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Swags posted:This is a 3.5 question. I'm posting it here because this is the closest thing to a 3.5 thread. Basically, it doesn't work very well, it's poorly implemented, and it takes a lot of houseruling to let it work at all. Just make a Paladin or Cleric, really, if you want to play a holier-than-thou type. Also look for the Justicar prestige class; it's based around not killing your opponents while not dicking over combat entirely. I think that's in Complete Divine, although I could be mistaken. (If I were the DM, I'd probably say that that breaks the vow, though. You're out there causing harm, and if I recall BoED gives stiff penalties for even accidentally breaking your vows or doing something while mind-controlled. This is also a reason it sucks.)
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Mar 22, 2010 00:18
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Eh... it seems to me at a rough glance that that's at best on par with a raging barbarian. Probably less, since the barbarian gets more to-hit bonus from his strength increase. Add in that you have to spend an action to cast your spell, and you have a flavorful buff that's probably not gamebreakingly powerful. It's going to increase your average damage by... what? 2.5 per attack at best? That's worth less than +2 attack and +2 damage. Of course, the barbarian has a more limited duration and exhaustion... which could come up if the fights run to a lot of turns. That's the closest comparison I can see at a glance, and it doesn't seem too bad to me.
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Aug 20, 2010 02:55
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It kinda depends on what you're facing. Summoner is probably the best overall, just thanks to its superior summoning power. Never mind your Eidolon; you can summon seven times for a minute each time. Get Spell Focus (Conjuration) and Augment Summoning, and you can summon a dog each round that's not that much weaker than the fighter, and they'll last until the end of the encounter or until slain. Spam dogs. A more interesting option would be a cleric of Urgathoa with the Magic domain. You have more HP than a wizard, you can prepare Burning Disarm, and if your enemies aren't dumb enough to drop their weapons, you can use your Magic domain power to hurl your scythe for a ranged attack that does about as much damage as the fighter's sword and also has that x4 crit that might trigger. Other options are a bard who abuses Fascinate, a druid with something that looks good for your animal companion, or the classic sorcerer with Sleep and Color Spray. Sorcerer is better than wizard at first level. Or you could just make something normal and enjoy the game, of course...
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Nov 4, 2010 18:49
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angrylinuxgeek posted:They challenged me to bring something OP to the game to show off how "well balanced" PF is, At first level?  By level 7 or 9 the Cleric and Wizard are starting to make the fighter look like a cheering squad, but, sure, at first level a sorcerer might want a fighter in front of him to keep him from going down in 1 or 2 strikes. But they'll never be anywhere near balanced as long as Divine Power, Righteous Might, and save-or-lose exist solely in the hands of the primary casters.
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Nov 4, 2010 19:46
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Name one reason to bring a fighter instead of another cleric. Cleric can manage effectively just as much to-hit, at least as much damage, can tank just as well with their healing power, have touch-range save-or-lose spells that are at least the equal of combat maneuvers, and have better saves naturally. Add in that they have buffing spells for essentially everything, the ability to summon, other area-control and damaging spells, and also this handy-dandy turn undead power, there is literally no reason for "fighter" to be more than a 2-level (or maybe four level, if you're desperate for feats) dip. It's kind of telling, to me, that I'm pretty sure that "fighter" is the only class ever listed as a prerequisite. "Caster level" is the closest other thing, and that can be fulfilled by a host of classes. But boy howdy, those fighter feats can't be available to barbarians/rogues/rangers/paladins! Now, without Divine Metamagic and with Pathfinder bonuses, the difference between a cleric and a fighter is somewhat less than it was in 3.5, if you're looking at the cleric as just a fighter-replacement instead of covering its own role. Essentially: the fighter is in all seriousness a joke class for people who like playing silly gimmicks or don't mind being useless. Even with Pathfinder, having a fighter that can contribute to a party of two wizards and two clerics, for instance, is just unlikely. And once spells get into maybe 5th level, at highest (it may be lower), a fighter is roughly equivalent to one spell by a caster--Summon Nasty, Wall of Force, Black Tentacles, Stoneskin, Charm, Blade Barrier... off the top of my head. And casters have a lot of spells.
