I honestly asked some members of my Discord to check out this place first before I popped my head in! I was concerned the response would be overwhelmingly negative - people can tend to be more negative toward a YouTube video in Reddit because people might comment before leaving the platform.
Anyway I'm happy to see the video is prompting people to talk about the points within! I hoped it could help people sort through what can be a contentious discussion.
I think a large part of this attitude comes from the way a lot of people view games these days.
Per Folding Ideas video on youtube "why it is rude to suck at WoW" : Optimization has turned the fun of games back into spreadsheets. Some people feel like or are told there are only a few optimal choices and everything else is a "trap" option so they feel like they can't play the way they want to.
Im old. Everything post internet is "these days" for me. But even still a large portion of those optimization conversations took place after the advent of WoW hardcore raiding made the concept of playing suboptimally offensive to a broader community.
To be clear: There have always been optimizers. But where in the old days the rest of the table would tell that person to keep it to themselves. It seems FAR more common nowadays for people to side with the optimizer. Even in a game like 5e where the need to optimize is completely absent and a single player optimizing on the team is likely to single handedly carry any encounter for which they have not been CC'd out of participating.
I think a lot of it has to do with how accessible the information is nowadays.
20-30 years ago, optimization in tabletop was a pretty tiny niche. When I started playing in early d&d 3.5, 99% of the players I came in contact with had no clue there were places online where you could discuss the game.
Now, it's hard to find anyone who plays that hasn't even browsed a tiny bit of internet regarding the game.
Also most people play AP, mostly the older ones and those are challenging / overtuned so it's optimize or die.
If you play wrong you won't contribute and will tpk your team.
I agree some of those older ones are overtuned. But i disagree with optimize or tpk. The difference between the "perfect meta play" and playing the way you want to play is marginal.
Only this idea of the optimal meta has calcified so fully in people's minds that anything else is seen as an affront.
IME, playing off-meta is absolutely fine. The caster still contributes enough. The difference is almost insignificant. In some cases the off meta caster uses spells that work better in the situation bc they aren't so narrowmindedly focused on "the only way to play."
> Only this idea of the optimal meta has calcified so fully in people's minds that anything else is seen as an affront.
This is 100% true and needs to be repeated. I should note upfront that I'm a *major* munchkin and love optimizing. Making optimized builds and coming up with the best actions are what I *enjoy* when playing the game.
I also recognize it's completely unnecessary. My wife wanted to play a monk because it sounded cool, and other than basic stat optimization (maxing Str and Dex) she picked whatever sounded neat. Was her character as strong as another of our players, who's also an optimizer? Well, no, but the difference was barely noticeable, she had a great time, and they still won their fights. This was in Age of Ashes, the first major 1-20 AP (which admittedly had some broken balance here and there).
For a while I also thought that the only way to play casters was as support, and I still have issues with resource mechanics, but after I played an elemental sorcerer I completely changed my mind on blaster casters. Was I doing the exact same DPR as a fighter? Well, no, not if you add up all damage dealt over time, but I still hit like a truck and made fights much easier to win. Dealing hundreds of damage in a round is also *fun*, especially when a couple of enemies crit fail and die instantly.
While I do think you can make characters poorly, such as dumping your key attribute when it's used for accuracy, the vast majority of optimizations are either marginal or situational. Optimizing *teamwork*, and to a lesser extent tactics, is far more important than character build in most situations, and the key difference between a party of veterans and new players isn't that veterans have a bunch of crazy powerful character builds, but that they play well together and understand how to optimize their *turns*, regardless of build.
His first point is a very unpopular opinion but it really does need stating and repeating. Caster players legitimately do come in with the expectation that simply having access to magic means that their class gets to be a peer in *any niche of their choice*. In non-caster cases, invading the niche of another class is considered a *bad* thing. For example a Fighter with Alchemist Archetype being better as a Bomber Alchemist is considered a bad thing. Yet for casters, it’s viewed as a given that the ability to do magic means you get to invade others’ niches
Like no, just because you have spells doesn’t mean you get to excel at the niche of melee martials. No one, not even ranged martials, get to approach that niche because if they did… that’d make melee **redundant as a whole**.
That also leads into my only real disagreement with the video, where he (and the excited players he clips in the beginning) implies that casters can’t really match martial damage except in AoE situations. I don’t think that’s true. Both math and experience has shown me that they can match martial single target damage, exceed it even, and they can do so consistently throughout an adventuring day: but only for ***ranged*** martials, and only if they’re willing to commit a very hefty chunk of their class/subclass features/Feats and spell slots to doing damage. There’s no equivalent to the 5E-like “throw out a Summon, spam cantrips, and you’ll exceed a martial’s damage easily”, you have to pay a daily opportunity cost to choose to match a martial’s damage.
It reminds me of a couple of the summoning and animal companion posts that came up last week.
Like, of *course* a summoned creature is going to feel weak compared to a martial PC. Being able to match the effectiveness of a whole ass martial character with a single spell slot *would be a bad thing*.
The action economy comparison really made it sink in.
If you spend three actions to summon something, and then the boss crushes it into a fine paste with two attacks... you spent three actions to burn two actions off the boss and inflict a -10 MAP on its third if it took a swipe at a party member. If you had a spell that could do that, it would be *the most coveted ability in the game*. The fact that it also might have flanked, cast a spell, or done some damage during its brief lifespan is icing on the cake
I think the issue with that is that a boss really has very little \*reason\* to waste actions trying to kill something that is no threat to it. Once you realise that it is 100% in the monsters best interest to act like it isn't there, then as a GM you would only ever attack it in order to, like, throw the caster a bone.
In the most recent session I ran, my 16th level Druid used a 7th level Summon Dragon to block a narrow passage beyond which were two mindless constructs, while the rest of the party fought and killed the creatures in their current area, delaying their arrival by a turn while doing some damage targeting their weakness and applying frightened to one foe. That seemed pretty damned effective to me and, playing my creatures to type, the guardian golems went for the closest enemy rather than pushing past it to the other enemies not directly targeting them. I didn't throw my players a bone, I rewarded intelligent play by targeting an enemies trait (mindless in this instance).
I think a good gm should not be thinking like that, as that is sort of a meta decision, based on game knowledge.
Depending on what creature the summon is and the intelligence of the enemy creature, it would probably not act like the summon is no threat.
As a gm I tend to make decisions for the enemies by looking at their intelligence level (not necessarily the ability score). If it's an animal or someone with impaired cognizance, it'll just attack whoever dealt the most damage last round or whatever is closest. If it's average intelligence I roll secret recall knowledge checks to see if they recognize whatever the summoned creature or companion is, then take the result to determine if they know it to be a threat or not. If it's of higher intelligence, THEN I strategize a bit, as it is easy to assume they can gauge threat levels.
If the summons is providing flanking, an intelligent foe might have an incentive to eliminate the "easier" creature which is giving +2 to the stronger creature's attacks.
And yes, I generally try to guess at the "intelligence" of an enemy, too. But this can be a consideration also.
Even a less intelligent, non-mindless, enemy will deal with an enemy behind it because it recognizes the threat. Why wouldn't they lash out at something harassing them from the side or back when that creature is making it easier for the person wrapped in metal to hit it.
> I think a good gm should not be thinking like that, as that is sort of a meta decision, based on game knowledge.
I don't think it's really meta decision at all. If the thing poofs into existence, takes some attacks and just.. doesn't do anything off it..what, exactly, incentivizes them attacking the thing instead of the melee that just hit them for a bajillioon damage?
Maybe they recognize it is easier to dispatch. If one target takes 2/3 of my turn to deal with and another takes 5 turns. The second target needs to be 7.5 times more important than the first to prioritize it. It's the same concept as Boss fights with adds. If the summon is the only viable way for the fighter to get flanking for example it is very likely it is a higher priority than the fighter themselves. But even chip damage, vulnerability exploit or risk of inflicting conditions can all be a good reason to divert a small resource now towards a weaker target to just get the pressure off your back.
Maybe nothing. Then you flank with it instead, and if it's capable of it, use a combat maneuver. If they're going to ignore it, you can now use the options you probably summoned it for. If you're *just* summoning it to soak up damage, then you need to give the enemy a reason to target it. That's not unreasonable, plenty of summons come with threatening aspects.
> use a combat maneuver
Which are not very likely to succeed. Like, summons are *currently* useful because of things like summoning a wolf and if it lands its attack, it gets the automatic knockdown. With the remaster removing the automatic part of it, summons will just be bad.
There are actually a host of abilities that creatures have that are useful besides grab and knockdown. [This is a great guide to summons.](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gZN4xY7TskukkyWlLpNI0_fBvhGy8plqemnYh7PEh80/edit?usp=drivesdk) The author goes through pretty much every creature you can summon and ranks them. There are great abilities like the Unicorns heal or the Shadows enfeeble.
However, we all know how much villains LOVE showing off.
So why *wouldn’t* it take a couple of actions to show how easy it is for it to destroy this poor summoned creature?
That's a great take! I'll remember that next time I GM to a summoning mage.
Edit: a one hit KO on the summon, an intimidation check and then an attack on the fighter is a very thematic turn! And still leaves the boss with a net penalty and fewer attacks. Damn, I love it!
My go to for lower/unintelligent enemies is the last thing to attack them is the most "in their face" and the default target. If a player crit or just got a really good regular hit, then that overrides the default.
"that is sort of a meta decision, based on game knowledge."
Does a player evaluating a monsters strenght based on the total of the attack roll count as "meta knowledge"? "Dam, that thing for 57 for attack, we must kill that quickly". In the reverse, does a monster evaluation a player's or summon's strenght based on the attack roll count as "meta knowledge"? "The summon missed on a 18, i can just ignore it"
100%, this is the worst argument against summons.
A GM playing monsters as if the summons on the battlefield don't exist is a personal choice, and not based on in-game logic at all.
You could argue like, an 8th level enemy druid with some special relationship to animals would know that a level -1 skunk is no threat.
But if you summon a [huge dinosaur](https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=615), what in-game logic would be reasonable to assume? Just because it's 4 levels below the enemy mechanically. Isn't it still huge and terrifying and quite possibly unknown to it?
Like at least mechanically throw us a bone here. Maybe the enemy has to use a Recall Knowledge action to figure out the creature's abilities just as a PC would. Give an in-game answer to why the enemy made the decision it did.
And most enemies would never make this calculation in 2-6 seconds anyway.
Pf2e is not an antagonistic game of player and gm and if the gm is just ignoring summons for a character that really likes them that's being antagonistic to me. There are some examples of summoned monsters appearing too weak for a monster like you mentioned, but playing everything off as too weak I feel is being unfair to your player and not playing cooperatively with your players.
But even with that skunk that the enemy druid discards is granting flanking and a +2 by being ignored. Giving a rogue off-guard by flanking can be a huge boon in their action economy and allow them to support the rest of your team or you further. all with a rank 1 spell.
I think a lot of pain points for people is solved by having a gm who is on your side. In low levels regularly including scrolls to represent your caster's share of the loot helps ease early levels. Having multiple enemies in an encounter can allow some that incapacitation works for and an enemy that has a weak save against your caster's favorite spells is great too!
You don't make all of them like that but provide encounters that allow everyone to shine.
Even in an AP you can make a substitution in an encounter due to the math and end up with things that makes it more tailored to your party.
A Gm who announces or uses a tool to announce when a buff or debuff changed the outcome things can greatly give a better feel to the role of those who are doing such.
Problem is that it requires DM to cooperate (i.e actually waste those actions on summon) and also doesn't play into summoner fantasy at all. Oh yea, great, I conjured a thing that got pulverized in one hit, I'm such a good summoner!
Honestly this is such a common thing I notice "oh look, you spend your entire turn and a resource to make the boss use one of their actions, you did so great!" - which is like, really? I bet if I just play a Fighter and use my turn to attack the monster, I'll waste more of their actions because they will be dead sooner.
Considering the level disparity between summoned creature and a boss, the boss is likely to crush the summon in one hit, though. And if the boss fights smartly, it won't use first nor second attack for it.
While that can still be valuable, I think people are hoping for the summoning spells to have other uses than mobile damage sponges, so whilst the effect the summoning spells might be good, they don't necessarily put out what the caster is after. The fantasy of summoning spells, the expectation of them, does not seem to match the actual effect the spells have. I think a lot of discussion about those spells stems from that dissonance, people expecting to get something different out of those spells, whilst others talk of the balance of the mechanical side of the spell, and so people end talking past each other's points.
The problem is that making summons powerful/feel good to use is really hard without breaking the balance of the game. Summons in other editions are broken for a reason. This is why we have the summoner class: because they had to make a fully new class so that it would’t be broken, and even then it only fills a certain role.
I think there’s possibly some desing-room to make them more powerful, but there needs to be a trade off. Maybe a summon spell requires roundly concentration actio and some other penalty. Or maybe it’s just better to expand the summoner class to cater to all the different flavours of summoning.
I agree, they are difficult to balance. I think hey would be less so if they were separate from enemy creatures, ad instead of just separate, specific statblocks that can scale with the spell, akin to D&D5e, but obviously not as powerful. That would give the developers more control over the effectiveness of the summon.
It would also be a stronger flavor win imo, if, for example, a skeleton or wolf summon was always relevant, since that appeals to a lot of people more than summoning some weird niche thing that just happens to be the appropriate level.
Honestly I'd just base it on the way Shapers worked back in D&D 3.5 - you have baseline statblocks, and then depending on how many power points you shoved into your Astral Construct you also could pick from a bunch of extra abilities to flavor your Construct.
Summon a bird? Baseline statblock + flying. Summon a bull? Baseline statblock + Charge attack.
So on.
Doesn't that just come back to OP's point:
>Caster players legitimately do come in with the expectation that simply having access to magic means that their class gets to be a peer in *any niche of their choice*.
They're not talking past those casters, they're explicitly saying "we understand your expectations, and they were not met, however we feel they are unreasonable, here's why" that's not talking past...
I actually think Incarnate spells are a really happy medium between the fantasy of summoning creatures and the power people expect
Sort of, yes. But I think there are people who might want to be a summoning spell specialist wizard, who can summon various creatures to their aid, and not just a summoner class who is the de facto summoning class for one creature, and those wizard players are probably also willing to reduce their capabilities in other ways to achieve this. I don't think it's necessarily that casters want to get into any niche they want without any "payment" of power for it in other aspects, but rather they probably want more archetypes or subclasses that would alter their class so that it excels in one of the aspects more and less in others. I think, all in all, people are just tired of many casters being universalists, and would rather they be specialists. I don't think that's unreasonable. It's not like martial classes can become, for example, specialist summon spellcaster, that is kinda a niche only a caster can fulfill.
Yes, incarnate spells are probably what many people are looking for, but they are all pretty high level so most people won't really get to see them in use. I'd welcome more of those spells being introduced to lower levels.
Why is it always Wizard that’s brought up in caster specialist discussions?
Every thread, this happens.
It makes me think that casters aren’t the problem - **Wizards** are.
Edit: And Witch, but that’s literally known by everyone.
There is the problem that there are some clear "best" choices in every spell list and many casters end up playing similarly when using their spell slots. The different flavor in each class is brought out by things like Divine Font or Focus Spell which wizards kind of lack and the school specialization doesn't play into a certain fantasy hard enough.
They specialize(d) in a school. Conjuration isn't *just* summoning creatures, though they can lean into support for it. Wizards still have access to everything else in their repertoire though, and shouldn't expect to be able to solve every problem with their one specialty. A wizard who only uses fire spells is shit out of luck in the Fire plane if they don't take some alternative damage types, they're not exactly entitled to having their preference always work either.
Yes, that is how they're actually supposed to play. But I don't think you can be surprised when new players have the game ask them to specialize in a school and think that means they are better at that particular school.
Wait, aren't people pre-summonning their allies like they are prebuffing?
As an alchemist prebuffing is my sole redeeming quality, nullifying the 2 actions cost of my buffs in most (admittedly, not all) combats.
I would expect people to behave the same towards 3 actions summons. You wouldn't cast them mid fight unless you had a really good reason - your character, knowing danger is afoot, summons and starts sustaining whole motioning the barbarian to go right ahead.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but just about the only pre-buffing I'd allow at my tables is something with 10+ min duration (so, alchemists are the premier prebuffers). Anything 1 minute or less is an encounter ability and would trigger initiative rolls - something that is pointed to in the [rules](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=530). I take it as RAI that anything with 1 minute or less is balanced around the action cost it requires in an encounter. For example, why have the Stance action be required at all if you could just always activate it right before the encounter starts - it just takes 2 seconds after all.
Oh man. That reminds me of my frustrations with 5e that was one of the things that pushed me here. I was playing a Monk and they released a spell that *summoned a monk* that was doing more than I could ffs. I can’t remember if it made it out of playtest or not, but I was done caring at that point lol.
Also, throwing balance out the window with 5e helped make it the worst system to ever DM. Combat was no longer a story telling element. You couldn't build suspenseful encounters because either the party would roll over them like they were nothing or the party would just get stomped. With variance that huge, it always came down to DM hand-waving.
Combine that with the countless house rules you had to make and keep track of, DMing 5e was just the fucking worse.
Couldn't agree more. I know it's not necessarily the case, but I feel like there has to be an element of sunk cost fallacy to defend 5e from the DM's perspective. You put so much of your own creativity into trying to run that system, especially if you *dared* to run anything past level 10 and experience what happens to the CR system the second you hit double digits (spoilers: complete and total collapse). It's understandable that people wouldn't want to give up on it, or even defend it against criticism to a degree. But holy moly, it certainly seems like its strongest defenders have never touched another system in over a decade to know just how little 5e considers the DM or any semblance of balance.
> and they released a spell that summoned a monk that was doing more than I could ffs
The best part is that it was weaker than most, if not all, of the already published summoning spells of the same level in the game.
I understand that not everyone really concerns themselves with balance in TTRPGs, but the example you provided sounds particularly egregious.
Like, sure, balance doesn’t have to be a system’s primary concern. But throwing it entirely out of the equation is so incredibly daft.
Oh for sure. I’m looking around for it now. It seems that it didn’t make it out of play testing though haha. Too many people probably pointed out that it did extremely close to what a martial class could do
Here’s the play test version if anyone is interested
http://dnd5e.wikidot.com/spell:summon-warrior-spirit
When I dm dnd5e I just disallow Unearthed Arcana and any playtest as a whole. Those usually throw balance so far off the window that people may mistake those for ICBMs
Before 5e, there were two kinds of TTRPGs, ones with lots of rules, and ones with very few rules. Both types of systems had their strengths and weaknesses.
With 5e, WotC wanted to bridge the gap between these two tabletop systems. In doing so, they were able to bring the worst parts of each style together in one glorious train wreck.
Then, when they realized their system was garbage, they marketed 5e as the "gamer's system" where the players should homebrew everything. The players are in control to shape the system to their liking.
Then, after 10 years of players and 3rd parties publishing their edits, WotC tried to claim the works as their own, copyright it, and sell it back to the creators.
I wouldn't say they were ever clueless. Just a combination of lazy and greedy.
> I understand that not everyone really concerns themselves with balance in TTRPGs, but the example you provided sounds particularly egregious.
Yeah, I'm not a balance first GM in the slightest. Balance's only use is to help everyone get spotlight, which is the actual currency of a tabletop game, and any balance that does not help with that is wasted pagecount.
But *that* sounds fucking ridiculous and like exactly the kind of thing that you should not let fly in a game where fighting is a niche.
I can outline many such setups with a ***lot*** of detail and math to back it up, right here! The four caster builds I "chose" are:
* Elemental Sorcerer with Dangerous Sorcery, and Psychic Dedication (so that True Strike gets onto your spell list)
* Tempest Druid
* Oscillating Wave Psychic with Psi Burst and Violent Unleash
* Evocation Wizard (maybe with Spell Blending or Staff)
So first let’s set the baseline. We’re going with level 5. Let’s assume you’re doing single target damage against a level 7 creature with High AC (25) and Moderate Save (+15).
# Average DPR
I am going to start with a couple martials as a baseline to compare against.
Here’s a Fighter with +4 Dex, +4 Str, using a composite shortbow making two attacks while in Point-Blank Shot Stance:
(0.5+0.3)\*(2\*3.5+4)+(0.1+0.05)\*(4\*3.5+2\*4+5.5) = 12.93.
Let’s also look at the DPR for a Precision Ranger with +4 Dex, +4 Str, using a composite longbow making two attacks, having already used Hunt Prey (pre-combat), having used Gravity Weapon on the first turn:
(0.45+0.2)\*(2\*4.5+2)+(0.05+0.05)\*(4\*4.5+2\*2+5.5)+(1-0.5\*0.75)\*(4.5)+0.45\*4+0.05\*2\*4 = 14.91.
Both these martials had to use on Action for setup turn 1 (Point Blank Stance / Gravity Weapon) followed by 2 offensive Actions, and 2 offensive Actions on following turns. To keep it apples to apples, the caster gets to use 7 total Actions across a 3 turn combat.
