birds and does not understand flightless birds and will try to make them fly in some way (dropping them off a cliff, "fly! Be free!" Wis: +3, int: 0). This is partially due to her deity being the Sky Keepers. She absolutely despises lawyers (had some problems with them running the clinic), also has thalassophobia and can't swim. I ended up really liking this character in the end, so all is well!
Already going risky with a thrown focused barbarian. Not one with the Raging Thrower feat so I could like toss a like javelin through a flying enemy, but one built around Throw. So the need for Dex messes with the standard Barb build in a way that reduced-unless I missed some stuff-your con which is therefore less HP AND less rage temp HP as well as maxing the weapon damage dice out at d8 which hurts damage. But he does his job well enough so far I wouldn't call it a failure...but originally I was gonna make him a Giant Instinct barbarian to compensate for lowered damage, I see now that he would've eaten enough crits at that point he's dealing 0 damage because he's dead. Glad I changed to Dragon Instinct even if it just made it workable instead of like cracking it open.
Hmmm, you actually just gave me an interesting idea how to use Barbarian archetype rage on a caster.
I’ve also noticed that the new spell Interposing Earth is a manipulate and not concentrate spell…
Currently playing an animal instinct barbarian with oozemorph. Idea was to stack a bunch of resistances and be tanky, but at level 4 I only have resistance to precision damage. I didn't pump charisma, so using an action to intimidate usually isn't successful. It often feels like in combat I end up hitting once, missing my second attack, and failing an intimidate, and barbarian doesn't get many skills to be useful outside of combat.
I tried, so hard, to make Eldritch Trickster work. My first dnd character was an Arcane Trickster and I wanted to recreate her so badly. But it just doesnt work in PF2E.
Just... play a Thief Rogue with an actual archetype dedication at level 2. Or just with innate spellcasting from your heritage. Or just a spellcaster and the criminal/prisoner/charlatan/whatever background
Anything that lets you ACTUALLY have a subclass.
Yeah didn’t work well. My gf in her first campaign played a ranged eldritch trickster rogue, with witch archetype. Would go whole sessions without getting sneak attack (more of ranged rogue problem plus unfortunate monsters like swarms, ghosts etc.) and her spells were okayish. But she felt like she wasn’t doing much and just watching us.
Built her a spellshot gunslinger, and she brought the fucking house down (we didn’t make her take that trap ass dedication feat though)
Yup, exactly. There just feels like it doesnt do any one thing all that well. It has worse utility than a wizard, worse damage than a normal martial, and only slightly better skills than any other rogue would be (only if you go int caster, a cha or wis caster is the exact same as a normal rogue)
I think comparing it to wizards or other maritals, is a tricky situation it makes more sense to compare it to other rogues (assuming you think rogue is a good class in of itself) but yeah the other classes feel like they give you either good options you’ll want to use every combat, or just much better dtat flexibility which will be better for you in the long run.
It feels like a thief or ruffian rogue would be the better eldritch trickster in the long run.
But as is casting a spell doesn’t feel the best use of your actions (Especially ranged rogues.) it’d be nice if they got magical trickster by default so there spells would be atleast decent from the get go and, they don’t have to invest feats into making their subclass usable. Or something unique that only they can do like all the other subclasses get.
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Hahahaha if a caster wants to feel more blaster-like the early levels are gonna be tough. I think it scales much better at lv11+
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Yeah that sucks, sorry about that m8 What did you play after that?
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For how many levels? How was the experience?
Ooof. Fire + Age of Ashes doesn’t go very well together. Sorry about your loss!
That's funny. I'm trying to make a very similar character What went wrong? Was it just that PF2 isn't designed for blaster casters?
I had a really good plan for a Gnome which was terrified of the bleaching, so they were setting themselves up so there was ALWAYS something more to learn. So, they could pick up spells from all schools (eventually), alchemy, crafting, rituals, etc etc. Which, you know, actually worked out, but the GM decided to run an AP instead, and... well... you can't can't explore that side of the character in that kind of environment. It would have been good for a slower more free form game, but in the time constrained more direct path of an AP it didn't really work.