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Nov 5, 2010 15:43
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Nigulus Rex posted:Anyone have any advice on a cleric? I've been sifting through the thread, but nothing concrete. I've read Eidolon's guide as well as the Beckett's Lab guide, but since this is my first character I'm kind of at a loss. Are you having any specific problems? A cleric can be worked towards almost any role. Inflict is a good series for touch-range offense, the stat-buffers area almost always useful, and your various defensive and offensive buffs can turn you or another party member into quite a death-dealer. Also, since 80% of your power or so is in your spells, you can change your role quite a lot from one day to another, and with spontaneous cure spells, you're always a good healer unless you just run out of spells completely. The only thing that I'd say to really look up on if you haven't is... you do know clerics get two domains, right? All of Sarenrae's domains look like pretty solid choices; the weakest is probably Healing. More Cha wouldn't have been terrible, either, for Channel Energy, but unless you're in an undead-heavy campaign, it shouldn't be too much of a problem.
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Nov 6, 2010 04:43
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grah posted:I always wonder if people who say this have played pathfinder fighters at high level. A cleric can't match a fighter in melee, unless he buffs. But buffs, summons, channels, and all these things that make clerics great, all cost actions. If ever the party is ambushed (perish the thought), you're already an action behind, and then if you spend the first turn doing a full round summon-which can easily be -interrupted, or casting a buff spell, you're now two actions behind and wasting resources. The action economy is one of the biggest limits on spellcasting, especially at levels where Swift Spell and its 4 spell-level bump is not viable. ZeeToo posted:Name one reason to bring a fighter instead of another cleric. This still stands. It takes about one spell to match what the fighter's advantages are, and sometimes you don't even need that. I'm not denying that a Fighter + a Cleric is better than a Cleric alone, but what's the advantage of a Fighter instead of another Cleric? The cleric isn't that much worse at low levels in weapon combat than a Fighter, and he has spells to draw on as well. Not many, sure, but even first-level buffs can be pretty helpful. At high levels, you have Symbols, mass Inflict spells, Summons, Holy Word(or equivalents), and so on. Sure, it'll take two or three spells to get as good as the fighter at weapon use, but it doesn't matter when you can stop the fight in one spell that does more damage (or equivalent) than a fighter's weapon, who cares? Then you start to get spells like Flame Strike and Boneshatter that do more damage at range than a bow-focused fighter. And if you're trying to tell me that a Fighter can top a cleric at melee range, with the cleric's touch-range killing spells, I don't know if you've even looked at the cleric's spell list. Then there's the fact that the cleric has, what, 50+ spells equipped at high levels, and can change every day to match what's on the agenda today. A human fighter has less than half as many feats, which often have prerequisites of other feats, and the feats are generally less powerful than, say, Implosion. I've never known SR/saves to be anywhere near enough to be meaningful except on powerful dragons and demon lords. And if you're fighting a dragon--guess what? You want the guy who can cast Resist Energy. For that matter, the guy who can summon an elemental or angel isn't a bad choice, either. Or the guy who can heal, drop buffs, who isn't completely flummoxed by something like Wall of Force... notice a trend? The cleric can generally also tank better, becuase it has better saves, and can heal and if he has one action free he can use a buff spell or two. Anything less that that sort of foe, and the cleric can just Slay Living or something. The only time you'd want a Fighter over a Cleric is if you're in an Anti-magic zone; I stand by my statement.
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Nov 8, 2010 06:32
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grah posted:This is just plain false and if you believe it there's not any discussion of any melee class to be had, and there is literally nothing that can balance a non-casting class short of giving them spells. At low levels, it's more on parity, but when the cleric has dozens upon dozens of spells to draw on, there's no comparison. A cleric can do a melee guy's job and more. A wizard or sorcerer can win fights even faster, but at least isn't nearly so obvious with the whole "your job and more" nonsense; a wizard is more about dropping something that just ends fights--Forcecage, Maze, Disintegrate. The much-maligned classes from Book of 9 Swords are still not on the same level as a cleric or wizard, though they at least can contribute well to a party with them, and they're pretty much all strictly superior to even PF-bonused Fighter/Barbarian/Paladin, once you convert from one system to the other what's needed.