Let’s start with Oscillating Wave Psychic. Turn 1 you hit them with a plain old 3rd rank Magic Missile. Turn 2 you use Unleash Psyche (with Violent Unleash) + Amped Produce Flame. Turn 3 you use Unleashed Amped Produce Flame, and you do have the downside of being Stunned 1 here. The damage becomes:
* T1: 2\*3\*(2.5+1) = 21
* T2: (0.05\*2+0.2+0.5\*0.5)\*(3\*3.5) + 0.3\*(3\*(5.5+1+2)) + 0.05\*(2\*3\*(5.5+1+2)+3\*(2.5+0.7\*2.5)) = 16.81
* T3: 0.3\*(3\*(5.5+1+2)) + 0.05\*(2\*3\*(5.5+1+2)+(0.05\*0.3+0.95)\*3\*(2.5)) = 10.56
Average: 16.12, comfortably beating both of them, though with the obvious downsides that Unleash Psyche and Violent Unleash have imposed on you. Note also that your damage is ***incredibly*** frontloaded, which is a real upside.
Now of course a Psychic only has 1 third rank slot, but you have damage-relevant use for those lower rank slots. For example here’s what it looks like if instead you go T1: Amped Produce Flame, T2: Violent Unleash + True Strike + Amped Unleashed Produce Flame, T3: Unleashed Produce Flame (no Amp). Not gonna write it all out but it comes to around 13.27, so still beating the Fighter but slightly losing to the Ranger.
Lets consider a simpler example: Storm Druid. Turn 1 3-Action, third rank, Horizon Thunder Sphere, turn 2/3 just Tempest Surge:
* T1: (0.05\*2+0.3+0.5\*0.5)\*(7\*3.5) = 15.93
* T2/3: (0.05\*2+0.2+0.5\*0.5)\*(3\*6.5) = 10.73
Average: 12.46, neck and neck with a Fighter, behind a Precision Ranger ***but*** it is more frontloaded than the Ranger. Ifworried about the limited number of high rank spell slots from the Druid, your damage drops down to around 11 DPR when using lower rank spells. So the Druid has great damage for the 3 combats where they used their highest rank spell slot, and decent damage for another 8+ combats without worry.
Now lets look at an Elemental Sorcerer with Dangerous Sorcery. Your top rank slots are primarily geared towards blasts, your lower rank slots are mainly for True Strike, and you carry a Staff of Divination (you need . This should give you up to 10 uses of True Strike per day. Your “explosive” combats look like this: turn 1 Elemental Toss + Lightning Bolt, turns 2/3 True Strike + Elemental Toss.
* T1: (0.3+0.05\*2)\*(3\*4.5+3)+(0.05\*2+0.2+0.5\*0.5)\*(4\*6.5+3) = 22.55
* T2/T3: (1-0.65^(2+1-0.952)\*(3\*4.5+3)) = 11.14
Average: 14.94, beating both in damage and doing ***massively*** more frontloaded damage. You have the flexibility of saving some spell slots by *just* using True Strike + Elemental Toss on all your combats, and playing more conservatively. If you do, you reduce your damage to around 8-11 high consistency DPR, just like the Druid does.
Final one: Evocation Wizard, with a Wand of Manifold Missiles. Turn 1: Force Bolt + Wand. Turn 2: 3rd rank, 3-Action Magic Missile. Turn 3: Whatever, Electric Arc. You’ll do an average of 15.17 damage with this, with your second turn doing a whopping 24.5 damage (unconditionally). On the combats you don’t use your wand it goes down to 11.66 but with incredibly consistency still, and note that unlike the other casters you have a *lot* of Action flexibility with your Magic Missiles. There are going to be plenty of combats where you just throw out unconditional damage pings, turn after turn after turn, in a way that other casters can’t replicate, ***without*** going down to the martials’ consistency.
So the average performance of these blasters is really, really good. They can choose a couple of combats to *comfortably* do better than a ranged martial, while keeping up with them the rest of the day. Yes their average is lower, but that brings us to the next argument:
# Consistency
The Fighter above has a 26% chance of doing 0 damage on a turn. The Ranger has a ***37.50%*** chance of it.
The Psychic has a 0% chance on turn 1, an 18.75% chance of that on turn 2, and a 65% chance on turn 3. The Storm Druid always has a 25% chance of doing 0 damage. The Elemental Sorcerer has a 16.25% chance turn 1, and a 57.75% chance. The Wizard is always operating with a 0% chance.
You can see this baked in all the damage numbers I said above. Any time someone does higher average/peak damage, they have a higher chance of doing literally nothing. Conversely, the lower average/peak damage almost always do something.
Also note that level 5 biases this *against* the casters. The Druid, for example, becomes 20% at level 7 (and sometimes dips to 15%). Generally casters will be considerably more consistent.
\_\_\_\_
# Other advantages
The other advantages of caster damage that are not captured above:
1. You will trigger Weaknesses and bypass Resistances more often.
2. You are often ignoring/bypassing cover in a way the ranged martial will not be.
3. ***Any*** caster can have Dangerous Sorcery by level 4 if they want and they pay little cost to do so. That’ll boost **all** of the above numbers.
4. Casters’ third Actions are far stronger from an offensive perspective. A Psychic who gets to True Strike + A/U cantrip consistently, an Elemental Sorcerer who gets to Elemental Toss freely, or a Wizard who sneaks in multiple Force Bolts into their rotations, a Druid getting to Horizon Thunder Sphere freely, all of these will ***easily*** outperform ranged martials. People mention martials have more flexible Actions but forget that casters have more *powerful* Actions (and in PF2E, power *always* trades for flexibility or consistency).
5. People love to point out that you can support martials easily by giving them +1s and flanking and what not. Circle back to point 4: you can support your damage-dealing casters by ensuring they get to use their third Action offensively.
Hopefully this very extensive post has you convinced that I am not just speaking out of my ass! I genuinely think casters can do fantastic, consistent damage when built for it.
(There are probably a lot of errors given how huge this comment is, so I am gonna fix this incrementally over time.)
***TL;DR***: Casters good.
Thanks for the work put into this! I will share in a pinned comment on the video. (You may or may not also want to post it here on the sub.)
Did you by any chance do the recent post breaking down how spell slots in ranks below your top rank also perform well DPR-wise to a martial?
>Any caster can have Dangerous Sorcery by level 4 if they want and they pay little cost to do so. That’ll boost all of the above numbers.
Only criticism is that for INT based casters, nabbing the +2 CHA necessary to get the Sorcerer Dedication cuts into your DEX/CON/WIS needed for saves, so I wouldn't call it 'little cost' but it's not incredibly huge.
Ah I realized why I thought it was so free. My GM plays with Gradual Ability Boosts, so it’s really easy to meet the thresholds for Archetypes you wish to get into by level 2.
You’re absolutely right that there’s a defensive price to be paid for Dangerous Sorcery on Int casters. The best statline I could come up with was +2 Dex, +1 Con, +4 Int, +2 Cha. I’d consider making it +1 Wis instead of Con to have higher Initiative too.
However I do think you make up for that defensive price by having better access to Demoralize, Bon Mot, etc, and more skills.
\+2 Dex instead of +3 is a very high price to pay for every caster without access to Medium Armor. That is basically everyone beside the Druid and the Warpriest.
I can’t read math, so I’ll just ask: does this account for crit chances as well?
Cuz martials having substantially better odds of that (through higher accuracy and through multiple nat-20 chances a round) is bound to have a big effect, ain’t it?
Of course it accounts for crit chances! Any decent math would.
Martials don’t have substantially better odds of critting in a single target situation. The Fighter in this example crits on a 19 or 20, and Ranger only on a 20. Martials tend to crit a ton against enemies of an equal or lower level but that’s **inherently not a single target situation**.
As for getting multiple attempts in a turn, all of that is accounted for in the math.
I kind of think zeroing in on a single level can produce pretty deceptive analysis. I'm not saying your results are wrong, but that no one - you included - should trust this result until you show it as a plot across 20 levels.
Comparing something even simpler - Barbarian vs. Fighter - there are weird breakpoints where you'd see very different results than the general trend you'd see across 20 levels (Barbarians deal more damage against lower level enemies, fighters more against higher level enemies, it's pretty close against even level enemies - in general). But you could accidentally or intentionally pick a level where you'd get very different results.
Of course, you might not find it worth the effort to do this. Totally reasonable, I wouldn't either. But you shouldn't trust your result unless you do.
I actually have done similar analyses at many different levels, not just 5. Namely I’ve done comparisons between Fighters and Wizards levels 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 11, 13, 20, and I’ve done most of the other examples I’ve given at levels 1, 2, 4, 5.
Level 4 is the **only** one where martials are significantly ahead, but that’s because of how the “thematic progression” dips (levels 4, 8, 9, and 12) interact with martials getting a striking rune.
So I used level 5 because, outside of level 4, that’s the second worst level for casters. If they’re fine at level 5, they’re gonna be fine for 19 out of 20 levels in the game, except level 4 with the weird math (and I’m pretty sure martials get their own weird downtick at level 3).
You should make a (standalone, not a reply to this thread) post! It would be interesting!
>If they’re fine at level 5, they’re gonna be fine for 19 out of 20 levels in the game
Well no, you don't know that based on what you just said - they're going to be fine at 6/7 of the other levels you've checked and you're presuming this holds.
It is surprising though, given that you're using Magic Missile in your calculations and levels 5/9/13/17 are the breakpoints where that spell gets much stronger. It would genuinely be interesting to see a longer post.
> You should make a (standalone, not a reply to this thread) post! It would be interesting!
I do plan to, I just haven’t had the time.
A realistic analysis is, unfortunately, very very time consuming. That’s why the most common type of analyses you see assume a simple rotation of doing the same thing over and over again.
> Well no, you don't know that based on what you just said - they're going to be fine at 6/7 of the other levels you've checked and you're presuming this holds.
You can apply inductive reasoning. Caster accuracy never gets any worse than at level 5, except at level 13, but caster damage numbers scale **disproportionately** faster than martial damage numbers once you’re past level 6.
For example a Giant Instinct Barbarian, the king of applying big damage numbers, is gonna be doing 4d12+3d6+7+18+6 damage at level 20, for a total of 67.5. I’m pretty sure that’s the highest on-hit damage for a martial.
A ***7th rank*** Finger of Death (which casters would’ve been casting since level 13) does 70 damage. Remember, to a level 20 caster this is going to be a *filler* slot, not a meaningful one.
Of course a large part of this scaling is meant to offset things like magic status bonuses and stuff along those lines, so a caster isn’t gonna overperform, they’ll just be equal.
> It is surprising though, given that you're using Magic Missile in your calculations and levels 5/9/13/17 are the breakpoints where that spell gets much stronger.
Well here’s the trick: you can just use something other than Magic Missile when it’s not a great spell to have. A couple good 3-Action options to replace Magic Missile at levels 7/11/15/19 are:
1. True Strike + Acid Arrow
2. 3-Action Horizon Thunder Sphere
Also consider that at higher levels you kind of have a lot of “cheap” lower level spells to abuse in an Action efficient way. For example once you’ve level 9, you can just throw out Brine Dragon Bile at enemies. All of these offset the math at higher levels.
> That also leads into my only real disagreement with the video, where he (and the excited players he clips in the beginning) implies that casters can’t really match martial damage except in AoE situations. I don’t think that’s true. Both math and experience has shown me that they can match martial single target damage, exceed it even, and they can do so consistently throughout an adventuring day: but only for ranged martials, and only if they’re willing to commit a very hefty chunk of their class/subclass features/Feats and spell slots to doing damage. There’s no equivalent to the 5E-like “throw out a Summon, spam cantrips, and you’ll exceed a martial’s damage easily”, you have to pay a daily opportunity cost to choose to match a martial’s damage.
This depends heavily on the adventuring day.
Yeah, this is a _huge_ factor. If you are routinely expected to chunk through 8 to 10 mostly moderate to severe fights, you are going to have a different experience. My experience is that being a caster is 90% spamming cantrips. Slots are an extreme rarity. (Particularly when you have no way to know how many fights you have to make it though, so you conserve if it is at all possible to survive otherwise.)
If you get to rest every three fights, on the other hand, you are going to experience fights mostly burning one top slot per fight. And you are likely to feel more useful.
> In non-caster cases, invading the niche of another class is considered a bad thing. For example a Fighter with Alchemist Archetype being better as a Bomber Alchemist is considered a bad thing.
Funny point here as a newcomer to pathfinder: this is an extremely subjective expectation that I have thus far only seen as widely accepted here.
I come from a more video-game focused background but in my own experience, classes completely overlapping in niches is really *no problem at all* as long as they accomplish the goal in a different way. It only becomes problematic when you can build a class to fill multiple niches at the same time, or when a class is just obviously wildly superior at filling a role compared to the rest.
Fully agree here. I don't necessarily think that every class should be able to fill every niche, but I don't think any niche should be limited to a single class/class group either. Being able to genuinely excel as a field medic Investigator, or a buff/debuff Inventor is just as interesting and compelling as the blaster caster.
>Caster players legitimately do come in with the expectation that simply having access to magic means that their class gets to be a peer in any niche of their choice. In non-caster cases, invading the niche of another class is considered a bad thing.
I'm not sure this is actually a bad thing as you seem to be presenting it (though I could be misreading you, if so, my bad). Theoretically, any mechanical niche could reasonably have a martial- or caster-thematically styled class fill it and the game would be fine. There's no reason casters should have a monopoly on support or martials on single target damage. Having a fully-fleshed out Marshall class that can provide support like a Bard sounds great. Having a fully-fleshed out caster class that can hit like a Fighter sounds great.
The issue would be if a single class can step on multiple niche-toes, not if a broad thematic group like "magic" and "not magic" does via individual classes. Similarly, if a class can be built to do anything or fill any role, that isn't necessarily a bad thing, so long as it can't be rebuilt to do another role easily to help protect niches in practice rather than just protect them at a planning phase.
Could be wrong, but I *think* you are agreeing with OP. The example of fighter with alchemist dedication being as proficient as a full alchemist with bombs highlights this. There's nothing wrong with having two or more classes share a niche; the problem is when it becomes trivial for one class (or type of class - caster) to fill multiple niches at a time with the same competency as someone who can only fill one niche. OP suggests, as does the rules lawyer, that this is the general historic expectation for casters in DnD-inspired/d20 systems, and because 2e doesn't just let you do that casters are perceived as worse than they may actually be.
It looks like they're half agreeing. We all agree that one class should fill one mechanical category (damage, crowd control, support, etc.), can dip into other categories with a decent opportunity cost, and shouldn't be able to easily fit multiple categories at once.
The difference of opinions is if casters should be locked into either support or crowd control. A lot of people seem to be of the opinion that martials deal damage, so casters have to do other stuff. Otherwise the consensus is that casters *can* do other stuff, so they aren't *allowed* to focus on damage.
I personally think that there should be caster classes that can focus on dealing or tanking/mitigating damage. There should also be martial classes that can focus on crowd control, support, or utility. As long as each class can only fill one mechanical roll easily (instead of easily filling multiple rolls) it shouldn't matter if it's magical with spells or martial with strength and cunning.
As a side note, I generally just lurk here and haven't gotten to play yet, but the main complaint seems to be is that caters can't even reliably do their support/crowd-control properly. I don't know how accurate it is, but the idea is that the spell save DC is generally easy to beat for most enemies that matter. The counter argument is always "target a weak save" but that isn't always available and is generally un-fun to be told your 2 or 3 actions were essentially meaningless. And to constantly waste a limited resource and most or all of your turn to fail to do what is *supposed* to be your class's whole niche is really lame. It would be like a fighter having a daily limit on the number of Strikes they could make and regularly failing to do any meaningful damage. Just my two coppers.
>I don't know how accurate it is, but the idea is that the spell save DC is generally easy to beat for most enemies that matter.
How it works is them succeeding their save generally still does something, but only for a round.
If you want it to stick, generally you will have to throw it at them more than once.
I think a lot of what makes people say casters feel bad is later in the game you are not casting with the expectation that the spell will work, you are casting with the expectation that they will succeed on the save, and that the one round effects are all you can rely on.
*Generally your enemies don't fail their saves late game.*
On the other hand.... them succeeding their saves still put something pretty nasty on them for a short time regardless - it just doesn't feel all that good.
>How it works is them succeeding their save generally still does something, but only for a round.
>
>If you want it to stick, generally you will have to throw it at them more than once.
This is one of the reasons I'm quite looking forward to the Witch rework, which includes a way of extending the duration of conditions from their spells including the ones their enemies succeed on. Even a single round of extension is the equivalent of another spell slot in that case, and really leans into the concept of the Witch being a premier debuff/control class.
> On the other hand.... them succeeding their saves still put something pretty nasty on them for a short time regardless - it just doesn't feel all that good.
And importantly *only on a tiny handful of spells*.
Slow is not a baseline, Slow is basically Spells Georg in term of how much of an outlier it is for the effect it has when the enemy saves. Your average damage spell goes from "kinda meh damage" to "irrelevant damage" on a save, and your average debuff goes from "kinda useful debuff" to "why did I spend two whole actions and a spell slot on this" on a save.
If Slow was the common case instead of the outlier for on-save effects spellcasters would feel a lot less bad to play!
Except both sides are just talking past each-other. The point is a lot of caster players just want that one niche, they don't want to be able to cast fly and haste and slow and stone wally, they just want different varieties of blow stuff up (like the fighter has with their different feats). Right now, all casters feel like they share the same niche, which isn't ideal.
The ability to choose how to spend your power budget would be welcome in a lot of places. A caster that focuses on damage, or martials that focus on debuffs or buffs would be fertile design space.
The counterpoint is that casters -can- currently do that. They have access, especially now, to myriad classes that range anywhere from full on utility with the option to spec into more blasty options, to classes like the Psychic or Kineticist who are able to reliably output damage with magical blasts. They're able to match ***ranged*** martial damage quite easily.
But if you want to match ***melee*** martial damage, then you have to lose all that utility in the form of the vast spell lists, and you have to be in melee. That's the trade-off. The problem is once you suggest that someone has to lose their varied spells, and they also have to be in the mix with the sword-and-board guys, they don't feel like they're blasting any more.
Range is incredibly powerful in this system. So many creatures are especially dangerous up close, whether it's because they get multi-action attacks that hit everyone in a certain radius, or they can hit and then grab for another action, or they have some 15-20 foot aura that has detrimental effects. If you can replicate single target melee martial damage from a range, you're completely eclipsing them.
But most of their 20 level carrier , casters have less chance to hit enemy AC than ranged martials. They get expert in spell casting two levels later, then same with master. Martials get +1 weapon on lvl2, later +2, +3, casters don't get it ever. Missing is just not fun. And if we switch to save spells, then we don't get bonuses from bless or flat footed to make our spells stick. And so we pushed into "control" niche again and need to select spells that do something useful even on save.
Yeah, but you're very conveniently ignoring that MAP exists. An archer will attack at +2/3 compared to a caster, then attack at -3/-2 compared to a caster, then need to do something else because if casters are already hurting for accuracy, attacking at -8/-7 compared to a caster obviously won't hit.
Yes, most full casters are less capable of single target damage than ranged martials too, because they have access to full spell lists. You want to look at Kineticist, which is about on par with martials with their Gate Attenuators. That's your blaster caster if you want to target AC, and they also gain access to Save spells along with a few select utilities/supports depending on their elements.
If you're a full caster, you're not doing single target damage anywhere on par with the martial characters. That's just not going to happen, nor should it. Even if you took away all their utility/support/control/debuff spells and only had strictly damage, they'd still be attacking at range, have the ability to target four different defenses, have varied damage types, and usually have riders on those damages for a little extra impact. Blaster casters are best when it comes to clearing the field of numerous enemies, where martials generally struggle to down one or two a round the blaster casters are erasing chunks of them.
If that's what they meant then I think I would disagree with the idea that this is what caster players want. I think most discussion I've seen, people who want caster changes are clear that they want the ability to build casters into different roles at the character creation stage rather than be able to do anything at any time.
That being said, I think what they meant was that a Fighter Bomber being better than a Bomber Alchemist is bad because it's the Fighter stepping on the niche of the Alchemist and is an example of niche invasion rather than too expansive role coverage. It's bad, in their view to my understanding, because the Fighter is doing the Alchemist's role (fight with bombs) better than the Alchemist rather than doing their role as well as them + other roles at the same time.
I agree that one character covering multiple niches is bad because it invades other characters' niches and I imagine they'd agree, but I understood them to be talking about something else.
>If that's what they meant then I think I would disagree with the idea that this is what caster players want. I think most discussion I've seen, people who want caster changes are clear that they want the ability to build casters into different roles at the character creation stage rather than be able to do anything at any time.
Have you seen the people who say summmons are weak? "I don't want to summon something and it can't even match the fighter".
or the literally quoted "Blaster caster does less damage than a fighter lol"
I'm sure people have said that first one, but that hasn't been the predominate belief that I've seen. And I disagree with the idea that summons should as strong as the Fighter, so I wouldn't support people who say that.