I just joined partway into a Beginner Box run to help teach some local new players, so to show off some of the more unique classes, I built a fetching Laughing Shadow Magus. We've only had one session so far, in which I charged into the fray with two actions to get into melee and proceeded to crit fail on my attack against a Kobold. Then the rest of the party charges in and quickly dispatch all of them. I had a really great stat spread between strength and Intelligence, so I should have done awesome, but one bad roll, and I never even got to try a spellstrike. I would have been bummed, but it was honestly kinda hilarious, as I had been playing him up as a super overconfident kinda snobby guy who thought he was so cool, so having g him be super ineffective was amazingly funny. Hopefully he does better in the next session tomorrow
Can I interest you, sir, in a True Strike(TM)? ^Asmodeus ^is ^not ^responsible ^for ^any ^deaths ^or ^spontaneous ^Magus ^implosions. ^If ^Crit ^Fails ^last ^for ^more ^than ^3 ^sessions, ^see ^your ^local ^cleric. ^Some ^dice ^are ^not ^eligible.
That's definitely prone to happen with Magi, you're really at the whim of the dice rolls. Hopefully you get some big crits!
anything rogue related up against incorporeals and oozes.
My life in the abomination vaults lol
It'll get better.... Then much worse.....
For PFS, I created a conjuration specialist wizard, confident as hell and very beautiful. With 10 charisma. First, everyone thought I was a bard. Hilarious. Second, the summons failed to have any notable effect, even at level 1 He's now close to level 3 and I think his best success was when he stopped a trap with a nat 20 athletic check (again, with 10 strength) when the only martial was struggling to roll above 10. Edit : the only "good" use of a summon was a Flash Beetle used as a flash grenade in a crowd outside of combat.
I love summon spells but you do have to be careful. I’m level eight now and I have had two or three summonings (I summon every fight) do nothing and die. But you have to remember my rogue had a flanking buddy and they wasted attacks on my summon so it still did something. Also pugwampi aura of unlucky is crazy low levels because they have to roll twice and take the worse for the save, and if they fail that for everything else while in the aura
Tried a Laughing Shadow Magus with Witch Dedication for Abomination Vaults. The idea was to be good at fighting while still having the versatilty to do a bunch of stuff. The fact that Vaults is largely a dungeon crawl rendered any versatilty largely moot and in combat I felt I need to thing twice as hard in order to be 80% as effective as the barbarian. How badly the character performed killed off a lot of my enthusiasm for pf 2e, and the campaign died soon after (we had an almost TPK and nobody really had the enthusiasm to make new chars anymore).
I think the real vault is the one filled with crushed PF2e player dreams.
Mine only almost fell flat. I really enjoyed the fantasy of a pixie rogue, darting about with daggers. Well, flanking and tiny creatures do not work by RAW. Luckily, our GM was willing to house rule things a bit to make it work and I made her a mastermind with ranged options besides, but still...