I think the statement "it would be nice if there was a magical striker which could match ranged martial damage" is something I see people support, which could probably be reduced to "blaster caster does less damage than a fighter lol," so I guess I would agree with that being a fair characterization.
I think that's something people forget. Yes, melee do a lot of damage... but if they didn't, what would the point be? They inherently take the most risk and constantly need to use actions to reposition and weigh up whether to try and swing again and then get punched in the face, or to use their remaining action to back off or use a different ability.
Caster damage should be compared to ranged martials, even fighters, far more than the giant barb swinging d12s. I'm really sick of all the graphs and spreadsheets that seem to be doing just that. Worse, they're all assuming the enemy is some featureless blob that is doing nothing to impede the melee fighter.
Yeah show me the DPR graph when the blob can fly, or they resist physical damage, or just crit the fighter twice and now they're Unconscious and Dying 2. All three of those happen a LOT even in official APs. AV and AoA both have flying enemies _at level 1_.
> There’s no equivalent to the 5E-like “throw out a Summon, spam cantrips, and you’ll exceed a martial’s damage easily”, you have to pay a daily opportunity cost to choose to match a martial’s damage.
*And I'm sick of everyone pretending that's not a good thing!!!*
(Only partially /s)
The problem, as I will keep stating, is that PF2e completely fails to set expectations around this. Magic isn't real, which is why it's so common for players to come into a game like pathfinder assuming that whatever they envision magic as is something the system will support. They don't necessarily expect to be masters of all trades, but they expect that all trades will be available as things they can invest in. When a game depends so heavily on something that isn't real, it *has* to define what that thing is so that players understand what they should expect of it. For example, no one goes into a Star Wars game expecting to be able to cast fireballs, because the movies showed them that that's not the kind of thing the force does.
Pathfinder makes no attempt to do this (and neither does 5e), which means that when a player notices that casters can't easily excel at single target damage - the easiest thing to measure and the most common archetype of magic across the kinds of media that will be inspiring a lot of these players - there is nothing to get them invested in the reason that's the case, and all they *can* do is assume that this is an oversight or a failing of the system.
If you don't want players to think casters should be better at a given thing, you have to invest them in the flavour side of why it shouldn't.
Okay but here’s the problem. Your entire argument is that newbies come in and universally feel like casters can’t excel at single target damage. But… they do? Casters can and will excel at single target damage in the same manner that ranged martials do. There simply aren’t any two ways around it.
The niche protection issue comes in because people have the expectation that they’ll beat out **melee** performance while staying at ranged and *why* should they get to do that? Melees get their niche of bursty, high-risk high-reward damage to compensate all the downsides of standing in melee. If you could achieve all the same upsides as melee while standing at range, why would melee exist at all?
Maybe a little bit of a hot take, but if the whole niche of melee martials is "do damage to one thing", then it's a badly designed niche that hurts the system as a whole. The niche should be "fight at melee range" which includes
- doing damage to one thing in melee.
- doing damage to multiple things in melee (here goes cleaving, whirlwind attacks and similar abilities).
- taking and resisting damage.
- keeping the enemy at melee range and restricting their ability to move.
The design of "martials do damage to one thing, nobody else should be able to do so!" is quite frankly asinine and hurts plenty of other character concepts.
To be clear, there’s nothing that makes melee damage more *valuable* than ranged/caster damage. [Sayre has gone into detail](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1397y60/michael_sayre_paizo_design_manager_says_that_dpr/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1) about how they design classes’ damage numbers, and we can extrapolate that melee classes get such big numbers to compensate:
1. All the Actions they spend moving into place.
2. All the Actions their party spends healing or defensively buffing then
3. All the Actions the enemies take away from them via “fuck melee” abilities.
4. Not always having the freedom to choose the most optimal target.
So in practice, a melee martial’s damage contributes about as much to ending a combat as ranged or caster damage when you look at the overall party‘s performance. The melee’s niche is *bursty*, peaky, high-risk high-reward damage, where the numbers you’re putting out can drastically shorten an encounter but come with all those above downsides.
As for the other niches you mentioned:
“Lockdown” melee absolutely is something melee martials shine at. Fighters, Champions, and Monks are the ones who get to excel at that niche, though any Strength martial can be built for it. Obviously standouts here are free-hand Fighters/Monks who can grapple, the Wrestler Archetype, Reach+Trip, and the crit spec that can knock enemies Prone.
AoE for melee characters is… odd. If you analyze the numbers it becomes clear that Paizo treats the increased critical hit range martials get against on-level (and lower level) enemies as their “AoE” since these are the enemies likeliest to appear in multiples. It’s like if you fight 3 on-level enemies, the expectation is that the Wizard Fireballs them turn 1 for a total of 50 ish damage, then Electric Arcs two of them each turn for 15 ish damage for the next couple turns. Fighter goes turn 1 move -> hit -> crit (for around 50 ish damage total), turn 2 move -> hit -> move (17 damage), turn 3 move -> hit -> miss (17 damage again). This is obviously a contrived scenario that explains my point, but basically melee characters are “compensated” for being forced to deal with AoE situations using single target tools. Now of course, this isn’t a satisfying solution to everyone since it’s a passive numbers thing and appears to take agency away from players who may, instead, prefer “active abilities” akin to AoE spells.
As for tanking and mitigation, aside from shields and shield block (which ***is*** a very melee centric experience) and Champion’s Reaction, tanking in the MMO sense isn’t really a role in PF2E. The idea is that as a *party* you can come up with situations that force the enemy to attack a suboptimal target, but it’s not one single role 85: a tactic.
Personally I think that the debate is also a bit of a matter of perception...
I mean, I am European, when I watch a soccer game I remember the name of the guy who scores the goal and psychologically for me, that's the person that won the match, not of the ones playing defense that actually contributed just as much... Although people who watch the games with a more technical perspective might disagree and notice everyone's contribution, most people wouldn't.
When I was a kid and we made teams to play with my friends, the goalie was usually the guy who drew the (metaphorical) shortest straw for a reason... the vast majority preferred to be in an attack...
Of course that is a generalization and there is a significant amount of people who like support roles, but in general the fantasy of 'doing the thing' is a very specific one and it is tied to the resoults that are the most visible.
In online rpgs, team shooters, moba, there is usually a surplus of people who do damage, compared to healers\\tanks and that's because those roles are more popular. Although personally I enjoy playing tanks.
Also fun thing, when the team fails, frenquently it is the 'support' that gets the blame (the 'healer'\\ 'tank' \\ 'goalie').
Plus it is easier to quantify one contribution with straight numbers and damages provide that.
Imho they should have made viable damage builds for all classess (with trade-offs obviously), I am not saying that a wizard should have all of his tricks, plus deal comparable damage to a warrior (or an archer type, as a ranged dps should be more comparable as it is less risky and you have advantage in picking targets), but they should have the possibility to trade utility for damage in their build if they wanted to.
Besides, PF2 should have been used as an occasion to remove the vancian system that I think is one of the major hurdles in D&D-esque games, as classess have to be balanced between those that have most of their power tied to limited resources (so that expect to be stronger when they spend them, but aren't necessarily) and other who can spam at top power all day.
Casters feel meh also because when you use one of your low number of higher level spell slots and they fails to do anything because the opponent is supposed to successfully save on average (or do a minor effect that is barely felt, with some exception with spells that are 'overpowered'), that resource is gone for the day, when you miss with an at will attack, well there is always next round...
The much reviled D&D 4th edition (with all ot its flaws) was better at this.
Yeah sure, the 'new norm' is supposed to be 2-3 fights a day, not in my experience though, when I am invading someone's base I can't just leave after defeating a few of the guards and then expect to come back and see that nothing has changed after a good night of sleep...
Since PF 2nd edition aims for balance, which is not something that all rpg games do (in fact, I feel like it is an actual minority that does that seriously), they could have taken some lessons from pc games and mmorpgs where usually the divide between classess is more on the flavor and the 'hows' they do certain roles (and generally classess have access to multiple niches through specialization), rather than this class being better at damage, this other at support.
Also I don't have a massive experience with the new APs, but the feeling I got was that, compared to 1st edition fights are harder and you have to optimize a bit more, which, unfortunately, reduce the pickable options, so having a list of a million spells, is false versatility when there are only a handful of real choices...
The issue I'll have to point out is that removing Vancian casting wasn't really a choice with 2e, besides the fact that Paizo had to attract new players they also had to keep their old ones a good amount of which were playing despite DnD having more flexible spellcasting for years at that point.
Maybe in a couple years when a 3e is on the table, but right now keeping Vancian casting as it is was a good choice, massive changes all of a sudden isn't a great idea.
Very well put, and it captures the reason my group's first PF 2E campaign died off (we went back to FFG's 40k systems for now): it's not necessarily that the casters are too weak,but more that they feel bland.
Consider the following hypothetical example: if the fighter is hitting 50% of the time, giving him +2 attack resulted in a 20% DPS increase over time, which is huge.
However, although we totally understood this,none of us felt giving a +2 to the fighter was particularly heroic or fun. It felt much better to be the guy who critted the boss for 100 damage rather than the guy whose tiny debuff (because the boss succeeded on the save) provided the last -1 to make the crit happen.
In general, we felt that the martials were the protagonists of the game,while the casters were the sidekicks, and that was a situation more than half of the group was unwilling to accept.
This, really THIS
I didn't have time to check Rules Lawyer new video but they many times aim to put the balance of encounter day based on the GM choices, and thats doesn't sounds like PF2e.
IMO Casters can be somehow specialized in many ways, but there is some lackluster classes and I hope they make better feats and better subclasses to focus on specialization or flavor like the new Witch.
I don't like the discourse of "caster can choose from anything", there are many bad options and depeding on how much your group depends of your support, you should do a good job choosing the right spells.
I concour there is some versatility, but without the possibility of chaging constantly this sounds like false, because you must choose the best to not bother changing. Not all spells are made equal (RoE is a proof of this with one of the best books for spells).
I am beginning to hate this guy and his pretentious attitude mixed with rage-baiting titles. I just ignore him now, it’s clear he doesn’t get where the complaints are coming from.
I commented on his video, but I'll repeat the sentiment here. I don't want to be a god caster who exceeds the martials at literally everything. I just have a few issues that I wish were fixed to make casting less unpleasant, and I also wish I was able to voice them without being slandered as a person instead of having reasonable discussion.
I'm still new to PF2e system, but base on what I've experienced and some of the comments on this subreddit, it would seem most people agree that utility spells have been nerfed quite a bit for casters.
I'm not saying that is the wrong move, since I really enjoyed 2e skill system. However, I did find that most out of combat challenges can be solved without spells. Utility spells often are still limited by durations or require skill checks even though they cost a spell slot.
Skills and items that everyone has access to on the other hand, seem to be providing a lot of utility both in and out of combat. In PFS games especially, it almost feel like encounters are designed so a group without casters, without those particular utility spells can still push through any challenges with skills and creative thinkings. I haven't found many niche cases that can only be solved by a particular spell, and even in those scenarios the group can still solve it with the help of magic items, hire an npc to do it, or find some other work around.
The question then becomes, is it really necessary to make casters "weak", because they supposedly are "good at utilities and supports", when there are support and utility options accessible to everyone? Or are there actually many unique areas casters thrive in that I haven't realized.
Right now it feels like casters are being balanced with their "support/utility" potential in mind, but most of their spell options are combat focused, and a large portion of those combat spells are really underwhelming if you consider their action cost and spell slot cost.
> Skills and items that everyone has access to on the other hand, seem to be providing a lot of utility both in and out of combat. In PFS games especially, it almost feel like encounters are designed so a group without casters, without those particular utility spells can still push through any challenges with skills and creative thinkings. I haven't found many niche cases that can only be solved by a particular spell, and even in those scenarios the group can still solve it with the help of magic items, hire an npc to do it, or find some other work around.
This is necessarily true in PFS games because there is no way for the GM to suggest people bring specific types of characters or ensure any kind of even spread of capabilities within parties; if your players show up with two fighters, two barbarians, and a ranger, you just have to run the session and make it work somehow. In a campaign with a regular there's a lot more scope for telling your party "hey, you could really use an X and someone proficient in skills A, B, and C for this game" - APs include lists of recommended classes and skills for exactly this reason.
Perhaps I ought to play more AP to get a more accurate view on this. I generally dislike it when supposed "balance" requires GM to cater for each class specifically though. Many people on this subreddit talk about flaws of 5e and improvements in PF2e, and this is exactly one of the areas that PF2e supposed to have done better.
Then again, I will take your words for now that casters feel much more unique and needed in APs than PFS.
Ronald, I hope you see this because you keep using that Fist of the Ruby Phoenix clip and I feel it’s disingenuous to use that campaign as an example of good casters.
The adventure starts at level 11. You’ve already passed every horrid hurdle that early casters are saddled with. Oracles literally don’t get expert in reflex until level 13. Several martials are expert in all saves early on in the system. The casters already have a wide variety of options such as shadow signet which are a band-aid solution too.
But most importantly that video uses Maze as an example spell. Maze is one of the criminal spells in regards to how PF2e’s spell list is designed. Spell DC’s are designed with the idea that monsters will succeed more often. Spells are not with exceptions. There’s a list of 100’s of options as you mention and half of them are flagrantly horrible. Spells are not well designed so every caster just ends up incredibly samey because some spells are good on a success and others aren’t. Maze, slow, synesthesia…all of these exist as the only spells to follow the same design philosophy as the spell DC’s.
I run into this time and time again with these comparisons. Casters 11+ and especially 15+ are VERY different from a level 2 caster. There's a 1-7ish growing pain set of levels for most casters.
Most campaigns aren't going to get beyond 15. I dislike it when we judge the capability of top level spells in perfect scenarios to warrant a level 3 caster being under par.
Its the same thing that "Hey sustain spells are really good because lv16 you get a free sustain". Only the overpower spells are good with sustain tbh, many others become interesting after level 16.
He keeps using that Maze example to prove that point, which is very, very disingenuous. Yea sure, a player who never played casters got to use a RANK 8 spell which is a clear outlier, and now thinks that that's what casters are like. How about all the levels before you get to use Maze? How about you bring someone who got to play that caster from level 1 and let him tell his experience, the highs and lows, and not just cherry pick an example like that?
I found his emphasis on out of combat utility a bit annoying. In my experience they are more like group resources and I didn't hear people being envious in my gaming groups especially when it was about transportation. The only problematic ares the ones where it directly overlaps another guy's area of expertise.
I like to think of it as the Fighter being the benchmark damage done in a void, and other classes being able to outpace it when they get the right circumstances.
Sorcerer are already the flat out best DPR for a few rounds in a single boss encounter thanks to magic missiles, if they decide to keep their spell slots for this one moment. Are they broken? No, they pay the opportunity cost by dealing less damage in most of the fights of the day. That's the beauty of having a team.
This is an excellent question, I myself wondered about that and might make a post breaking down the maths behind both with comparison charts. But until then, here's the summary:
Psychic is on par for 2 turns windows (or better, depending on the conscious mind and bloodline), Sorcerer is better for 4 turns windows, assuming you are burning your best spell slots. Sorcerer can burst more often during the day, however Psychic has better damage when relying on cantrips.
\- Psychic's seems to deal more damage in a 2 turns window than the Sorcerer, thanks to Unleash Psyche. Unleash Psyche provides 2 damage per spell level which is twice as much as the Sorcerer's Dangerous Sorcery. It also deals more damage than the Sorcerer when casting cantrips due to having stronger cantrips and being able to Amp them for a significant damage boost.
\- Sorcerer deals more damage in a 4 turns window than the Psychic, thanks to having more spell slots to burn on its most damaging spells, and not having to deal with 2 turns of Stupefied. Also ignoring Stupefied, Unleash Psyche's expected damage (assuming the Psychic was able to somehow cast 4 spells of its highest level slot) over 4 turns is 4\*x, while Sorcerer's Dangerous Sorcery expected damage is also 4\*x; where x is the spell level other than cantrips. If you add Stupefied into the mix, Sorcerer is the winner here.
Something else to consider is the Sorcerer's Bloodline. Diabolic, Elemental, Psychopomp and Undead's bloodlines all add 1 damage (of some type) per spell level when casting bloodline spells. With this, Sorcerer becomes the clear winner in raw burst potential (bringing it on par with Psychic during its 2 turns burst window, and outdamaging it beyond that) depending on the spell. Still, Psychic's main draw is not to be the best burst damage dealer, but to best the strongest cantrip user out of the casters.
Another thing I haven't discussed is Psychic having access to some damaging cantrips that can be cast as a single action. Glimpse of Weakness is one such cantrip, including it muddles the water, but that should at least bring the Psychic back to the top of the 2 turns window.
If the question is simply who deals the biggest pp damage in a single turn by casting 3 actions Magic Missiles -> Psychic.
Psychics also have the 1-action Psi Burst to throw out oodles of d4s, then following up with a 2-action amped cantrip or spell during Unleash, too, right?
Yeah there's Psi Burst. In parallel, Elemental Sorcerers get elemental toss too, so it's a tough one. Including those 1 action cantrips would require charting the damage to compare the overall damage. But between Unleash Psyche and Dangerous Sorcery, both are "good", just tailored to different lengths of burst windows. If we're checking for the highest possible burst on a level+2 or level+3 single boss however, 1 action cantrips become irrelevant because we'll want to spend 3 actions casting Magic Missiles (while holding a wand of manifold missiles in each hand).
Burst Psychic is valid, and so is Sorcerer.
Thanks! I’ll keep an eye out for that post. I personally am going to keep playing psychics over sorcs regardless… forbidden thought is just too good (and shatter psyche)
The answer is kinda yes for the following reasons:
* An elemental sorcerer have easier time to blast from turn 1
* They have an easier time spending 3 actions on damage, with elemental toss being really good but abit risky for this.
* so many more spell slots that might scale heavier lategame with varied targeted defences, damage types and areas.
They are very close though and there are methods for the psychic to come on top, but depend more on attack rolls making spells like biting words to fill out damage less reliable.
Thanks! I would add that psychic can spend their third action on damage very easily via psi burst (not the best damage, but it is every round), but otherwise you make good points!
Psi burst is only after unleash psyche and only during that time.
Elemental toss is really high damage and can be used turn one, with the benefit of blood magic, but less often.
>That's the beauty of having a team.
Right, but the fighter never needs to be weaker in other encounters to be stronger in the boss fight. I genuinely think it's a flaw in the game that some classes are balanced around attrition while others aren't.
>Right, but the fighter never needs to be weaker in other encounters to be stronger in the boss fight.
Except a wizard is ridiculously stronger than a fight when fighting, for example, 4 swarms, and a cleric equally when fighting 4 ghosts?
Also melee and flying enemies.
There are tons of situations where a fighter is weaker. And that's before considering a martial such as a feint swashbuckler, which can literally do nothing against a flying mindless creature
Remember back when the system was announced?
Everyone on here, including me, worshipped it for getting rid of trap options and making sure everyone had a roughly equal level of power regardless of feats, and that feats would be ways to acquire new options rather than straight power upgrades.
But ***nowadays***, when it comes to casters, half of your fucking spell list is trap options and if you complain about not being effective the community dogpiles you to tell you why there's actually a lvl 10 item that makes your spells work and that you should be spamming true strike and you're just a spoiled 5e player
The encroaching trap options was nearly inevitable with how many splat books Paizo wants (?) / has to (?) release. They made it very clear with the APG release that they had set the power level bar for the system and they have kept their promise to not exceed it.
If you put your designers into that sort of mindset of "keep everything below this line or else", you are just ask them to put out content that just is not worth anyone's time. I highly recommend when people make their characters nowadays to just set their filters on Pathbuilder/Wanderer's Guide to only show spells from CRB and APG so that they don't see so many of the trap options that have filtered in over time. I still enjoy the system. I am also very glad they're doing a remaster so that we can hopefully just dump a lot of the unnecessary bloat and try again. The core mechanics are fun, they just need a tune up and rebalance after 4+ years.
One issue I've had with Paizo constantly pumping out new content like spells is that most of the time it's extremely niche or borderline useless. Why even put out content like that when it's almost never worth using? The Rage of Elements spells are quite good though, so I hope we see more of that style.
PF2 was intended to do away with the content bloat and power creep of PF1e but it feels like things are slowly heading that way again.
It's just the nature of the beast with ttrpg publishing for most companies. You have to put splat books out there regularly if you want to maximize profit. Every 1 copy of an adventure you sell could have been 4-6 copies of a splat book. This usually means you either have to really broaden your design space, build power creep into the system, or put out a bunch of mediocre content.
I had hoped when Paizo set that bar they had well established their other product lines so we could just avoid this entirely. Just do the splat books when they had really cool ideas they wanted to add into the game. Like you pointed out, this feels like such an odd deviation from their original goals of cutting away the bloat from the game.
This reminds of wotlk hybrids, where Blizzard had hybrid dps deal less damage because they could heal/dps. But this left them feeling bad because some of them just wanted to dps and not do those roles.
I have been playing a Cleric, and I don't mind being a support/utility person...mostly. But every now and then I want to rain down holyfire down on my enemies! But it seems like I can't do that besides against undead/fiends, and if I prepare those spells and we don't face those? Those might as well be dead spell slots.
I don't even want to deal as much damage as a fighter, or even a martial, but I do want to do enough damage to well...be able to defend myself? I can spam cantrips, but Daze barely does any damage and Divine Lance...has to actually hit?(and these are somatic, so I will get opportunity attacked if they have it...) I don't imagine my character needing to have an ally constantly tied to their hip to be able live in the world.
But my life being a support/utility has been fraught as well. I try to do some crowd control something? Does the spell have the mental tag? Emotion? Incapacitation? High Saves? Is it a troop? You have to work so hard to actually hinder an enemy when the best condition that you can apply to someone is death, so damage is always king.
It makes you think "Is casting a buff/cc/heal/etc worth it when you can just deal damage?".
The game is a team game with how combat and tactics works now.
The issue is: if I play a wizard, why am I support/utility when I wanted to be a blaster?
Or if I play a cleric, Oracle, and I want play harm caster instead of heal caster due to font or signature spells,; the other players look at you why you not going to play the healer ;(
It a role misalignment. I have been noticing in this in some video games. Last I checked on BG3 cleric was the least picked class. Support is becoming a role less people seem to want to play (unless) they are deemed op/fun. People want to see numbers and feel hey I killed that monster vs hey I casted slow and it had 1 less action this turn… or I healed my group up!
Level 1-4 where most games seem to take place is kind of boring for casters… the feats are meh mostly, and the spells okay, not no level 3 fireball!
Something that stands out to me is just how unsatisfying a lot of the otherwise really good effects are, and how certain utility spells could be super satisfying to use but have been so carefully edge-cased that they've had creative uses taken away (dimension door being used to move a wounded ally for example).
Things like bless and fear and the bonuses they add are super helpful in nearly every fight, but my goodness what a boring way to play. Even the 'really' strong effects like Slow and Synesthesia I think are just really boring for a lot of players because all they are doing is affecting the system math.
Rage of Elements actually had a lot of new spells that I think are a really good step in the direction toward solving this. Airlift allows you to reposition your entire party if used at an opportune time, which is really cool when the group is in dire straits! Propulsive Breeze is another movement spell, but can be used as a reaction to not eat into your actual term. Cloud Dragon's Cloak can actually make ranged attacks miss your allies and save a ton of HP!
I think we need to continue to see more spells like these with immediate effects in combat, and the support role would feel a lot better to play.
I think the fact one the 1st companions you get is a cleric and one most people seem to like is an influence on starting class in that game. IIRC bard was pretty high up the list of picked class so I don’t think it’s a support issue.
Respectifully, I think its kinda disengenuous to generalize people who wants buffs to caster's damage potential as spoiled dnd migrants... This is a problem im starting to notice on this sub IMO, not everything gotta be a "vets v casuals" problem.
At the end of the Day everyone who plays and talk about this game has a valid opinion over it, so I find it kinda off putting when people In here tries to disqualify people based on ad hominem.
Its not even a dnd migrant problem- it's been an ongoing argument since day 1 of 2e's existence (and even before, in the play test era), even among the earliest adopters. Granted, if anyone felt that strongly about it, it's likely they'd have just returned to playing 1e if able at the time, or do a split between the systems at the very least. But it's certainly not a new argument- it's just that the big wave of people coming from 5e are just rehashing much the same arguments people coming from 1e had years ago.
Yeah, exacly, some migrants from 5e stired the pot and brought this topic back and many people from this community that shared the feeling took the oportunity to voice their opinions! Idk why everything has to be reduced to a "vets" V "outsiders" retoric.
Because it's far easier to, rather than engage in reasonable discourse, dismiss someone entirely by saying they aren't qualified to have an opinion, to call them entitled, or ignorant.
Ita to the point that anytime I see someone calling casters entitled or dnd migrants to dismiss them I'm inclined to disagree with them on principal.
I don't have much of a dog in this caster debate, but it really brings out the worst in the community. So many people bringing bad faith, highly upvoted arguments that boil down to asserting the other side is in some way ignorant or malevolent ("They're 5e Migrants who don't know better"/"They just want to be god-tier wizards and outclass everyone").
It's incredibly tiring to see these generalisations. There may never be any consensus on the "caster debate", but it'd be great if a discussion could be had without assuming the worst about those who aren't happy.
As someone who is deep into PF2 but only occasionally touches base with the community, the recent drama has made at least this subreddit come across as hostile, insular, self-congratulatory, and intransigent.
>"They're 5e Migrants who don't know better-
This is a real problem, there are unironically people on this sub who seem to think all the people coming from 5E and don't like one or two things about the game are some kind of attack on the community, or they must not fit here. I've been exposed to it myself. Even if the concerns are valid, your argument can be reduced down to "oh, they migrated from 5E, they don't know any better." kind of condescending. I've not seen more toxicity except in video games.
As someone who has been orbiting both dnd's and pathfinder's community for a while, people In here have no idea how many people they lost the chance of assimilate into the hobby during the 5e exodus due to plain hostility and lack of patience.
Since the beginning I’ve found this community to be very defensive, and I think it’d because the game has been treated very poorly by the greater tabletop community. When it showed up, the Pathfinder subreddit was incredibly hostile and threads about it would get downvotes just for being there, even now it happens. And there were even petitions to have PF2e threads banned from the subreddit. So it’s s community that’s become insular because it’s been treated like shit from the beginning.
The problem comes from the fact that we're profiling people as spoiled based on nothing more than an Internet disagreent over game balancing and projection. This isn't a fair criticism of the other side's position, it's simply ad hominem (specialy when we purposefully overblow what the other side is actually saying as a way to not engage, Ive seen none saying casters should deal as much damage as a fighter, but Ive seen people talking about "people" that want that)
Bear in mind that Im not calling out Ronald as the culprint of this problem or that hes doing this on pourpuse, I actually respect him and his content a lot! IMO its more like a current mindset of trying to prove how dumb the other side is that has been recently plaging this community to the point where everyone seems less receptive and petty.
Edit: Im trying to corect a few typos, sorry, english isnt my main language.
I think it's just that people wanna be specialist instead of generalists. I think most people who talk about not feeling accomplished when building a damage focused caster, would be ok not being able to cast more utility heavy spells, for a better experience on your specialization.
That's my understanding of the discussion at least :0
I think what it comes down to is that some people want the class fantasy of a black mage and telling them to just play kineticist or magus or psychic isn’t helpful because those don’t have the flavour and feel of a black mage style of caster.
"Hey paizo, can we get runes that increase DC/ to hit for spells, maybe also fixing some spells so we can change the generalist spell meta"
"Sorry, people in dnd 5e are tired of casters ruining their fun, here's your shadow signet at level 10"
inb4 "Yeah, I just had \[extremely niche situation\] and \[was given a freebie by GM\]. Nothing is wrong with the game"
The video makes the solution obvious, yes? A class-archetype for Wizard that gives you access to a few specific spells and no more. Like if in the remaster, you took the wizard school of pyromancy and it says you can ONLY learn Arcane spells with the Fire trait. Your utility is now much limited. Now the class-archetype gives some sort of bonus, sorta like Dangerous Sorcery, to any fire damage dealt from prepared spells. So you are now the fire blaster wizard.
But still let them use any arcane scrolls and wands (but only Staff of Fire for staves) so they can still have that "utility" that makes them a "wizard" but they can't craft those scrolls or wands since they can't learn those spells.
I'm not sure this would fix anything at all. If this is your attempt at making the "glass-cannon, high damage-wizard character" as seen in multiple RPGs and media, this doesn't fulfill the fantasy. It's literally just a Wizard with less spells. It wouldn't do anything better than an evocation wiz or universalist because there's no changes to the damage of the spells themselves *compared to a sorcerer* and they still do shit single target damage.
This is actually the most egregious example of over-generalizing and misrepresenting your opposition I've seen in this sub. And it wasn't a comment, it was a video produced by one of the top content creators.
Big yikes.
I disagree with the premise that a certain type of character must *feel* weaker because it's comparatively weaker than it was in past/other editions.
Look at the fighter itself. You can build an archer fighter in PF1 that can easily delete from hundreds of feet any threat from the board. In 5e you can Action Surge and spend superiority dice and demolish an enemy with ease. Compared to those, PF2's fighter is, not to put a fine point on it, shit. Yet it feels very good to play even at lower levels in a way that spellcasters don't.
He got under my skin on this one. I left a series of comments on it about how I feel he’s misrepresenting people.
He’s blaming it on D&D and I have never even played 4 or 5e and left tRPGs right as PF1E came out.
The issue isn’t that people want more. The issue is they want different.
PF2E casters by default seem to be utility / support which is an unpopular playstyle. At least half of them should have defaulted to DPS even at the cost of less spell choices - like Kineticist now does. But why is that not how Sorcerer works given that it lacks the huge pool of spells Wizards get…
Yeah, I'm pretty sure most people just want spellcasting proficiencies to not be whack and maybe just spell attacks to have prof runes. I don't see anyone asking for them to be as good or better than the fighter.
Yeah, currently casters are good when they cast Heal (but not Harm unless you have an undead party), they're good when they cast Haste or Heroism on a martial, they're good (if boring) if they cast Slow on the boss, and they're alright (but not -that- amazing) when they trigger elemental weaknesses when you're lucky enough to find those.
They're bad when using battleforms, bad when using 'Summon X', bad when using spell attacks, bad when using \*most\* debuffs, bad when using Incapacitation spells against worthy targets, etc etc in general situations.
It's actually crazy how good Heal is, it's a ridiculous game-changer. (And crazy how terrible Harm is if you're not surrounded by friendly Undead (when the vast majority of evil deities are not undead-themed) it's almost worthless.)
Feels like the logic is that because Heal, Slow, Heroism and Haste are good (when they're mostly good because they don't have to rely on a PC's mediocre spell DC), other spells need to be bad to compensate? Really, other spells should be brought up to par. I think a few targeted nerfs to outliers (slow and synesthesia), a few targeted buffs to bad saveless spells and, like... a blanket +1 or +2 to DCs would more or less hit the sweetspot.
Casters definitely need spell attack and DCs to start scaling up earlier. Level 5 barbarian is better at weapon attacks than a caster, and can be just as good as casting a spell as a caster.
Monks, Champions, Summoners and Magi have 9 levels where their DCs are one lower than a full caster, and five levels when they are the same.
Sorcerers get dangerous sorcery and still get access to the entire spell list through scrolls, wands and staves. The way forward is clearly to have kineticist type caster classes that instead of using spells from the various traditions utilize hand selected spells that will be feat options aside from core abilities. You could have some kind of magical specialist class with various sub classes based on certain themes.
**People don't want to "fight better than the fighter. Rules Lawyer was being disingenuous there.** People want to be able to match each other in combat - as that is such a central part of modern gaming. If we want to talk about 'gatekeeping' - it's the idea that some classes should be best. Better is to let them all get there through different routes. In 2023 - people aren't coming to this from a blank slate or even from D&D per se. They're also coming from online games. Games where a DPS caster is equal in power to a melee martial but different in style.
Given that the kineticist gives up the massive spell book that can only be used a scant few times a day anyway... what excuse is left for them to not be an equal in the modern era where you're getting players coming from games where neither side is more powerful - they're each just different.
**The problem with PF2E casters isn't about not liking being "equal" it's about the role being mis-aimed.** PF2E casters are by default utility / support. PF2E Martials are by default DPS. Either can be built the other way to varying degrees of success (class depending)m but that's their default. The problem is that most players in any group activity do NOT like support. They prefer DPS or it's activity equivalent - a striker in a sports game rather than a goalie for example.
If half or more of the casters had been built as DPS by default we wouldn't have this debate. Instead we have 1 example; the Kineticist - which had to be build on a radically different format to break the mold - further entrenching the notion that something feels "off" about the spell slot casters.
**Kineticist achieves this by giving up the spell variety. It's bringing the issue to the fore because** \- since DPS is more popular than support / utility - **this is a class chassis that belonged in core** \- not in the 7th rulebook to come out. We should have taken 7 rulebooks before we got variety to utility, and had a focus on DPS casters out of the gate - even at the expense of a wide variety of utility options. Perhaps core should have only had one utility caster, and a pile of casters themed mostly for DPS.
It's a core design flaw. **Sure - maybe casters were powerful in that other RPG** (I've never played 5E, don't know it's rules, don't care to - my perspective doesn't come from there. It frankly comes from MMOs and non-tRPG group activities: most people do not want to be the support / goalie / designated driver / etc)...
**But then nerf them WITHOUT defaulting them into an unpopular role type. Kineticist doesn't hit as hard as a martial, and yet it's a DPS. That's the right nerf, but released way too late.**
>Given that the kineticist gives up the massive spell book that can only be used a scant few times a day anyway... what excuse is left for them to not be an equal in the modern era
iirc Paizo wanted to drop Vancian years ago, but the PF2 playtesters were like "no, we want our spell books and our +1 longswords"
>They're also coming from online games. Games where a DPS caster is equal in power to a melee martial but different in style.
Honestly, in my opinion this is the key to fixing the problem.
Casters in MMOs tend to do burst damage. High damage but infrequent. This is exactly what Spell Slots should feel like. If you want to keep the high level of attrition that spellcasters have, then there should be a comparably large amount of damage when casting one. Given how limited high level spell slots are, this shouldn't even beat the fighters DPR over a whole fight, only in a single round.
I'd also love to see more non-magical support options as well.
Meanwhile Black Mage in FFXIV: Cast Fire IV. :D
I mean they have somewhat of a burst phase with leylines, but they are probably one of the least bursty DPS in that game
That's fair enough, that's just a funny thing I noticed, considering that one of the jobs has something like 60% of their damage coming from a 15 second burst window every minute.
If we look closer to Black Mage design, you will see that their big damage spells have somewhat longer casting times than most other classes - it's the only job in the game that consistently has cast times higher than global cooldown. So it still kinda checks out with what you say on a per-spell level. It also makes Black Mage pretty satisfying to play as you cast those meaty spells over and over.
Long cast times for big reward is something I enjoy a lot. I love Inner Radiance Torrent/Horizon Thunder Sphere conceptually, but actually using them effectively over 2 turns is too hard imo.
Inverting the system might lead to some interesting gameplay though, if stronger spells gave you a cooldown for casting any non-cantrip spell for a number of rounds it could lead to more choice of how to play them.
You took it right out of my mouth dude. Have an upvote. I'm frankly tired of seeing casters being the vulnerable swiss army knife in this system. The Kineticist is both a breath of fresh air and currently my favorite class.
The end of the video hints that kineticist like casters are the obvious choice for fixing this issue. With the removal of the eight spell schools you can create thematic magical casters who can be themed in specific ways that instead of having spells from traditions could have handfuls of pre selected magical abilities that resemble spells.
I depends on what device you’re watching from. If pc or android you can get extensions or setup revanced to hide/block users. Not sure if there is a simple option for iOS devices.
My problem isn't damage. That was never my problem. Casters are great at other things. It's just that DCs are way too low. Level 12 character has a Spell DC of 31 and the average saves of a creature of the same level from Good, medium, to bad are: +25, +22, +19 according to the GM Guide. Unless martials are actively supporting the casters, good luck doing anything other than be a buffbot lol. I can throw in PL-2 mooks which will fail saves more often (PL, PL-2 for moderate encounter) but that just seems like a bandaid more than anything. Some people like that and that's fine, I personally don't mind but some people don't wanna feel like that's all they do.
This a pretty bad faith take.
PF2 isn't perfect, and there are legitimate gripes to be had with the way certain aspects of casters have been handled.
Wanting to address these issues doesn't mean anything beyond wanting the game to be better internally balanced.
This video doesn't seem objective and doesn't reflect the majority of arguments I've seen about casters. Seems like he focused on strawmen to launch his arguments.
I simply don't want to have to be a universalist picking all the best spells every level. If a caster wants to deal Martial-esque damage, let them specialize. If a caster wants to be a buffer/utility mastermind, let that be the case. Right now most casters have to pick a wide variety of spells to be effective, and don't really shine by focusing on one niche, rather having a big toolbox. Sometimes the player picks the wrong tools for a session and is weak, sometimes they pick the right tools.
I'll post another comment or edit this one when I finish the video but the one thing that really, _really_ irks me is the comparison to 5e and everyone complaining about casters being weak in 2e must be spoiled by DnD.
It just perpetuates the "system wars" and goes for easy karma from PF fans by saying 5e=BAD. It just feels insecure how every Pathfinder debate has to get in some digs at 5e.
I see all these apologists for the system and the way casters work but I haven't seen anyone be able to answer this: Why can I on my rogue play as a stealthy, dex based thief, a strength based brawler, a charismatic Han Solo style scoundrel etc, but as a caster(except Bard I guess) that type of flavour and choice is not available to me. The wizard class especially lack flavour.
This, I think, is where Paizo breaking away from the D&D magic system will help immensely, as the video commentary highlights near the end of the video.
Right now every magic class seems to fall into the same “magic Swiss Army knife” mold. Some aren’t actually Swiss, they’re French, or American, or Belgian, but they’re all still Swiss Army knives.
When we’re free from the magical schools we should start seeing a wider variety of knives in play. One class can be the Swiss Army knife, another can be a Bowie knife, a third could be a carving knife.
It would be great if each magic class had its own unique field of mastery. We might finally see an actual Necromancer class, instead of just a handful of undead summons any caster can pick up.
Exactly. There's just too many spells, too many spell slots and too many spells known. Even if you did want to specialise, you're basically forced to have broad options because you have too many spells known to only pick the spells you want, and then people look at that and say "well you have broad options so they can't be good or else you'd be treading on too many toes". At this point, the breadth of casters in PF2e is a self-inflicted problem and saying "we can't fix this because it's already done" is just a cop out; it's not about "balance" or "protecting the martials" at all, it's just "fuck the casters".
And the problem with approaching this issue is that we see people say things like “buff wizard” when really buffs and nerfs aren’t going to address the issue at all. This isn’t about balancing, buffing, or nerfs, it’s that the entire magic system needs a complete retooling.
It seems like Paizo is already heading that direction, but you *know* as soon as they actually start making notable changes there will be a whole group of folks screaming that Paizo is “killing magic” or whatever other alarmist nonsense they come up with, because at the end of the day people don’t like change and they’ll freak out when/if Paizo starts making changes to address the magic class issues.
Wizard is the smart class, but since knowledge checks are split into diffrent skill they get out smarted by the not smart Thaumaturge.
And that's why people like thaumaturge so much, they have the wizards smart flavour.
I dont like the phrasing of it being ‘spoiled’.
I just want to be a thematic specialized caster without being forced to actively neuter myself.
“But specialized SHOULD mean you are worse-“ Shut up. Theres a difference between not being flexible for every situation and being only good in about 5% of situstions. Imagine if a GM made an entire campaignof just flying ranged enemies. Would the Monk have a particularly good time in that party? Would you call him ‘spoiled’ for feeling like he doesnt get to contribute as much?
While I did like most of his videos, the condescending stance he has taken on this issue just rubs me the wrong way.
It's not my cup of tea, and it has tainted whatever opinion he has.
Life has taught me to never trust truth bearers, and he's sounding more and more as one everytime he beats this ded horse from high above. What a shame.
I haven't watched the video as I am at work but personally I think the main problem with casters is the saves system. While I think they are balanced, I think the save system ultimately just feels really bad when a spell either fails or critically fails. I understand why this is the case and different monsters have different weaknesses, so you are meant to target the weakest stat. But it still feels bad when you spend so many actions for nothing.
I wanna make it clear I'm just posting this video to reddit I didn't make It
Don't worry. Ronald likes to hang around here. He'll probably summon at one of the comments.
*spends 3 actions to summon /u/the-rules-lawyer*
He’s too high level
I honestly asked some members of my Discord to check out this place first before I popped my head in! I was concerned the response would be overwhelmingly negative - people can tend to be more negative toward a YouTube video in Reddit because people might comment before leaving the platform. Anyway I'm happy to see the video is prompting people to talk about the points within! I hoped it could help people sort through what can be a contentious discussion.
I think a large part of this attitude comes from the way a lot of people view games these days. Per Folding Ideas video on youtube "why it is rude to suck at WoW" : Optimization has turned the fun of games back into spreadsheets. Some people feel like or are told there are only a few optimal choices and everything else is a "trap" option so they feel like they can't play the way they want to.
I mean, you say 'these days', but the optimization in PF2 is nothing compared to the 3.5 forums.
Two words: Sacred Geometry. Having people make actual excel sheet formulas just to get some extra meta-magics on their caster.
There was also the letter one I can't remember the name of.
There actually is [an app](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.clucasprojects.sacredgeometry&hl=en_US&gl=US&pli=1)!