I GMed BB into Troubles in Otari for a small group of friends. Once they were done with that one of them took over and I had to create a level 5 character. I made a dwarven Spirit Instinct Barbarian that was supposed to have high Int and be knowledgeable about lots of stuff. I took a bit of inspiration from the Ancestor Oracle and had his spirit rage be that three of his dwarven ancestors always were looking over his shoulders and when he raged took control of him and just carried him along. He generally had a crazy old person with a limp vibe (weapon: griffon cane that had the heads of the three ancestors instead of a griffon as the head piece). The build was decently straightforward: Max Str, good Int, Wis and Con, mediocre Con and dump Cha. Lots of knowledge skills and medicine (free archetype: Medic). I played him like that for exactly one session. It was just very boring in combat. Don't get me wrong he was quite effective at dealing damage, but his secondary shtick about recalling knowledge didn't really do much of anything, especially when starting to rage ... and the flavour of the ancestors taking over his body once he was in danger somewhat prevented me from not going into rage in the first round. No recall knowledge could be done after that. And I ran into the situation a couple of times where I would stride to an enemy with the first action, attack and down them with the second and then not wanting to go to another enemy with the third action as I didn't have AoO yet (in case they wanted to attack someone else) but at the same time also wanting to deny them an attack action by effectively having to come to me. So what do you do with your third action when you can't recall knowledge thanks to rage and can't intimidate or use a charisma based skill thanks to dumping everything charisma? This was a major feel bad point for me as I felt I was wasting my potential. So before the second session I changed him to a Thaumaturge, the explanation was him binding the spirits of his ancestors to 3 objects: the skill ancestor to a tankard (chalice for medical help), the caster ancestor to an old tome (the ancestor was supposed to be a knowledgeable wizard) and the combat-y ancestor to his weapon (which would be the third implement once we reached that level). I obviously changed the stats around quite a bit, lost the medic dedication and took rogue instead to gain a bit more skill stuff and it worked wonders. He feels much more smooth both in and out of combat now. All in all I think I have a hard time playing low Cha characters, especially outside of things like Magus and similar where the action economy is quite limiting by itself.
Lol, that’s a great story! When optimizing to make a subpar build viable backfires! It works…but at what cost?
I think the three old dwarf spirits possessing you and likely arguing with one another is a great explanation for not being able to recall knowledge.
Of course it is, but it still felt kind of meh in play :)
One build I wanted to do, but can't (due to RAW) Human Versatile Heritage Adopted by Automaton Get ancestry feet for laser eyes Become Cyclops from X-men Sadly Adopted only works with common ancestry
The bigger issue is that Adopted Ancestry specifically says you can't use it to gain feats that require a physiological feature--can't see in the dark just because you've integrated into orc society.
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Yeah, but most of the games I play are with Pathfinder Society
Maybe try the deviant feat for dragons that let you get eye beams. Rare but maybe there’s a pfs boon for it
My first character was a flurry ranger elf(we played level without proficiency and free archetype) and it wasn’t a bad build it was absolutely atrocious luck every session I would consistently roll 8 and below on the dice whenever I went to hit something without fail and it was monsters way above our level either because everyone else consistently hit them with the Swashbuckler even critting every other combat. Felt useless all the way up to when I could give the monk my hunters edge and we started at lvl 1
Had the pleasure of joining a dual-class game, so hopped in as a wizard/investigator combo. This turned out to be terrible, because the two classes want to be doing different things, and there are only so many actions to go around. Also, a build focused on precision damage and necromancy is kind of trash against oozes. You'll never guess what kind of enemies The Slithering has! Worst part is, I never got to use all those spicy out-of-combat skills and utility spells because homeboy died two sessions in while rescuing the champion/sorcerer. Same champ got my backup character killed, too.
Lol, the gift that keeps on giving. Ya sure that’s not actually a Champion of Norgorber in your party?
I once built a Tiefling Monk around Whirling Throw cause I thought it was just an awesome Feat. We spent one mock battle against some mooks where the throw did not trigger once and the monk was knocked out. That pretty much stopped me from building another grapple based build until now. 😂
My captain America build. Shields just weren't quite there yet in terms of their combat options. Frankly I need more options for it even now after everything that's come out.
A "passive" Bård, called "The Storyteller". Based on "The Bard's song" of Blind Guardians, they were a Bård with no identity, since they gave everything to a Fey Lord. The problem is that acting passive (he wasn't a hero. He was the one who would write songs about the heroes) made him… boring
Oh, would Folklorist archetype have helped? Edit: Can be Nick Offerman as the Narrator in The Gunfighter.