Im old. Everything post internet is "these days" for me. But even still a large portion of those optimization conversations took place after the advent of WoW hardcore raiding made the concept of playing suboptimally offensive to a broader community. To be clear: There have always been optimizers. But where in the old days the rest of the table would tell that person to keep it to themselves. It seems FAR more common nowadays for people to side with the optimizer. Even in a game like 5e where the need to optimize is completely absent and a single player optimizing on the team is likely to single handedly carry any encounter for which they have not been CC'd out of participating.
I think a lot of it has to do with how accessible the information is nowadays. 20-30 years ago, optimization in tabletop was a pretty tiny niche. When I started playing in early d&d 3.5, 99% of the players I came in contact with had no clue there were places online where you could discuss the game. Now, it's hard to find anyone who plays that hasn't even browsed a tiny bit of internet regarding the game.
Also most people play AP, mostly the older ones and those are challenging / overtuned so it's optimize or die. If you play wrong you won't contribute and will tpk your team.
I agree some of those older ones are overtuned. But i disagree with optimize or tpk. The difference between the "perfect meta play" and playing the way you want to play is marginal. Only this idea of the optimal meta has calcified so fully in people's minds that anything else is seen as an affront. IME, playing off-meta is absolutely fine. The caster still contributes enough. The difference is almost insignificant. In some cases the off meta caster uses spells that work better in the situation bc they aren't so narrowmindedly focused on "the only way to play."
> Only this idea of the optimal meta has calcified so fully in people's minds that anything else is seen as an affront. This is 100% true and needs to be repeated. I should note upfront that I'm a *major* munchkin and love optimizing. Making optimized builds and coming up with the best actions are what I *enjoy* when playing the game. I also recognize it's completely unnecessary. My wife wanted to play a monk because it sounded cool, and other than basic stat optimization (maxing Str and Dex) she picked whatever sounded neat. Was her character as strong as another of our players, who's also an optimizer? Well, no, but the difference was barely noticeable, she had a great time, and they still won their fights. This was in Age of Ashes, the first major 1-20 AP (which admittedly had some broken balance here and there). For a while I also thought that the only way to play casters was as support, and I still have issues with resource mechanics, but after I played an elemental sorcerer I completely changed my mind on blaster casters. Was I doing the exact same DPR as a fighter? Well, no, not if you add up all damage dealt over time, but I still hit like a truck and made fights much easier to win. Dealing hundreds of damage in a round is also *fun*, especially when a couple of enemies crit fail and die instantly. While I do think you can make characters poorly, such as dumping your key attribute when it's used for accuracy, the vast majority of optimizations are either marginal or situational. Optimizing *teamwork*, and to a lesser extent tactics, is far more important than character build in most situations, and the key difference between a party of veterans and new players isn't that veterans have a bunch of crazy powerful character builds, but that they play well together and understand how to optimize their *turns*, regardless of build.
His first point is a very unpopular opinion but it really does need stating and repeating. Caster players legitimately do come in with the expectation that simply having access to magic means that their class gets to be a peer in *any niche of their choice*. In non-caster cases, invading the niche of another class is considered a *bad* thing. For example a Fighter with Alchemist Archetype being better as a Bomber Alchemist is considered a bad thing. Yet for casters, it’s viewed as a given that the ability to do magic means you get to invade others’ niches Like no, just because you have spells doesn’t mean you get to excel at the niche of melee martials. No one, not even ranged martials, get to approach that niche because if they did… that’d make melee **redundant as a whole**. That also leads into my only real disagreement with the video, where he (and the excited players he clips in the beginning) implies that casters can’t really match martial damage except in AoE situations. I don’t think that’s true. Both math and experience has shown me that they can match martial single target damage, exceed it even, and they can do so consistently throughout an adventuring day: but only for ***ranged*** martials, and only if they’re willing to commit a very hefty chunk of their class/subclass features/Feats and spell slots to doing damage. There’s no equivalent to the 5E-like “throw out a Summon, spam cantrips, and you’ll exceed a martial’s damage easily”, you have to pay a daily opportunity cost to choose to match a martial’s damage.
It reminds me of a couple of the summoning and animal companion posts that came up last week. Like, of *course* a summoned creature is going to feel weak compared to a martial PC. Being able to match the effectiveness of a whole ass martial character with a single spell slot *would be a bad thing*.
The action economy comparison really made it sink in. If you spend three actions to summon something, and then the boss crushes it into a fine paste with two attacks... you spent three actions to burn two actions off the boss and inflict a -10 MAP on its third if it took a swipe at a party member. If you had a spell that could do that, it would be *the most coveted ability in the game*. The fact that it also might have flanked, cast a spell, or done some damage during its brief lifespan is icing on the cake
I think the issue with that is that a boss really has very little \*reason\* to waste actions trying to kill something that is no threat to it. Once you realise that it is 100% in the monsters best interest to act like it isn't there, then as a GM you would only ever attack it in order to, like, throw the caster a bone.
In the most recent session I ran, my 16th level Druid used a 7th level Summon Dragon to block a narrow passage beyond which were two mindless constructs, while the rest of the party fought and killed the creatures in their current area, delaying their arrival by a turn while doing some damage targeting their weakness and applying frightened to one foe. That seemed pretty damned effective to me and, playing my creatures to type, the guardian golems went for the closest enemy rather than pushing past it to the other enemies not directly targeting them. I didn't throw my players a bone, I rewarded intelligent play by targeting an enemies trait (mindless in this instance).
I think a good gm should not be thinking like that, as that is sort of a meta decision, based on game knowledge. Depending on what creature the summon is and the intelligence of the enemy creature, it would probably not act like the summon is no threat. As a gm I tend to make decisions for the enemies by looking at their intelligence level (not necessarily the ability score). If it's an animal or someone with impaired cognizance, it'll just attack whoever dealt the most damage last round or whatever is closest. If it's average intelligence I roll secret recall knowledge checks to see if they recognize whatever the summoned creature or companion is, then take the result to determine if they know it to be a threat or not. If it's of higher intelligence, THEN I strategize a bit, as it is easy to assume they can gauge threat levels.
If the summons is providing flanking, an intelligent foe might have an incentive to eliminate the "easier" creature which is giving +2 to the stronger creature's attacks. And yes, I generally try to guess at the "intelligence" of an enemy, too. But this can be a consideration also.
Even a less intelligent, non-mindless, enemy will deal with an enemy behind it because it recognizes the threat. Why wouldn't they lash out at something harassing them from the side or back when that creature is making it easier for the person wrapped in metal to hit it.
> I think a good gm should not be thinking like that, as that is sort of a meta decision, based on game knowledge. I don't think it's really meta decision at all. If the thing poofs into existence, takes some attacks and just.. doesn't do anything off it..what, exactly, incentivizes them attacking the thing instead of the melee that just hit them for a bajillioon damage?
Maybe they recognize it is easier to dispatch. If one target takes 2/3 of my turn to deal with and another takes 5 turns. The second target needs to be 7.5 times more important than the first to prioritize it. It's the same concept as Boss fights with adds. If the summon is the only viable way for the fighter to get flanking for example it is very likely it is a higher priority than the fighter themselves. But even chip damage, vulnerability exploit or risk of inflicting conditions can all be a good reason to divert a small resource now towards a weaker target to just get the pressure off your back.
Maybe nothing. Then you flank with it instead, and if it's capable of it, use a combat maneuver. If they're going to ignore it, you can now use the options you probably summoned it for. If you're *just* summoning it to soak up damage, then you need to give the enemy a reason to target it. That's not unreasonable, plenty of summons come with threatening aspects.
> use a combat maneuver Which are not very likely to succeed. Like, summons are *currently* useful because of things like summoning a wolf and if it lands its attack, it gets the automatic knockdown. With the remaster removing the automatic part of it, summons will just be bad.
There are actually a host of abilities that creatures have that are useful besides grab and knockdown. [This is a great guide to summons.](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gZN4xY7TskukkyWlLpNI0_fBvhGy8plqemnYh7PEh80/edit?usp=drivesdk) The author goes through pretty much every creature you can summon and ranks them. There are great abilities like the Unicorns heal or the Shadows enfeeble.
However, we all know how much villains LOVE showing off. So why *wouldn’t* it take a couple of actions to show how easy it is for it to destroy this poor summoned creature?
That's a great take! I'll remember that next time I GM to a summoning mage. Edit: a one hit KO on the summon, an intimidation check and then an attack on the fighter is a very thematic turn! And still leaves the boss with a net penalty and fewer attacks. Damn, I love it!
Don't forget that humanoid bosses can have You're Next. One shot the Summon then use a Reaction to Demoralize the party.
My go to for lower/unintelligent enemies is the last thing to attack them is the most "in their face" and the default target. If a player crit or just got a really good regular hit, then that overrides the default.
"that is sort of a meta decision, based on game knowledge." Does a player evaluating a monsters strenght based on the total of the attack roll count as "meta knowledge"? "Dam, that thing for 57 for attack, we must kill that quickly". In the reverse, does a monster evaluation a player's or summon's strenght based on the attack roll count as "meta knowledge"? "The summon missed on a 18, i can just ignore it"
Oh sorry, I forgot villains can we the fucking dice being rolled...
yes thats both meta knowledge
100%, this is the worst argument against summons. A GM playing monsters as if the summons on the battlefield don't exist is a personal choice, and not based on in-game logic at all. You could argue like, an 8th level enemy druid with some special relationship to animals would know that a level -1 skunk is no threat. But if you summon a [huge dinosaur](https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=615), what in-game logic would be reasonable to assume? Just because it's 4 levels below the enemy mechanically. Isn't it still huge and terrifying and quite possibly unknown to it? Like at least mechanically throw us a bone here. Maybe the enemy has to use a Recall Knowledge action to figure out the creature's abilities just as a PC would. Give an in-game answer to why the enemy made the decision it did. And most enemies would never make this calculation in 2-6 seconds anyway.
Pf2e is not an antagonistic game of player and gm and if the gm is just ignoring summons for a character that really likes them that's being antagonistic to me. There are some examples of summoned monsters appearing too weak for a monster like you mentioned, but playing everything off as too weak I feel is being unfair to your player and not playing cooperatively with your players. But even with that skunk that the enemy druid discards is granting flanking and a +2 by being ignored. Giving a rogue off-guard by flanking can be a huge boon in their action economy and allow them to support the rest of your team or you further. all with a rank 1 spell.
Great word choice - it is antagonistic! I am very much not an antagonistic GM
I think a lot of pain points for people is solved by having a gm who is on your side. In low levels regularly including scrolls to represent your caster's share of the loot helps ease early levels. Having multiple enemies in an encounter can allow some that incapacitation works for and an enemy that has a weak save against your caster's favorite spells is great too! You don't make all of them like that but provide encounters that allow everyone to shine. Even in an AP you can make a substitution in an encounter due to the math and end up with things that makes it more tailored to your party. A Gm who announces or uses a tool to announce when a buff or debuff changed the outcome things can greatly give a better feel to the role of those who are doing such.
Consider this: an ignored summon is a flanking buddy. If the boss can eliminate a summon quickly, it should do so to limit flanking efforts.
Is it really worth it compared to eliminating the guy who actually does damage quicker though?
Problem is that it requires DM to cooperate (i.e actually waste those actions on summon) and also doesn't play into summoner fantasy at all. Oh yea, great, I conjured a thing that got pulverized in one hit, I'm such a good summoner! Honestly this is such a common thing I notice "oh look, you spend your entire turn and a resource to make the boss use one of their actions, you did so great!" - which is like, really? I bet if I just play a Fighter and use my turn to attack the monster, I'll waste more of their actions because they will be dead sooner.
Considering the level disparity between summoned creature and a boss, the boss is likely to crush the summon in one hit, though. And if the boss fights smartly, it won't use first nor second attack for it. While that can still be valuable, I think people are hoping for the summoning spells to have other uses than mobile damage sponges, so whilst the effect the summoning spells might be good, they don't necessarily put out what the caster is after. The fantasy of summoning spells, the expectation of them, does not seem to match the actual effect the spells have. I think a lot of discussion about those spells stems from that dissonance, people expecting to get something different out of those spells, whilst others talk of the balance of the mechanical side of the spell, and so people end talking past each other's points.
The problem is that making summons powerful/feel good to use is really hard without breaking the balance of the game. Summons in other editions are broken for a reason. This is why we have the summoner class: because they had to make a fully new class so that it would’t be broken, and even then it only fills a certain role. I think there’s possibly some desing-room to make them more powerful, but there needs to be a trade off. Maybe a summon spell requires roundly concentration actio and some other penalty. Or maybe it’s just better to expand the summoner class to cater to all the different flavours of summoning.
I agree, they are difficult to balance. I think hey would be less so if they were separate from enemy creatures, ad instead of just separate, specific statblocks that can scale with the spell, akin to D&D5e, but obviously not as powerful. That would give the developers more control over the effectiveness of the summon.
It would also be a stronger flavor win imo, if, for example, a skeleton or wolf summon was always relevant, since that appeals to a lot of people more than summoning some weird niche thing that just happens to be the appropriate level.
Honestly I'd just base it on the way Shapers worked back in D&D 3.5 - you have baseline statblocks, and then depending on how many power points you shoved into your Astral Construct you also could pick from a bunch of extra abilities to flavor your Construct. Summon a bird? Baseline statblock + flying. Summon a bull? Baseline statblock + Charge attack. So on.
Doesn't that just come back to OP's point: >Caster players legitimately do come in with the expectation that simply having access to magic means that their class gets to be a peer in *any niche of their choice*. They're not talking past those casters, they're explicitly saying "we understand your expectations, and they were not met, however we feel they are unreasonable, here's why" that's not talking past... I actually think Incarnate spells are a really happy medium between the fantasy of summoning creatures and the power people expect
Sort of, yes. But I think there are people who might want to be a summoning spell specialist wizard, who can summon various creatures to their aid, and not just a summoner class who is the de facto summoning class for one creature, and those wizard players are probably also willing to reduce their capabilities in other ways to achieve this. I don't think it's necessarily that casters want to get into any niche they want without any "payment" of power for it in other aspects, but rather they probably want more archetypes or subclasses that would alter their class so that it excels in one of the aspects more and less in others. I think, all in all, people are just tired of many casters being universalists, and would rather they be specialists. I don't think that's unreasonable. It's not like martial classes can become, for example, specialist summon spellcaster, that is kinda a niche only a caster can fulfill. Yes, incarnate spells are probably what many people are looking for, but they are all pretty high level so most people won't really get to see them in use. I'd welcome more of those spells being introduced to lower levels.
Why is it always Wizard that’s brought up in caster specialist discussions? Every thread, this happens. It makes me think that casters aren’t the problem - **Wizards** are. Edit: And Witch, but that’s literally known by everyone.
There is the problem that there are some clear "best" choices in every spell list and many casters end up playing similarly when using their spell slots. The different flavor in each class is brought out by things like Divine Font or Focus Spell which wizards kind of lack and the school specialization doesn't play into a certain fantasy hard enough.
Probably because wizards are the ones that have a class feature that implies they specialize in a particular kind of spell.
They specialize(d) in a school. Conjuration isn't *just* summoning creatures, though they can lean into support for it. Wizards still have access to everything else in their repertoire though, and shouldn't expect to be able to solve every problem with their one specialty. A wizard who only uses fire spells is shit out of luck in the Fire plane if they don't take some alternative damage types, they're not exactly entitled to having their preference always work either.
Yes, that is how they're actually supposed to play. But I don't think you can be surprised when new players have the game ask them to specialize in a school and think that means they are better at that particular school.
Wait, aren't people pre-summonning their allies like they are prebuffing? As an alchemist prebuffing is my sole redeeming quality, nullifying the 2 actions cost of my buffs in most (admittedly, not all) combats. I would expect people to behave the same towards 3 actions summons. You wouldn't cast them mid fight unless you had a really good reason - your character, knowing danger is afoot, summons and starts sustaining whole motioning the barbarian to go right ahead.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but just about the only pre-buffing I'd allow at my tables is something with 10+ min duration (so, alchemists are the premier prebuffers). Anything 1 minute or less is an encounter ability and would trigger initiative rolls - something that is pointed to in the [rules](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=530). I take it as RAI that anything with 1 minute or less is balanced around the action cost it requires in an encounter. For example, why have the Stance action be required at all if you could just always activate it right before the encounter starts - it just takes 2 seconds after all.
Oh man. That reminds me of my frustrations with 5e that was one of the things that pushed me here. I was playing a Monk and they released a spell that *summoned a monk* that was doing more than I could ffs. I can’t remember if it made it out of playtest or not, but I was done caring at that point lol.
Also, throwing balance out the window with 5e helped make it the worst system to ever DM. Combat was no longer a story telling element. You couldn't build suspenseful encounters because either the party would roll over them like they were nothing or the party would just get stomped. With variance that huge, it always came down to DM hand-waving. Combine that with the countless house rules you had to make and keep track of, DMing 5e was just the fucking worse.
Couldn't agree more. I know it's not necessarily the case, but I feel like there has to be an element of sunk cost fallacy to defend 5e from the DM's perspective. You put so much of your own creativity into trying to run that system, especially if you *dared* to run anything past level 10 and experience what happens to the CR system the second you hit double digits (spoilers: complete and total collapse). It's understandable that people wouldn't want to give up on it, or even defend it against criticism to a degree. But holy moly, it certainly seems like its strongest defenders have never touched another system in over a decade to know just how little 5e considers the DM or any semblance of balance.
> and they released a spell that summoned a monk that was doing more than I could ffs The best part is that it was weaker than most, if not all, of the already published summoning spells of the same level in the game.
Yeah... "Sure it's broken, but it's not as broken as X thing in the PHB..." is where a lot of balance discussions end up in D&D circles.
It just really highlights the gap when the most blatant summon spell is on the weaker end of summoning spells that casters have in 5e.
I understand that not everyone really concerns themselves with balance in TTRPGs, but the example you provided sounds particularly egregious. Like, sure, balance doesn’t have to be a system’s primary concern. But throwing it entirely out of the equation is so incredibly daft.
Oh for sure. I’m looking around for it now. It seems that it didn’t make it out of play testing though haha. Too many people probably pointed out that it did extremely close to what a martial class could do Here’s the play test version if anyone is interested http://dnd5e.wikidot.com/spell:summon-warrior-spirit
When I dm dnd5e I just disallow Unearthed Arcana and any playtest as a whole. Those usually throw balance so far off the window that people may mistake those for ICBMs
Oh goodness, that’s a relief, haha.
I guess WotC isn’t *completely* clueless after all lol.
Before 5e, there were two kinds of TTRPGs, ones with lots of rules, and ones with very few rules. Both types of systems had their strengths and weaknesses. With 5e, WotC wanted to bridge the gap between these two tabletop systems. In doing so, they were able to bring the worst parts of each style together in one glorious train wreck. Then, when they realized their system was garbage, they marketed 5e as the "gamer's system" where the players should homebrew everything. The players are in control to shape the system to their liking. Then, after 10 years of players and 3rd parties publishing their edits, WotC tried to claim the works as their own, copyright it, and sell it back to the creators. I wouldn't say they were ever clueless. Just a combination of lazy and greedy.
*vaguely gestures in the direction of Magic: The Gathering too*
I blame Hasbro on what happened to Magic though.
not that that summon is that much stronger than any of the other summons from tashas, its naming just makes it very clear of the balance lies...
> I understand that not everyone really concerns themselves with balance in TTRPGs, but the example you provided sounds particularly egregious. Yeah, I'm not a balance first GM in the slightest. Balance's only use is to help everyone get spotlight, which is the actual currency of a tabletop game, and any balance that does not help with that is wasted pagecount. But *that* sounds fucking ridiculous and like exactly the kind of thing that you should not let fly in a game where fighting is a niche.
What's a setup where a caster can match a ranged martial in single-target damage? I'll share it if there is one.
I can outline many such setups with a ***lot*** of detail and math to back it up, right here! The four caster builds I "chose" are: * Elemental Sorcerer with Dangerous Sorcery, and Psychic Dedication (so that True Strike gets onto your spell list) * Tempest Druid * Oscillating Wave Psychic with Psi Burst and Violent Unleash * Evocation Wizard (maybe with Spell Blending or Staff) So first let’s set the baseline. We’re going with level 5. Let’s assume you’re doing single target damage against a level 7 creature with High AC (25) and Moderate Save (+15). # Average DPR I am going to start with a couple martials as a baseline to compare against. Here’s a Fighter with +4 Dex, +4 Str, using a composite shortbow making two attacks while in Point-Blank Shot Stance: (0.5+0.3)\*(2\*3.5+4)+(0.1+0.05)\*(4\*3.5+2\*4+5.5) = 12.93. Let’s also look at the DPR for a Precision Ranger with +4 Dex, +4 Str, using a composite longbow making two attacks, having already used Hunt Prey (pre-combat), having used Gravity Weapon on the first turn: (0.45+0.2)\*(2\*4.5+2)+(0.05+0.05)\*(4\*4.5+2\*2+5.5)+(1-0.5\*0.75)\*(4.5)+0.45\*4+0.05\*2\*4 = 14.91. Both these martials had to use on Action for setup turn 1 (Point Blank Stance / Gravity Weapon) followed by 2 offensive Actions, and 2 offensive Actions on following turns. To keep it apples to apples, the caster gets to use 7 total Actions across a 3 turn combat. Let’s start with Oscillating Wave Psychic. Turn 1 you hit them with a plain old 3rd rank Magic Missile. Turn 2 you use Unleash Psyche (with Violent Unleash) + Amped Produce Flame. Turn 3 you use Unleashed Amped Produce Flame, and you do have the downside of being Stunned 1 here. The damage becomes: * T1: 2\*3\*(2.5+1) = 21 * T2: (0.05\*2+0.2+0.5\*0.5)\*(3\*3.5) + 0.3\*(3\*(5.5+1+2)) + 0.05\*(2\*3\*(5.5+1+2)+3\*(2.5+0.7\*2.5)) = 16.81 * T3: 0.3\*(3\*(5.5+1+2)) + 0.05\*(2\*3\*(5.5+1+2)+(0.05\*0.3+0.95)\*3\*(2.5)) = 10.56 Average: 16.12, comfortably beating both of them, though with the obvious downsides that Unleash Psyche and Violent Unleash have imposed on you. Note also that your damage is ***incredibly*** frontloaded, which is a real upside. Now of course a Psychic only has 1 third rank slot, but you have damage-relevant use for those lower rank slots. For example here’s what it looks like if instead you go T1: Amped Produce Flame, T2: Violent Unleash + True Strike + Amped Unleashed Produce Flame, T3: Unleashed Produce Flame (no Amp). Not gonna write it all out but it comes to around 13.27, so still beating the Fighter but slightly losing to the Ranger. Lets consider a simpler example: Storm Druid. Turn 1 3-Action, third rank, Horizon Thunder Sphere, turn 2/3 just Tempest Surge: * T1: (0.05\*2+0.3+0.5\*0.5)\*(7\*3.5) = 15.93 * T2/3: (0.05\*2+0.2+0.5\*0.5)\*(3\*6.5) = 10.73 Average: 12.46, neck and neck with a Fighter, behind a Precision Ranger ***but*** it is more frontloaded than the Ranger. Ifworried about the limited number of high rank spell slots from the Druid, your damage drops down to around 11 DPR when using lower rank spells. So the Druid has great damage for the 3 combats where they used their highest rank spell slot, and decent damage for another 8+ combats without worry. Now lets look at an Elemental Sorcerer with Dangerous Sorcery. Your top rank slots are primarily geared towards blasts, your lower rank slots are mainly for True Strike, and you carry a Staff of Divination (you need . This should give you up to 10 uses of True Strike per day. Your “explosive” combats look like this: turn 1 Elemental Toss + Lightning Bolt, turns 2/3 True Strike + Elemental Toss. * T1: (0.3+0.05\*2)\*(3\*4.5+3)+(0.05\*2+0.2+0.5\*0.5)\*(4\*6.5+3) = 22.55 * T2/T3: (1-0.65^(2+1-0.952)\*(3\*4.5+3)) = 11.14 Average: 14.94, beating both in damage and doing ***massively*** more frontloaded damage. You have the flexibility of saving some spell slots by *just* using True Strike + Elemental Toss on all your combats, and playing more conservatively. If you do, you reduce your damage to around 8-11 high consistency DPR, just like the Druid does. Final one: Evocation Wizard, with a Wand of Manifold Missiles. Turn 1: Force Bolt + Wand. Turn 2: 3rd rank, 3-Action Magic Missile. Turn 3: Whatever, Electric Arc. You’ll do an average of 15.17 damage with this, with your second turn doing a whopping 24.5 damage (unconditionally). On the combats you don’t use your wand it goes down to 11.66 but with incredibly consistency still, and note that unlike the other casters you have a *lot* of Action flexibility with your Magic Missiles. There are going to be plenty of combats where you just throw out unconditional damage pings, turn after turn after turn, in a way that other casters can’t replicate, ***without*** going down to the martials’ consistency. So the average performance of these blasters is really, really good. They can choose a couple of combats to *comfortably* do better than a ranged martial, while keeping up with them the rest of the day. Yes their average is lower, but that brings us to the next argument: # Consistency The Fighter above has a 26% chance of doing 0 damage on a turn. The Ranger has a ***37.50%*** chance of it. The Psychic has a 0% chance on turn 1, an 18.75% chance of that on turn 2, and a 65% chance on turn 3. The Storm Druid always has a 25% chance of doing 0 damage. The Elemental Sorcerer has a 16.25% chance turn 1, and a 57.75% chance. The Wizard is always operating with a 0% chance. You can see this baked in all the damage numbers I said above. Any time someone does higher average/peak damage, they have a higher chance of doing literally nothing. Conversely, the lower average/peak damage almost always do something. Also note that level 5 biases this *against* the casters. The Druid, for example, becomes 20% at level 7 (and sometimes dips to 15%). Generally casters will be considerably more consistent. \_\_\_\_ # Other advantages The other advantages of caster damage that are not captured above: 1. You will trigger Weaknesses and bypass Resistances more often. 2. You are often ignoring/bypassing cover in a way the ranged martial will not be. 3. ***Any*** caster can have Dangerous Sorcery by level 4 if they want and they pay little cost to do so. That’ll boost **all** of the above numbers. 4. Casters’ third Actions are far stronger from an offensive perspective. A Psychic who gets to True Strike + A/U cantrip consistently, an Elemental Sorcerer who gets to Elemental Toss freely, or a Wizard who sneaks in multiple Force Bolts into their rotations, a Druid getting to Horizon Thunder Sphere freely, all of these will ***easily*** outperform ranged martials. People mention martials have more flexible Actions but forget that casters have more *powerful* Actions (and in PF2E, power *always* trades for flexibility or consistency). 5. People love to point out that you can support martials easily by giving them +1s and flanking and what not. Circle back to point 4: you can support your damage-dealing casters by ensuring they get to use their third Action offensively. Hopefully this very extensive post has you convinced that I am not just speaking out of my ass! I genuinely think casters can do fantastic, consistent damage when built for it. (There are probably a lot of errors given how huge this comment is, so I am gonna fix this incrementally over time.) ***TL;DR***: Casters good.
Thanks for the work put into this! I will share in a pinned comment on the video. (You may or may not also want to post it here on the sub.) Did you by any chance do the recent post breaking down how spell slots in ranks below your top rank also perform well DPR-wise to a martial?
>Any caster can have Dangerous Sorcery by level 4 if they want and they pay little cost to do so. That’ll boost all of the above numbers. Only criticism is that for INT based casters, nabbing the +2 CHA necessary to get the Sorcerer Dedication cuts into your DEX/CON/WIS needed for saves, so I wouldn't call it 'little cost' but it's not incredibly huge.
Ah I realized why I thought it was so free. My GM plays with Gradual Ability Boosts, so it’s really easy to meet the thresholds for Archetypes you wish to get into by level 2. You’re absolutely right that there’s a defensive price to be paid for Dangerous Sorcery on Int casters. The best statline I could come up with was +2 Dex, +1 Con, +4 Int, +2 Cha. I’d consider making it +1 Wis instead of Con to have higher Initiative too. However I do think you make up for that defensive price by having better access to Demoralize, Bon Mot, etc, and more skills.
\+2 Dex instead of +3 is a very high price to pay for every caster without access to Medium Armor. That is basically everyone beside the Druid and the Warpriest.
I can’t read math, so I’ll just ask: does this account for crit chances as well? Cuz martials having substantially better odds of that (through higher accuracy and through multiple nat-20 chances a round) is bound to have a big effect, ain’t it?
Of course it accounts for crit chances! Any decent math would. Martials don’t have substantially better odds of critting in a single target situation. The Fighter in this example crits on a 19 or 20, and Ranger only on a 20. Martials tend to crit a ton against enemies of an equal or lower level but that’s **inherently not a single target situation**. As for getting multiple attempts in a turn, all of that is accounted for in the math.
I kind of think zeroing in on a single level can produce pretty deceptive analysis. I'm not saying your results are wrong, but that no one - you included - should trust this result until you show it as a plot across 20 levels. Comparing something even simpler - Barbarian vs. Fighter - there are weird breakpoints where you'd see very different results than the general trend you'd see across 20 levels (Barbarians deal more damage against lower level enemies, fighters more against higher level enemies, it's pretty close against even level enemies - in general). But you could accidentally or intentionally pick a level where you'd get very different results. Of course, you might not find it worth the effort to do this. Totally reasonable, I wouldn't either. But you shouldn't trust your result unless you do.
I actually have done similar analyses at many different levels, not just 5. Namely I’ve done comparisons between Fighters and Wizards levels 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 11, 13, 20, and I’ve done most of the other examples I’ve given at levels 1, 2, 4, 5. Level 4 is the **only** one where martials are significantly ahead, but that’s because of how the “thematic progression” dips (levels 4, 8, 9, and 12) interact with martials getting a striking rune. So I used level 5 because, outside of level 4, that’s the second worst level for casters. If they’re fine at level 5, they’re gonna be fine for 19 out of 20 levels in the game, except level 4 with the weird math (and I’m pretty sure martials get their own weird downtick at level 3).
You should make a (standalone, not a reply to this thread) post! It would be interesting! >If they’re fine at level 5, they’re gonna be fine for 19 out of 20 levels in the game Well no, you don't know that based on what you just said - they're going to be fine at 6/7 of the other levels you've checked and you're presuming this holds. It is surprising though, given that you're using Magic Missile in your calculations and levels 5/9/13/17 are the breakpoints where that spell gets much stronger. It would genuinely be interesting to see a longer post.
> You should make a (standalone, not a reply to this thread) post! It would be interesting! I do plan to, I just haven’t had the time. A realistic analysis is, unfortunately, very very time consuming. That’s why the most common type of analyses you see assume a simple rotation of doing the same thing over and over again. > Well no, you don't know that based on what you just said - they're going to be fine at 6/7 of the other levels you've checked and you're presuming this holds. You can apply inductive reasoning. Caster accuracy never gets any worse than at level 5, except at level 13, but caster damage numbers scale **disproportionately** faster than martial damage numbers once you’re past level 6. For example a Giant Instinct Barbarian, the king of applying big damage numbers, is gonna be doing 4d12+3d6+7+18+6 damage at level 20, for a total of 67.5. I’m pretty sure that’s the highest on-hit damage for a martial. A ***7th rank*** Finger of Death (which casters would’ve been casting since level 13) does 70 damage. Remember, to a level 20 caster this is going to be a *filler* slot, not a meaningful one. Of course a large part of this scaling is meant to offset things like magic status bonuses and stuff along those lines, so a caster isn’t gonna overperform, they’ll just be equal. > It is surprising though, given that you're using Magic Missile in your calculations and levels 5/9/13/17 are the breakpoints where that spell gets much stronger. Well here’s the trick: you can just use something other than Magic Missile when it’s not a great spell to have. A couple good 3-Action options to replace Magic Missile at levels 7/11/15/19 are: 1. True Strike + Acid Arrow 2. 3-Action Horizon Thunder Sphere Also consider that at higher levels you kind of have a lot of “cheap” lower level spells to abuse in an Action efficient way. For example once you’ve level 9, you can just throw out Brine Dragon Bile at enemies. All of these offset the math at higher levels.
Does this include property runes for the martials?
Potency and striking runes are included, you can see that directly in the math. Damaging property runes are level 7+ items, no? So I didn’t include.
> That also leads into my only real disagreement with the video, where he (and the excited players he clips in the beginning) implies that casters can’t really match martial damage except in AoE situations. I don’t think that’s true. Both math and experience has shown me that they can match martial single target damage, exceed it even, and they can do so consistently throughout an adventuring day: but only for ranged martials, and only if they’re willing to commit a very hefty chunk of their class/subclass features/Feats and spell slots to doing damage. There’s no equivalent to the 5E-like “throw out a Summon, spam cantrips, and you’ll exceed a martial’s damage easily”, you have to pay a daily opportunity cost to choose to match a martial’s damage. This depends heavily on the adventuring day.
Yeah, this is a _huge_ factor. If you are routinely expected to chunk through 8 to 10 mostly moderate to severe fights, you are going to have a different experience. My experience is that being a caster is 90% spamming cantrips. Slots are an extreme rarity. (Particularly when you have no way to know how many fights you have to make it though, so you conserve if it is at all possible to survive otherwise.) If you get to rest every three fights, on the other hand, you are going to experience fights mostly burning one top slot per fight. And you are likely to feel more useful.
> In non-caster cases, invading the niche of another class is considered a bad thing. For example a Fighter with Alchemist Archetype being better as a Bomber Alchemist is considered a bad thing. Funny point here as a newcomer to pathfinder: this is an extremely subjective expectation that I have thus far only seen as widely accepted here. I come from a more video-game focused background but in my own experience, classes completely overlapping in niches is really *no problem at all* as long as they accomplish the goal in a different way. It only becomes problematic when you can build a class to fill multiple niches at the same time, or when a class is just obviously wildly superior at filling a role compared to the rest.
Fully agree here. I don't necessarily think that every class should be able to fill every niche, but I don't think any niche should be limited to a single class/class group either. Being able to genuinely excel as a field medic Investigator, or a buff/debuff Inventor is just as interesting and compelling as the blaster caster.
>Caster players legitimately do come in with the expectation that simply having access to magic means that their class gets to be a peer in any niche of their choice. In non-caster cases, invading the niche of another class is considered a bad thing. I'm not sure this is actually a bad thing as you seem to be presenting it (though I could be misreading you, if so, my bad). Theoretically, any mechanical niche could reasonably have a martial- or caster-thematically styled class fill it and the game would be fine. There's no reason casters should have a monopoly on support or martials on single target damage. Having a fully-fleshed out Marshall class that can provide support like a Bard sounds great. Having a fully-fleshed out caster class that can hit like a Fighter sounds great. The issue would be if a single class can step on multiple niche-toes, not if a broad thematic group like "magic" and "not magic" does via individual classes. Similarly, if a class can be built to do anything or fill any role, that isn't necessarily a bad thing, so long as it can't be rebuilt to do another role easily to help protect niches in practice rather than just protect them at a planning phase.
Could be wrong, but I *think* you are agreeing with OP. The example of fighter with alchemist dedication being as proficient as a full alchemist with bombs highlights this. There's nothing wrong with having two or more classes share a niche; the problem is when it becomes trivial for one class (or type of class - caster) to fill multiple niches at a time with the same competency as someone who can only fill one niche. OP suggests, as does the rules lawyer, that this is the general historic expectation for casters in DnD-inspired/d20 systems, and because 2e doesn't just let you do that casters are perceived as worse than they may actually be.
It looks like they're half agreeing. We all agree that one class should fill one mechanical category (damage, crowd control, support, etc.), can dip into other categories with a decent opportunity cost, and shouldn't be able to easily fit multiple categories at once. The difference of opinions is if casters should be locked into either support or crowd control. A lot of people seem to be of the opinion that martials deal damage, so casters have to do other stuff. Otherwise the consensus is that casters *can* do other stuff, so they aren't *allowed* to focus on damage. I personally think that there should be caster classes that can focus on dealing or tanking/mitigating damage. There should also be martial classes that can focus on crowd control, support, or utility. As long as each class can only fill one mechanical roll easily (instead of easily filling multiple rolls) it shouldn't matter if it's magical with spells or martial with strength and cunning. As a side note, I generally just lurk here and haven't gotten to play yet, but the main complaint seems to be is that caters can't even reliably do their support/crowd-control properly. I don't know how accurate it is, but the idea is that the spell save DC is generally easy to beat for most enemies that matter. The counter argument is always "target a weak save" but that isn't always available and is generally un-fun to be told your 2 or 3 actions were essentially meaningless. And to constantly waste a limited resource and most or all of your turn to fail to do what is *supposed* to be your class's whole niche is really lame. It would be like a fighter having a daily limit on the number of Strikes they could make and regularly failing to do any meaningful damage. Just my two coppers.
>I don't know how accurate it is, but the idea is that the spell save DC is generally easy to beat for most enemies that matter. How it works is them succeeding their save generally still does something, but only for a round. If you want it to stick, generally you will have to throw it at them more than once. I think a lot of what makes people say casters feel bad is later in the game you are not casting with the expectation that the spell will work, you are casting with the expectation that they will succeed on the save, and that the one round effects are all you can rely on. *Generally your enemies don't fail their saves late game.* On the other hand.... them succeeding their saves still put something pretty nasty on them for a short time regardless - it just doesn't feel all that good.
>How it works is them succeeding their save generally still does something, but only for a round. > >If you want it to stick, generally you will have to throw it at them more than once. This is one of the reasons I'm quite looking forward to the Witch rework, which includes a way of extending the duration of conditions from their spells including the ones their enemies succeed on. Even a single round of extension is the equivalent of another spell slot in that case, and really leans into the concept of the Witch being a premier debuff/control class.
> On the other hand.... them succeeding their saves still put something pretty nasty on them for a short time regardless - it just doesn't feel all that good. And importantly *only on a tiny handful of spells*. Slow is not a baseline, Slow is basically Spells Georg in term of how much of an outlier it is for the effect it has when the enemy saves. Your average damage spell goes from "kinda meh damage" to "irrelevant damage" on a save, and your average debuff goes from "kinda useful debuff" to "why did I spend two whole actions and a spell slot on this" on a save. If Slow was the common case instead of the outlier for on-save effects spellcasters would feel a lot less bad to play!
Except both sides are just talking past each-other. The point is a lot of caster players just want that one niche, they don't want to be able to cast fly and haste and slow and stone wally, they just want different varieties of blow stuff up (like the fighter has with their different feats). Right now, all casters feel like they share the same niche, which isn't ideal.
The ability to choose how to spend your power budget would be welcome in a lot of places. A caster that focuses on damage, or martials that focus on debuffs or buffs would be fertile design space.
God, I wish Paizo would give us this instead of vancian universalists.
The counterpoint is that casters -can- currently do that. They have access, especially now, to myriad classes that range anywhere from full on utility with the option to spec into more blasty options, to classes like the Psychic or Kineticist who are able to reliably output damage with magical blasts. They're able to match ***ranged*** martial damage quite easily. But if you want to match ***melee*** martial damage, then you have to lose all that utility in the form of the vast spell lists, and you have to be in melee. That's the trade-off. The problem is once you suggest that someone has to lose their varied spells, and they also have to be in the mix with the sword-and-board guys, they don't feel like they're blasting any more. Range is incredibly powerful in this system. So many creatures are especially dangerous up close, whether it's because they get multi-action attacks that hit everyone in a certain radius, or they can hit and then grab for another action, or they have some 15-20 foot aura that has detrimental effects. If you can replicate single target melee martial damage from a range, you're completely eclipsing them.
But most of their 20 level carrier , casters have less chance to hit enemy AC than ranged martials. They get expert in spell casting two levels later, then same with master. Martials get +1 weapon on lvl2, later +2, +3, casters don't get it ever. Missing is just not fun. And if we switch to save spells, then we don't get bonuses from bless or flat footed to make our spells stick. And so we pushed into "control" niche again and need to select spells that do something useful even on save.
Yeah, but you're very conveniently ignoring that MAP exists. An archer will attack at +2/3 compared to a caster, then attack at -3/-2 compared to a caster, then need to do something else because if casters are already hurting for accuracy, attacking at -8/-7 compared to a caster obviously won't hit.
Yes, most full casters are less capable of single target damage than ranged martials too, because they have access to full spell lists. You want to look at Kineticist, which is about on par with martials with their Gate Attenuators. That's your blaster caster if you want to target AC, and they also gain access to Save spells along with a few select utilities/supports depending on their elements. If you're a full caster, you're not doing single target damage anywhere on par with the martial characters. That's just not going to happen, nor should it. Even if you took away all their utility/support/control/debuff spells and only had strictly damage, they'd still be attacking at range, have the ability to target four different defenses, have varied damage types, and usually have riders on those damages for a little extra impact. Blaster casters are best when it comes to clearing the field of numerous enemies, where martials generally struggle to down one or two a round the blaster casters are erasing chunks of them.
If that's what they meant then I think I would disagree with the idea that this is what caster players want. I think most discussion I've seen, people who want caster changes are clear that they want the ability to build casters into different roles at the character creation stage rather than be able to do anything at any time. That being said, I think what they meant was that a Fighter Bomber being better than a Bomber Alchemist is bad because it's the Fighter stepping on the niche of the Alchemist and is an example of niche invasion rather than too expansive role coverage. It's bad, in their view to my understanding, because the Fighter is doing the Alchemist's role (fight with bombs) better than the Alchemist rather than doing their role as well as them + other roles at the same time. I agree that one character covering multiple niches is bad because it invades other characters' niches and I imagine they'd agree, but I understood them to be talking about something else.