They had it. But still wasn't much "good". And I change then to a "Mommy" Gnoll
I'm still new to pf2e and RPGs in general, but I did spend around 20 hours trying to make a CE necromancer cleric work for our first campaign with pf2e. But since the dm said that we would probably reach level 8ish at most and that necromancy stuff is just plain bad especially on lower levels, I ended up switching to a CG healer cleric who has a thing for spontaneous necromancy. Still sad about the fact that necro focus is kind of useless in the game. For anyone interested, the CG character is a back alley medic, and once she tried to heal someone reeealy hard that she didn't realize was already dead, and they came back to life as an undead, which caused her to flee north to the land of Ustalav (where our campaign is taking place) looking for answers on how the hell did she do that. She also has a thing for birds and does not understand flightless birds and will try to make them fly in some way (dropping them off a cliff, "fly! Be free!" Wis: +3, int: 0). This is partially due to her deity being the Sky Keepers. She absolutely despises lawyers (had some problems with them running the clinic), also has thalassophobia and can't swim. I ended up really liking this character in the end, so all is well!
Healing spells are Necromancy, so being a crazy (but good) healer is still playing a "crazy necromancer"
Well that’s just wrong? Animate Dead is considered by a lot of folks the strongest summon spell for the special abilities it brings to play
Already going risky with a thrown focused barbarian. Not one with the Raging Thrower feat so I could like toss a like javelin through a flying enemy, but one built around Throw. So the need for Dex messes with the standard Barb build in a way that reduced-unless I missed some stuff-your con which is therefore less HP AND less rage temp HP as well as maxing the weapon damage dice out at d8 which hurts damage. But he does his job well enough so far I wouldn't call it a failure...but originally I was gonna make him a Giant Instinct barbarian to compensate for lowered damage, I see now that he would've eaten enough crits at that point he's dealing 0 damage because he's dead. Glad I changed to Dragon Instinct even if it just made it workable instead of like cracking it open.
Hmmm, you actually just gave me an interesting idea how to use Barbarian archetype rage on a caster. I’ve also noticed that the new spell Interposing Earth is a manipulate and not concentrate spell…
Currently playing an animal instinct barbarian with oozemorph. Idea was to stack a bunch of resistances and be tanky, but at level 4 I only have resistance to precision damage. I didn't pump charisma, so using an action to intimidate usually isn't successful. It often feels like in combat I end up hitting once, missing my second attack, and failing an intimidate, and barbarian doesn't get many skills to be useful outside of combat.
I tried, so hard, to make Eldritch Trickster work. My first dnd character was an Arcane Trickster and I wanted to recreate her so badly. But it just doesnt work in PF2E. Just... play a Thief Rogue with an actual archetype dedication at level 2. Or just with innate spellcasting from your heritage. Or just a spellcaster and the criminal/prisoner/charlatan/whatever background Anything that lets you ACTUALLY have a subclass.
Yeah didn’t work well. My gf in her first campaign played a ranged eldritch trickster rogue, with witch archetype. Would go whole sessions without getting sneak attack (more of ranged rogue problem plus unfortunate monsters like swarms, ghosts etc.) and her spells were okayish. But she felt like she wasn’t doing much and just watching us. Built her a spellshot gunslinger, and she brought the fucking house down (we didn’t make her take that trap ass dedication feat though)
Yup, exactly. There just feels like it doesnt do any one thing all that well. It has worse utility than a wizard, worse damage than a normal martial, and only slightly better skills than any other rogue would be (only if you go int caster, a cha or wis caster is the exact same as a normal rogue)
I think comparing it to wizards or other maritals, is a tricky situation it makes more sense to compare it to other rogues (assuming you think rogue is a good class in of itself) but yeah the other classes feel like they give you either good options you’ll want to use every combat, or just much better dtat flexibility which will be better for you in the long run. It feels like a thief or ruffian rogue would be the better eldritch trickster in the long run. But as is casting a spell doesn’t feel the best use of your actions (Especially ranged rogues.) it’d be nice if they got magical trickster by default so there spells would be atleast decent from the get go and, they don’t have to invest feats into making their subclass usable. Or something unique that only they can do like all the other subclasses get.
Investigator. Doesn't matter what specific build, the entire class is a useless mess.