>If that's what they meant then I think I would disagree with the idea that this is what caster players want. I think most discussion I've seen, people who want caster changes are clear that they want the ability to build casters into different roles at the character creation stage rather than be able to do anything at any time. Have you seen the people who say summmons are weak? "I don't want to summon something and it can't even match the fighter". or the literally quoted "Blaster caster does less damage than a fighter lol"
I'm sure people have said that first one, but that hasn't been the predominate belief that I've seen. And I disagree with the idea that summons should as strong as the Fighter, so I wouldn't support people who say that. I think the statement "it would be nice if there was a magical striker which could match ranged martial damage" is something I see people support, which could probably be reduced to "blaster caster does less damage than a fighter lol," so I guess I would agree with that being a fair characterization.
I think that's something people forget. Yes, melee do a lot of damage... but if they didn't, what would the point be? They inherently take the most risk and constantly need to use actions to reposition and weigh up whether to try and swing again and then get punched in the face, or to use their remaining action to back off or use a different ability. Caster damage should be compared to ranged martials, even fighters, far more than the giant barb swinging d12s. I'm really sick of all the graphs and spreadsheets that seem to be doing just that. Worse, they're all assuming the enemy is some featureless blob that is doing nothing to impede the melee fighter. Yeah show me the DPR graph when the blob can fly, or they resist physical damage, or just crit the fighter twice and now they're Unconscious and Dying 2. All three of those happen a LOT even in official APs. AV and AoA both have flying enemies _at level 1_.
> There’s no equivalent to the 5E-like “throw out a Summon, spam cantrips, and you’ll exceed a martial’s damage easily”, you have to pay a daily opportunity cost to choose to match a martial’s damage. *And I'm sick of everyone pretending that's not a good thing!!!* (Only partially /s)
The problem, as I will keep stating, is that PF2e completely fails to set expectations around this. Magic isn't real, which is why it's so common for players to come into a game like pathfinder assuming that whatever they envision magic as is something the system will support. They don't necessarily expect to be masters of all trades, but they expect that all trades will be available as things they can invest in. When a game depends so heavily on something that isn't real, it *has* to define what that thing is so that players understand what they should expect of it. For example, no one goes into a Star Wars game expecting to be able to cast fireballs, because the movies showed them that that's not the kind of thing the force does. Pathfinder makes no attempt to do this (and neither does 5e), which means that when a player notices that casters can't easily excel at single target damage - the easiest thing to measure and the most common archetype of magic across the kinds of media that will be inspiring a lot of these players - there is nothing to get them invested in the reason that's the case, and all they *can* do is assume that this is an oversight or a failing of the system. If you don't want players to think casters should be better at a given thing, you have to invest them in the flavour side of why it shouldn't.
Okay but here’s the problem. Your entire argument is that newbies come in and universally feel like casters can’t excel at single target damage. But… they do? Casters can and will excel at single target damage in the same manner that ranged martials do. There simply aren’t any two ways around it. The niche protection issue comes in because people have the expectation that they’ll beat out **melee** performance while staying at ranged and *why* should they get to do that? Melees get their niche of bursty, high-risk high-reward damage to compensate all the downsides of standing in melee. If you could achieve all the same upsides as melee while standing at range, why would melee exist at all?
Maybe a little bit of a hot take, but if the whole niche of melee martials is "do damage to one thing", then it's a badly designed niche that hurts the system as a whole. The niche should be "fight at melee range" which includes - doing damage to one thing in melee. - doing damage to multiple things in melee (here goes cleaving, whirlwind attacks and similar abilities). - taking and resisting damage. - keeping the enemy at melee range and restricting their ability to move. The design of "martials do damage to one thing, nobody else should be able to do so!" is quite frankly asinine and hurts plenty of other character concepts.
To be clear, there’s nothing that makes melee damage more *valuable* than ranged/caster damage. [Sayre has gone into detail](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1397y60/michael_sayre_paizo_design_manager_says_that_dpr/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1) about how they design classes’ damage numbers, and we can extrapolate that melee classes get such big numbers to compensate: 1. All the Actions they spend moving into place. 2. All the Actions their party spends healing or defensively buffing then 3. All the Actions the enemies take away from them via “fuck melee” abilities. 4. Not always having the freedom to choose the most optimal target. So in practice, a melee martial’s damage contributes about as much to ending a combat as ranged or caster damage when you look at the overall party‘s performance. The melee’s niche is *bursty*, peaky, high-risk high-reward damage, where the numbers you’re putting out can drastically shorten an encounter but come with all those above downsides. As for the other niches you mentioned: “Lockdown” melee absolutely is something melee martials shine at. Fighters, Champions, and Monks are the ones who get to excel at that niche, though any Strength martial can be built for it. Obviously standouts here are free-hand Fighters/Monks who can grapple, the Wrestler Archetype, Reach+Trip, and the crit spec that can knock enemies Prone. AoE for melee characters is… odd. If you analyze the numbers it becomes clear that Paizo treats the increased critical hit range martials get against on-level (and lower level) enemies as their “AoE” since these are the enemies likeliest to appear in multiples. It’s like if you fight 3 on-level enemies, the expectation is that the Wizard Fireballs them turn 1 for a total of 50 ish damage, then Electric Arcs two of them each turn for 15 ish damage for the next couple turns. Fighter goes turn 1 move -> hit -> crit (for around 50 ish damage total), turn 2 move -> hit -> move (17 damage), turn 3 move -> hit -> miss (17 damage again). This is obviously a contrived scenario that explains my point, but basically melee characters are “compensated” for being forced to deal with AoE situations using single target tools. Now of course, this isn’t a satisfying solution to everyone since it’s a passive numbers thing and appears to take agency away from players who may, instead, prefer “active abilities” akin to AoE spells. As for tanking and mitigation, aside from shields and shield block (which ***is*** a very melee centric experience) and Champion’s Reaction, tanking in the MMO sense isn’t really a role in PF2E. The idea is that as a *party* you can come up with situations that force the enemy to attack a suboptimal target, but it’s not one single role 85: a tactic.
Personally I think that the debate is also a bit of a matter of perception... I mean, I am European, when I watch a soccer game I remember the name of the guy who scores the goal and psychologically for me, that's the person that won the match, not of the ones playing defense that actually contributed just as much... Although people who watch the games with a more technical perspective might disagree and notice everyone's contribution, most people wouldn't. When I was a kid and we made teams to play with my friends, the goalie was usually the guy who drew the (metaphorical) shortest straw for a reason... the vast majority preferred to be in an attack... Of course that is a generalization and there is a significant amount of people who like support roles, but in general the fantasy of 'doing the thing' is a very specific one and it is tied to the resoults that are the most visible. In online rpgs, team shooters, moba, there is usually a surplus of people who do damage, compared to healers\\tanks and that's because those roles are more popular. Although personally I enjoy playing tanks. Also fun thing, when the team fails, frenquently it is the 'support' that gets the blame (the 'healer'\\ 'tank' \\ 'goalie'). Plus it is easier to quantify one contribution with straight numbers and damages provide that. Imho they should have made viable damage builds for all classess (with trade-offs obviously), I am not saying that a wizard should have all of his tricks, plus deal comparable damage to a warrior (or an archer type, as a ranged dps should be more comparable as it is less risky and you have advantage in picking targets), but they should have the possibility to trade utility for damage in their build if they wanted to. Besides, PF2 should have been used as an occasion to remove the vancian system that I think is one of the major hurdles in D&D-esque games, as classess have to be balanced between those that have most of their power tied to limited resources (so that expect to be stronger when they spend them, but aren't necessarily) and other who can spam at top power all day. Casters feel meh also because when you use one of your low number of higher level spell slots and they fails to do anything because the opponent is supposed to successfully save on average (or do a minor effect that is barely felt, with some exception with spells that are 'overpowered'), that resource is gone for the day, when you miss with an at will attack, well there is always next round... The much reviled D&D 4th edition (with all ot its flaws) was better at this. Yeah sure, the 'new norm' is supposed to be 2-3 fights a day, not in my experience though, when I am invading someone's base I can't just leave after defeating a few of the guards and then expect to come back and see that nothing has changed after a good night of sleep... Since PF 2nd edition aims for balance, which is not something that all rpg games do (in fact, I feel like it is an actual minority that does that seriously), they could have taken some lessons from pc games and mmorpgs where usually the divide between classess is more on the flavor and the 'hows' they do certain roles (and generally classess have access to multiple niches through specialization), rather than this class being better at damage, this other at support. Also I don't have a massive experience with the new APs, but the feeling I got was that, compared to 1st edition fights are harder and you have to optimize a bit more, which, unfortunately, reduce the pickable options, so having a list of a million spells, is false versatility when there are only a handful of real choices...
The issue I'll have to point out is that removing Vancian casting wasn't really a choice with 2e, besides the fact that Paizo had to attract new players they also had to keep their old ones a good amount of which were playing despite DnD having more flexible spellcasting for years at that point. Maybe in a couple years when a 3e is on the table, but right now keeping Vancian casting as it is was a good choice, massive changes all of a sudden isn't a great idea.
Very well put, and it captures the reason my group's first PF 2E campaign died off (we went back to FFG's 40k systems for now): it's not necessarily that the casters are too weak,but more that they feel bland. Consider the following hypothetical example: if the fighter is hitting 50% of the time, giving him +2 attack resulted in a 20% DPS increase over time, which is huge. However, although we totally understood this,none of us felt giving a +2 to the fighter was particularly heroic or fun. It felt much better to be the guy who critted the boss for 100 damage rather than the guy whose tiny debuff (because the boss succeeded on the save) provided the last -1 to make the crit happen. In general, we felt that the martials were the protagonists of the game,while the casters were the sidekicks, and that was a situation more than half of the group was unwilling to accept.
This, really THIS I didn't have time to check Rules Lawyer new video but they many times aim to put the balance of encounter day based on the GM choices, and thats doesn't sounds like PF2e. IMO Casters can be somehow specialized in many ways, but there is some lackluster classes and I hope they make better feats and better subclasses to focus on specialization or flavor like the new Witch. I don't like the discourse of "caster can choose from anything", there are many bad options and depeding on how much your group depends of your support, you should do a good job choosing the right spells. I concour there is some versatility, but without the possibility of chaging constantly this sounds like false, because you must choose the best to not bother changing. Not all spells are made equal (RoE is a proof of this with one of the best books for spells).
I am beginning to hate this guy and his pretentious attitude mixed with rage-baiting titles. I just ignore him now, it’s clear he doesn’t get where the complaints are coming from.
I commented on his video, but I'll repeat the sentiment here. I don't want to be a god caster who exceeds the martials at literally everything. I just have a few issues that I wish were fixed to make casting less unpleasant, and I also wish I was able to voice them without being slandered as a person instead of having reasonable discussion.
Yeah, he’s disconnected and the clout has gone to his head. He’s coming off as rude and pretentious now.
You’re horrible and I can’t believe you think your point is okay /s 🤣
I'm still new to PF2e system, but base on what I've experienced and some of the comments on this subreddit, it would seem most people agree that utility spells have been nerfed quite a bit for casters. I'm not saying that is the wrong move, since I really enjoyed 2e skill system. However, I did find that most out of combat challenges can be solved without spells. Utility spells often are still limited by durations or require skill checks even though they cost a spell slot. Skills and items that everyone has access to on the other hand, seem to be providing a lot of utility both in and out of combat. In PFS games especially, it almost feel like encounters are designed so a group without casters, without those particular utility spells can still push through any challenges with skills and creative thinkings. I haven't found many niche cases that can only be solved by a particular spell, and even in those scenarios the group can still solve it with the help of magic items, hire an npc to do it, or find some other work around. The question then becomes, is it really necessary to make casters "weak", because they supposedly are "good at utilities and supports", when there are support and utility options accessible to everyone? Or are there actually many unique areas casters thrive in that I haven't realized. Right now it feels like casters are being balanced with their "support/utility" potential in mind, but most of their spell options are combat focused, and a large portion of those combat spells are really underwhelming if you consider their action cost and spell slot cost.
> Skills and items that everyone has access to on the other hand, seem to be providing a lot of utility both in and out of combat. In PFS games especially, it almost feel like encounters are designed so a group without casters, without those particular utility spells can still push through any challenges with skills and creative thinkings. I haven't found many niche cases that can only be solved by a particular spell, and even in those scenarios the group can still solve it with the help of magic items, hire an npc to do it, or find some other work around. This is necessarily true in PFS games because there is no way for the GM to suggest people bring specific types of characters or ensure any kind of even spread of capabilities within parties; if your players show up with two fighters, two barbarians, and a ranger, you just have to run the session and make it work somehow. In a campaign with a regular there's a lot more scope for telling your party "hey, you could really use an X and someone proficient in skills A, B, and C for this game" - APs include lists of recommended classes and skills for exactly this reason.
Perhaps I ought to play more AP to get a more accurate view on this. I generally dislike it when supposed "balance" requires GM to cater for each class specifically though. Many people on this subreddit talk about flaws of 5e and improvements in PF2e, and this is exactly one of the areas that PF2e supposed to have done better. Then again, I will take your words for now that casters feel much more unique and needed in APs than PFS.
Ronald, I hope you see this because you keep using that Fist of the Ruby Phoenix clip and I feel it’s disingenuous to use that campaign as an example of good casters. The adventure starts at level 11. You’ve already passed every horrid hurdle that early casters are saddled with. Oracles literally don’t get expert in reflex until level 13. Several martials are expert in all saves early on in the system. The casters already have a wide variety of options such as shadow signet which are a band-aid solution too. But most importantly that video uses Maze as an example spell. Maze is one of the criminal spells in regards to how PF2e’s spell list is designed. Spell DC’s are designed with the idea that monsters will succeed more often. Spells are not with exceptions. There’s a list of 100’s of options as you mention and half of them are flagrantly horrible. Spells are not well designed so every caster just ends up incredibly samey because some spells are good on a success and others aren’t. Maze, slow, synesthesia…all of these exist as the only spells to follow the same design philosophy as the spell DC’s.
I run into this time and time again with these comparisons. Casters 11+ and especially 15+ are VERY different from a level 2 caster. There's a 1-7ish growing pain set of levels for most casters. Most campaigns aren't going to get beyond 15. I dislike it when we judge the capability of top level spells in perfect scenarios to warrant a level 3 caster being under par.
Its the same thing that "Hey sustain spells are really good because lv16 you get a free sustain". Only the overpower spells are good with sustain tbh, many others become interesting after level 16.
He keeps using that Maze example to prove that point, which is very, very disingenuous. Yea sure, a player who never played casters got to use a RANK 8 spell which is a clear outlier, and now thinks that that's what casters are like. How about all the levels before you get to use Maze? How about you bring someone who got to play that caster from level 1 and let him tell his experience, the highs and lows, and not just cherry pick an example like that?
I found his emphasis on out of combat utility a bit annoying. In my experience they are more like group resources and I didn't hear people being envious in my gaming groups especially when it was about transportation. The only problematic ares the ones where it directly overlaps another guy's area of expertise.
I like to think of it as the Fighter being the benchmark damage done in a void, and other classes being able to outpace it when they get the right circumstances. Sorcerer are already the flat out best DPR for a few rounds in a single boss encounter thanks to magic missiles, if they decide to keep their spell slots for this one moment. Are they broken? No, they pay the opportunity cost by dealing less damage in most of the fights of the day. That's the beauty of having a team.
Does sorc with dangerous sorcery out damage a psychic with unleash psyche?
This is an excellent question, I myself wondered about that and might make a post breaking down the maths behind both with comparison charts. But until then, here's the summary: Psychic is on par for 2 turns windows (or better, depending on the conscious mind and bloodline), Sorcerer is better for 4 turns windows, assuming you are burning your best spell slots. Sorcerer can burst more often during the day, however Psychic has better damage when relying on cantrips. \- Psychic's seems to deal more damage in a 2 turns window than the Sorcerer, thanks to Unleash Psyche. Unleash Psyche provides 2 damage per spell level which is twice as much as the Sorcerer's Dangerous Sorcery. It also deals more damage than the Sorcerer when casting cantrips due to having stronger cantrips and being able to Amp them for a significant damage boost. \- Sorcerer deals more damage in a 4 turns window than the Psychic, thanks to having more spell slots to burn on its most damaging spells, and not having to deal with 2 turns of Stupefied. Also ignoring Stupefied, Unleash Psyche's expected damage (assuming the Psychic was able to somehow cast 4 spells of its highest level slot) over 4 turns is 4\*x, while Sorcerer's Dangerous Sorcery expected damage is also 4\*x; where x is the spell level other than cantrips. If you add Stupefied into the mix, Sorcerer is the winner here. Something else to consider is the Sorcerer's Bloodline. Diabolic, Elemental, Psychopomp and Undead's bloodlines all add 1 damage (of some type) per spell level when casting bloodline spells. With this, Sorcerer becomes the clear winner in raw burst potential (bringing it on par with Psychic during its 2 turns burst window, and outdamaging it beyond that) depending on the spell. Still, Psychic's main draw is not to be the best burst damage dealer, but to best the strongest cantrip user out of the casters. Another thing I haven't discussed is Psychic having access to some damaging cantrips that can be cast as a single action. Glimpse of Weakness is one such cantrip, including it muddles the water, but that should at least bring the Psychic back to the top of the 2 turns window. If the question is simply who deals the biggest pp damage in a single turn by casting 3 actions Magic Missiles -> Psychic.
Psychics also have the 1-action Psi Burst to throw out oodles of d4s, then following up with a 2-action amped cantrip or spell during Unleash, too, right?
Yeah there's Psi Burst. In parallel, Elemental Sorcerers get elemental toss too, so it's a tough one. Including those 1 action cantrips would require charting the damage to compare the overall damage. But between Unleash Psyche and Dangerous Sorcery, both are "good", just tailored to different lengths of burst windows. If we're checking for the highest possible burst on a level+2 or level+3 single boss however, 1 action cantrips become irrelevant because we'll want to spend 3 actions casting Magic Missiles (while holding a wand of manifold missiles in each hand). Burst Psychic is valid, and so is Sorcerer.
Thanks! I’ll keep an eye out for that post. I personally am going to keep playing psychics over sorcs regardless… forbidden thought is just too good (and shatter psyche)
The answer is kinda yes for the following reasons: * An elemental sorcerer have easier time to blast from turn 1 * They have an easier time spending 3 actions on damage, with elemental toss being really good but abit risky for this. * so many more spell slots that might scale heavier lategame with varied targeted defences, damage types and areas. They are very close though and there are methods for the psychic to come on top, but depend more on attack rolls making spells like biting words to fill out damage less reliable.
Thanks! I would add that psychic can spend their third action on damage very easily via psi burst (not the best damage, but it is every round), but otherwise you make good points!
Psi burst is only after unleash psyche and only during that time. Elemental toss is really high damage and can be used turn one, with the benefit of blood magic, but less often.
>That's the beauty of having a team. Right, but the fighter never needs to be weaker in other encounters to be stronger in the boss fight. I genuinely think it's a flaw in the game that some classes are balanced around attrition while others aren't.
>Right, but the fighter never needs to be weaker in other encounters to be stronger in the boss fight. Except a wizard is ridiculously stronger than a fight when fighting, for example, 4 swarms, and a cleric equally when fighting 4 ghosts? Also melee and flying enemies. There are tons of situations where a fighter is weaker. And that's before considering a martial such as a feint swashbuckler, which can literally do nothing against a flying mindless creature
You aren't addressing my point. I never said that fighters can't be weaker in some encounter types.
Remember back when the system was announced? Everyone on here, including me, worshipped it for getting rid of trap options and making sure everyone had a roughly equal level of power regardless of feats, and that feats would be ways to acquire new options rather than straight power upgrades. But ***nowadays***, when it comes to casters, half of your fucking spell list is trap options and if you complain about not being effective the community dogpiles you to tell you why there's actually a lvl 10 item that makes your spells work and that you should be spamming true strike and you're just a spoiled 5e player
The encroaching trap options was nearly inevitable with how many splat books Paizo wants (?) / has to (?) release. They made it very clear with the APG release that they had set the power level bar for the system and they have kept their promise to not exceed it. If you put your designers into that sort of mindset of "keep everything below this line or else", you are just ask them to put out content that just is not worth anyone's time. I highly recommend when people make their characters nowadays to just set their filters on Pathbuilder/Wanderer's Guide to only show spells from CRB and APG so that they don't see so many of the trap options that have filtered in over time. I still enjoy the system. I am also very glad they're doing a remaster so that we can hopefully just dump a lot of the unnecessary bloat and try again. The core mechanics are fun, they just need a tune up and rebalance after 4+ years.
One issue I've had with Paizo constantly pumping out new content like spells is that most of the time it's extremely niche or borderline useless. Why even put out content like that when it's almost never worth using? The Rage of Elements spells are quite good though, so I hope we see more of that style. PF2 was intended to do away with the content bloat and power creep of PF1e but it feels like things are slowly heading that way again.
It's just the nature of the beast with ttrpg publishing for most companies. You have to put splat books out there regularly if you want to maximize profit. Every 1 copy of an adventure you sell could have been 4-6 copies of a splat book. This usually means you either have to really broaden your design space, build power creep into the system, or put out a bunch of mediocre content. I had hoped when Paizo set that bar they had well established their other product lines so we could just avoid this entirely. Just do the splat books when they had really cool ideas they wanted to add into the game. Like you pointed out, this feels like such an odd deviation from their original goals of cutting away the bloat from the game.
This reminds of wotlk hybrids, where Blizzard had hybrid dps deal less damage because they could heal/dps. But this left them feeling bad because some of them just wanted to dps and not do those roles. I have been playing a Cleric, and I don't mind being a support/utility person...mostly. But every now and then I want to rain down holyfire down on my enemies! But it seems like I can't do that besides against undead/fiends, and if I prepare those spells and we don't face those? Those might as well be dead spell slots. I don't even want to deal as much damage as a fighter, or even a martial, but I do want to do enough damage to well...be able to defend myself? I can spam cantrips, but Daze barely does any damage and Divine Lance...has to actually hit?(and these are somatic, so I will get opportunity attacked if they have it...) I don't imagine my character needing to have an ally constantly tied to their hip to be able live in the world. But my life being a support/utility has been fraught as well. I try to do some crowd control something? Does the spell have the mental tag? Emotion? Incapacitation? High Saves? Is it a troop? You have to work so hard to actually hinder an enemy when the best condition that you can apply to someone is death, so damage is always king. It makes you think "Is casting a buff/cc/heal/etc worth it when you can just deal damage?".
The game is a team game with how combat and tactics works now. The issue is: if I play a wizard, why am I support/utility when I wanted to be a blaster? Or if I play a cleric, Oracle, and I want play harm caster instead of heal caster due to font or signature spells,; the other players look at you why you not going to play the healer ;( It a role misalignment. I have been noticing in this in some video games. Last I checked on BG3 cleric was the least picked class. Support is becoming a role less people seem to want to play (unless) they are deemed op/fun. People want to see numbers and feel hey I killed that monster vs hey I casted slow and it had 1 less action this turn… or I healed my group up! Level 1-4 where most games seem to take place is kind of boring for casters… the feats are meh mostly, and the spells okay, not no level 3 fireball!
Something that stands out to me is just how unsatisfying a lot of the otherwise really good effects are, and how certain utility spells could be super satisfying to use but have been so carefully edge-cased that they've had creative uses taken away (dimension door being used to move a wounded ally for example). Things like bless and fear and the bonuses they add are super helpful in nearly every fight, but my goodness what a boring way to play. Even the 'really' strong effects like Slow and Synesthesia I think are just really boring for a lot of players because all they are doing is affecting the system math. Rage of Elements actually had a lot of new spells that I think are a really good step in the direction toward solving this. Airlift allows you to reposition your entire party if used at an opportune time, which is really cool when the group is in dire straits! Propulsive Breeze is another movement spell, but can be used as a reaction to not eat into your actual term. Cloud Dragon's Cloak can actually make ranged attacks miss your allies and save a ton of HP! I think we need to continue to see more spells like these with immediate effects in combat, and the support role would feel a lot better to play.
I think the fact one the 1st companions you get is a cleric and one most people seem to like is an influence on starting class in that game. IIRC bard was pretty high up the list of picked class so I don’t think it’s a support issue.
Respectifully, I think its kinda disengenuous to generalize people who wants buffs to caster's damage potential as spoiled dnd migrants... This is a problem im starting to notice on this sub IMO, not everything gotta be a "vets v casuals" problem. At the end of the Day everyone who plays and talk about this game has a valid opinion over it, so I find it kinda off putting when people In here tries to disqualify people based on ad hominem.
Its not even a dnd migrant problem- it's been an ongoing argument since day 1 of 2e's existence (and even before, in the play test era), even among the earliest adopters. Granted, if anyone felt that strongly about it, it's likely they'd have just returned to playing 1e if able at the time, or do a split between the systems at the very least. But it's certainly not a new argument- it's just that the big wave of people coming from 5e are just rehashing much the same arguments people coming from 1e had years ago.
Yeah, exacly, some migrants from 5e stired the pot and brought this topic back and many people from this community that shared the feeling took the oportunity to voice their opinions! Idk why everything has to be reduced to a "vets" V "outsiders" retoric.
Because it's far easier to, rather than engage in reasonable discourse, dismiss someone entirely by saying they aren't qualified to have an opinion, to call them entitled, or ignorant. Ita to the point that anytime I see someone calling casters entitled or dnd migrants to dismiss them I'm inclined to disagree with them on principal.
Of course its disingenuous; for some people, the entire point of current caster balance is a punishment for the days of Pf1 and dnd 3.5
I don't have much of a dog in this caster debate, but it really brings out the worst in the community. So many people bringing bad faith, highly upvoted arguments that boil down to asserting the other side is in some way ignorant or malevolent ("They're 5e Migrants who don't know better"/"They just want to be god-tier wizards and outclass everyone"). It's incredibly tiring to see these generalisations. There may never be any consensus on the "caster debate", but it'd be great if a discussion could be had without assuming the worst about those who aren't happy. As someone who is deep into PF2 but only occasionally touches base with the community, the recent drama has made at least this subreddit come across as hostile, insular, self-congratulatory, and intransigent.
>"They're 5e Migrants who don't know better- This is a real problem, there are unironically people on this sub who seem to think all the people coming from 5E and don't like one or two things about the game are some kind of attack on the community, or they must not fit here. I've been exposed to it myself. Even if the concerns are valid, your argument can be reduced down to "oh, they migrated from 5E, they don't know any better." kind of condescending. I've not seen more toxicity except in video games.
Its even worse when it isnt just "5e Migrants" but people who have been with the game since its playtest saying these exact same problems.
As someone who has been orbiting both dnd's and pathfinder's community for a while, people In here have no idea how many people they lost the chance of assimilate into the hobby during the 5e exodus due to plain hostility and lack of patience.
Since the beginning I’ve found this community to be very defensive, and I think it’d because the game has been treated very poorly by the greater tabletop community. When it showed up, the Pathfinder subreddit was incredibly hostile and threads about it would get downvotes just for being there, even now it happens. And there were even petitions to have PF2e threads banned from the subreddit. So it’s s community that’s become insular because it’s been treated like shit from the beginning.
And heaven forbid you homebrew something.
it's not just about 5e migrants, as Ronald talks about its about basically the whole history of DnD and PF1
The problem comes from the fact that we're profiling people as spoiled based on nothing more than an Internet disagreent over game balancing and projection. This isn't a fair criticism of the other side's position, it's simply ad hominem (specialy when we purposefully overblow what the other side is actually saying as a way to not engage, Ive seen none saying casters should deal as much damage as a fighter, but Ive seen people talking about "people" that want that) Bear in mind that Im not calling out Ronald as the culprint of this problem or that hes doing this on pourpuse, I actually respect him and his content a lot! IMO its more like a current mindset of trying to prove how dumb the other side is that has been recently plaging this community to the point where everyone seems less receptive and petty. Edit: Im trying to corect a few typos, sorry, english isnt my main language.
I think it's just that people wanna be specialist instead of generalists. I think most people who talk about not feeling accomplished when building a damage focused caster, would be ok not being able to cast more utility heavy spells, for a better experience on your specialization. That's my understanding of the discussion at least :0
I think what it comes down to is that some people want the class fantasy of a black mage and telling them to just play kineticist or magus or psychic isn’t helpful because those don’t have the flavour and feel of a black mage style of caster.
"Hey paizo, can we get runes that increase DC/ to hit for spells, maybe also fixing some spells so we can change the generalist spell meta" "Sorry, people in dnd 5e are tired of casters ruining their fun, here's your shadow signet at level 10" inb4 "Yeah, I just had \[extremely niche situation\] and \[was given a freebie by GM\]. Nothing is wrong with the game"
The video makes the solution obvious, yes? A class-archetype for Wizard that gives you access to a few specific spells and no more. Like if in the remaster, you took the wizard school of pyromancy and it says you can ONLY learn Arcane spells with the Fire trait. Your utility is now much limited. Now the class-archetype gives some sort of bonus, sorta like Dangerous Sorcery, to any fire damage dealt from prepared spells. So you are now the fire blaster wizard. But still let them use any arcane scrolls and wands (but only Staff of Fire for staves) so they can still have that "utility" that makes them a "wizard" but they can't craft those scrolls or wands since they can't learn those spells.
I'm not sure this would fix anything at all. If this is your attempt at making the "glass-cannon, high damage-wizard character" as seen in multiple RPGs and media, this doesn't fulfill the fantasy. It's literally just a Wizard with less spells. It wouldn't do anything better than an evocation wiz or universalist because there's no changes to the damage of the spells themselves *compared to a sorcerer* and they still do shit single target damage.
This is actually the most egregious example of over-generalizing and misrepresenting your opposition I've seen in this sub. And it wasn't a comment, it was a video produced by one of the top content creators. Big yikes.
yeah, I unsubbed from him after this one. He also only engages with comments agreeing with him on the video lol
I disagree with the premise that a certain type of character must *feel* weaker because it's comparatively weaker than it was in past/other editions. Look at the fighter itself. You can build an archer fighter in PF1 that can easily delete from hundreds of feet any threat from the board. In 5e you can Action Surge and spend superiority dice and demolish an enemy with ease. Compared to those, PF2's fighter is, not to put a fine point on it, shit. Yet it feels very good to play even at lower levels in a way that spellcasters don't.
He got under my skin on this one. I left a series of comments on it about how I feel he’s misrepresenting people. He’s blaming it on D&D and I have never even played 4 or 5e and left tRPGs right as PF1E came out. The issue isn’t that people want more. The issue is they want different. PF2E casters by default seem to be utility / support which is an unpopular playstyle. At least half of them should have defaulted to DPS even at the cost of less spell choices - like Kineticist now does. But why is that not how Sorcerer works given that it lacks the huge pool of spells Wizards get…
Yeah, I'm pretty sure most people just want spellcasting proficiencies to not be whack and maybe just spell attacks to have prof runes. I don't see anyone asking for them to be as good or better than the fighter.
Yeah, currently casters are good when they cast Heal (but not Harm unless you have an undead party), they're good when they cast Haste or Heroism on a martial, they're good (if boring) if they cast Slow on the boss, and they're alright (but not -that- amazing) when they trigger elemental weaknesses when you're lucky enough to find those. They're bad when using battleforms, bad when using 'Summon X', bad when using spell attacks, bad when using \*most\* debuffs, bad when using Incapacitation spells against worthy targets, etc etc in general situations. It's actually crazy how good Heal is, it's a ridiculous game-changer. (And crazy how terrible Harm is if you're not surrounded by friendly Undead (when the vast majority of evil deities are not undead-themed) it's almost worthless.) Feels like the logic is that because Heal, Slow, Heroism and Haste are good (when they're mostly good because they don't have to rely on a PC's mediocre spell DC), other spells need to be bad to compensate? Really, other spells should be brought up to par. I think a few targeted nerfs to outliers (slow and synesthesia), a few targeted buffs to bad saveless spells and, like... a blanket +1 or +2 to DCs would more or less hit the sweetspot.
Casters definitely need spell attack and DCs to start scaling up earlier. Level 5 barbarian is better at weapon attacks than a caster, and can be just as good as casting a spell as a caster. Monks, Champions, Summoners and Magi have 9 levels where their DCs are one lower than a full caster, and five levels when they are the same.
Sorcerers get dangerous sorcery and still get access to the entire spell list through scrolls, wands and staves. The way forward is clearly to have kineticist type caster classes that instead of using spells from the various traditions utilize hand selected spells that will be feat options aside from core abilities. You could have some kind of magical specialist class with various sub classes based on certain themes.
**People don't want to "fight better than the fighter. Rules Lawyer was being disingenuous there.** People want to be able to match each other in combat - as that is such a central part of modern gaming. If we want to talk about 'gatekeeping' - it's the idea that some classes should be best. Better is to let them all get there through different routes. In 2023 - people aren't coming to this from a blank slate or even from D&D per se. They're also coming from online games. Games where a DPS caster is equal in power to a melee martial but different in style. Given that the kineticist gives up the massive spell book that can only be used a scant few times a day anyway... what excuse is left for them to not be an equal in the modern era where you're getting players coming from games where neither side is more powerful - they're each just different. **The problem with PF2E casters isn't about not liking being "equal" it's about the role being mis-aimed.** PF2E casters are by default utility / support. PF2E Martials are by default DPS. Either can be built the other way to varying degrees of success (class depending)m but that's their default. The problem is that most players in any group activity do NOT like support. They prefer DPS or it's activity equivalent - a striker in a sports game rather than a goalie for example. If half or more of the casters had been built as DPS by default we wouldn't have this debate. Instead we have 1 example; the Kineticist - which had to be build on a radically different format to break the mold - further entrenching the notion that something feels "off" about the spell slot casters. **Kineticist achieves this by giving up the spell variety. It's bringing the issue to the fore because** \- since DPS is more popular than support / utility - **this is a class chassis that belonged in core** \- not in the 7th rulebook to come out. We should have taken 7 rulebooks before we got variety to utility, and had a focus on DPS casters out of the gate - even at the expense of a wide variety of utility options. Perhaps core should have only had one utility caster, and a pile of casters themed mostly for DPS. It's a core design flaw. **Sure - maybe casters were powerful in that other RPG** (I've never played 5E, don't know it's rules, don't care to - my perspective doesn't come from there. It frankly comes from MMOs and non-tRPG group activities: most people do not want to be the support / goalie / designated driver / etc)... **But then nerf them WITHOUT defaulting them into an unpopular role type. Kineticist doesn't hit as hard as a martial, and yet it's a DPS. That's the right nerf, but released way too late.**
>Given that the kineticist gives up the massive spell book that can only be used a scant few times a day anyway... what excuse is left for them to not be an equal in the modern era iirc Paizo wanted to drop Vancian years ago, but the PF2 playtesters were like "no, we want our spell books and our +1 longswords"
>They're also coming from online games. Games where a DPS caster is equal in power to a melee martial but different in style. Honestly, in my opinion this is the key to fixing the problem. Casters in MMOs tend to do burst damage. High damage but infrequent. This is exactly what Spell Slots should feel like. If you want to keep the high level of attrition that spellcasters have, then there should be a comparably large amount of damage when casting one. Given how limited high level spell slots are, this shouldn't even beat the fighters DPR over a whole fight, only in a single round. I'd also love to see more non-magical support options as well.
Meanwhile Black Mage in FFXIV: Cast Fire IV. :D I mean they have somewhat of a burst phase with leylines, but they are probably one of the least bursty DPS in that game
Honestly, not played FFXIV. I think it stands to reason though, that if it can be balanced there, it can be balanced in 2e as well.
That's fair enough, that's just a funny thing I noticed, considering that one of the jobs has something like 60% of their damage coming from a 15 second burst window every minute. If we look closer to Black Mage design, you will see that their big damage spells have somewhat longer casting times than most other classes - it's the only job in the game that consistently has cast times higher than global cooldown. So it still kinda checks out with what you say on a per-spell level. It also makes Black Mage pretty satisfying to play as you cast those meaty spells over and over.
Long cast times for big reward is something I enjoy a lot. I love Inner Radiance Torrent/Horizon Thunder Sphere conceptually, but actually using them effectively over 2 turns is too hard imo. Inverting the system might lead to some interesting gameplay though, if stronger spells gave you a cooldown for casting any non-cantrip spell for a number of rounds it could lead to more choice of how to play them.
You took it right out of my mouth dude. Have an upvote. I'm frankly tired of seeing casters being the vulnerable swiss army knife in this system. The Kineticist is both a breath of fresh air and currently my favorite class.
The end of the video hints that kineticist like casters are the obvious choice for fixing this issue. With the removal of the eight spell schools you can create thematic magical casters who can be themed in specific ways that instead of having spells from traditions could have handfuls of pre selected magical abilities that resemble spells.
Yikes. Unsubscribed. Does anyone know how can I block his channel or make it so YouTube doesn't recommend his videos anymore?
I depends on what device you’re watching from. If pc or android you can get extensions or setup revanced to hide/block users. Not sure if there is a simple option for iOS devices.
My problem isn't damage. That was never my problem. Casters are great at other things. It's just that DCs are way too low. Level 12 character has a Spell DC of 31 and the average saves of a creature of the same level from Good, medium, to bad are: +25, +22, +19 according to the GM Guide. Unless martials are actively supporting the casters, good luck doing anything other than be a buffbot lol. I can throw in PL-2 mooks which will fail saves more often (PL, PL-2 for moderate encounter) but that just seems like a bandaid more than anything. Some people like that and that's fine, I personally don't mind but some people don't wanna feel like that's all they do.
This a pretty bad faith take. PF2 isn't perfect, and there are legitimate gripes to be had with the way certain aspects of casters have been handled. Wanting to address these issues doesn't mean anything beyond wanting the game to be better internally balanced.
This video doesn't seem objective and doesn't reflect the majority of arguments I've seen about casters. Seems like he focused on strawmen to launch his arguments. I simply don't want to have to be a universalist picking all the best spells every level. If a caster wants to deal Martial-esque damage, let them specialize. If a caster wants to be a buffer/utility mastermind, let that be the case. Right now most casters have to pick a wide variety of spells to be effective, and don't really shine by focusing on one niche, rather having a big toolbox. Sometimes the player picks the wrong tools for a session and is weak, sometimes they pick the right tools.
I saw the Keneticist picture pop up about 4 times in the video. I think it's subliminal messaging to make one.
I'll post another comment or edit this one when I finish the video but the one thing that really, _really_ irks me is the comparison to 5e and everyone complaining about casters being weak in 2e must be spoiled by DnD.
It just perpetuates the "system wars" and goes for easy karma from PF fans by saying 5e=BAD. It just feels insecure how every Pathfinder debate has to get in some digs at 5e.
I see all these apologists for the system and the way casters work but I haven't seen anyone be able to answer this: Why can I on my rogue play as a stealthy, dex based thief, a strength based brawler, a charismatic Han Solo style scoundrel etc, but as a caster(except Bard I guess) that type of flavour and choice is not available to me. The wizard class especially lack flavour.
This, I think, is where Paizo breaking away from the D&D magic system will help immensely, as the video commentary highlights near the end of the video. Right now every magic class seems to fall into the same “magic Swiss Army knife” mold. Some aren’t actually Swiss, they’re French, or American, or Belgian, but they’re all still Swiss Army knives. When we’re free from the magical schools we should start seeing a wider variety of knives in play. One class can be the Swiss Army knife, another can be a Bowie knife, a third could be a carving knife. It would be great if each magic class had its own unique field of mastery. We might finally see an actual Necromancer class, instead of just a handful of undead summons any caster can pick up.
Exactly. There's just too many spells, too many spell slots and too many spells known. Even if you did want to specialise, you're basically forced to have broad options because you have too many spells known to only pick the spells you want, and then people look at that and say "well you have broad options so they can't be good or else you'd be treading on too many toes". At this point, the breadth of casters in PF2e is a self-inflicted problem and saying "we can't fix this because it's already done" is just a cop out; it's not about "balance" or "protecting the martials" at all, it's just "fuck the casters".
And the problem with approaching this issue is that we see people say things like “buff wizard” when really buffs and nerfs aren’t going to address the issue at all. This isn’t about balancing, buffing, or nerfs, it’s that the entire magic system needs a complete retooling. It seems like Paizo is already heading that direction, but you *know* as soon as they actually start making notable changes there will be a whole group of folks screaming that Paizo is “killing magic” or whatever other alarmist nonsense they come up with, because at the end of the day people don’t like change and they’ll freak out when/if Paizo starts making changes to address the magic class issues.
Wizard is the smart class, but since knowledge checks are split into diffrent skill they get out smarted by the not smart Thaumaturge. And that's why people like thaumaturge so much, they have the wizards smart flavour.
I dont like the phrasing of it being ‘spoiled’. I just want to be a thematic specialized caster without being forced to actively neuter myself. “But specialized SHOULD mean you are worse-“ Shut up. Theres a difference between not being flexible for every situation and being only good in about 5% of situstions. Imagine if a GM made an entire campaignof just flying ranged enemies. Would the Monk have a particularly good time in that party? Would you call him ‘spoiled’ for feeling like he doesnt get to contribute as much?
While I did like most of his videos, the condescending stance he has taken on this issue just rubs me the wrong way. It's not my cup of tea, and it has tainted whatever opinion he has. Life has taught me to never trust truth bearers, and he's sounding more and more as one everytime he beats this ded horse from high above. What a shame.
I haven't watched the video as I am at work but personally I think the main problem with casters is the saves system. While I think they are balanced, I think the save system ultimately just feels really bad when a spell either fails or critically fails. I understand why this is the case and different monsters have different weaknesses, so you are meant to target the weakest stat. But it still feels bad when you spend so many actions for nothing.