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Nov 9, 2010 01:33
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Klungar posted:I'd rather build the alluded to "Better than the Fighter" Cleric Well, at level 9, you also have access to Righteous Might, which does wonders for battlefield control, thanks to your size and new 10-foot reach. To just be a better tank than a Fighter, get Armor Proficiency, Heavy and Toughness--you can now take hits like a pro, and if need be, you spend your action healing yourself. For Fighter-ish damage output, Divine Power and Righteous Might are the go-to spells. The issue is that that takes two turns to get rolling and you had to spend a 4th and a 5th level spell to manage it, which isn't inconsiderable at this level (at high levels, you can have a Quickened Divine Power handy if you really feel like smashing stuff). Damage is better handled via Flamestrike/Summon Monster (IV/V)/Bone Shatter/Holy Smite (and its alignment variations) if you absolutely must deal it at range. If you can get close, Slay Living and Plane Shift are both essentially kills if they land... and they're both Conjurations. Get Spell Focus (Conjuration) (and Greater if you can), and you've got something that almost nothing at that level is going to be able to stand up to--one targets Will save, and one Fort. It starts to look painfully feat-intensive at level 9 if you need Spell Penetration to beat SR, but luckily not much at that level has it. You probably can't do everything better than a Fighter at level 9, or not all at the same day at least. It's only when things start to get to really high levels that it becomes Fighter-irrelevant, which is why grah's claims looked so odd to me. You can definitely contribute more by picking what of the above your party needs most, though. Swags posted:My binder, which I had taken from level 3 to 14, died last week. So I'm thinking of bringing in a summoner, and playing him like Ash Ketchum from Pokemon, mainly because I think it's a hilarious concept. Level 14, of course. 1) If you have Augment Summoning, odds are you're not doing too bad. What does the party lack? Find a hole in the party and fill it; Summoners are pretty much always going to be second-rate anything when not summoning, but with the eidolon and your spell selection, you can be an okay choice for anything, including sneaking around and trap detecting--the eidolon can have the relevant skills for the former if you want, and with your class feature summon spells and the eidolon itself, you can handle traps via the "have something expendable walk in front" method. 2) Plays into your chosen role. 3) If you want the other players to hate you, summon something complex every single combat round. Intelligent outsiders are good for this, and you can get 1d4+1 Bralani each time you use it. Note: bad advice! This will slow things down until people want to beat you over the head with their books. More seriously, just stack interesting-looking attacks and defenses into the eidolon until you have a beatstick that won't go down easily; odds are that that's going to fit well with your teammates, since I'm guessing that at the moment the cleric is the best tank. But if things start to go sour or the eidolon is out for the moment, your summoning spell-like is seriously a crazy turn-around. Don't worry about not being useless; the big worry is chewing up time so that combat rounds take forever and half of them are your summons.
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Nov 10, 2010 17:23
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I know stuff like Divine Favor and Divine Power are important, but other than that I'm kind of lost.
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Swags posted:Well, in the place where we were going, the Weave did not work. Only the Dark Weave did. Permanent anti-magic field that only affected us. Even a theoretically entirely mundane sword-swinger type isn't going to enjoy himself much, because suddenly his cool magical weapon is useless, he can't get buff spells on him, his HP total (however high) becomes an incredibly scarce resource when all you can get back is what you get by resting, and unless he's made out of very specific cheese his damage output is nerfed to the point that his "in the spotlight" fight ends up being 1/10th or less of the enemy's HP per round, so he's probably vexed by how little damage he does and the primary casters are doubtlessly completely fed up. Adding enemy-only magic and flying wizards against such a party should have set off your DM's Bad Idea senses, but if you're going with a published adventure, some DMs just aren't willing to mess with it because they assume that the writers must have known what they were doing. Anti-Magic is in all seriousness probably the worst spell 3.5 ever had, and Pathfinder didn't do anything to make it better. My biggest question about the whole thing would be why the DM would do it in the third of three books when you say it's been used two or more previous times; shouldn't he have learned by now?
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Nov 12, 2010 17:19
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Does PF have a 20d6 max damage rule? Because in stock 3.5, the only thing that caps at 20d6 is falling damage and a lot (but not all) spells. Generally the only limit to damage output is what you can line up on one single strike.
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Nov 21, 2010 09:21
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Nigulus Rex posted:I don't understand what you just said. Don't attack them, and don't cast spells, but "assist" them? I'm missing something here. I'm pretty sure he means Aid Another, actually. Use your turn to probably give your ally a +2 to hit or AC.
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Dec 6, 2010 22:25
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Sole.Sushi posted:EDIT: No point in keeping that going. Well, those two questions actually have different answers, based on what I've seen and what my players have comes up with. In terms of actual optimization, cleric and wizard are definitely better than their spontaneous counterparts. That's not really worth discussing, since having a wider range of spells and getting to cast them a level earlier is enormous. The Oracle has its weird curse mechanic, loses good fort saving throws, never gets Channel Energy, and gives up the cleric's ability to prepare whatever spells are on his list, and in its place gets... nothing, really. It's probably less fun to play than the Cleric, and I don't see a reason to play it unless you want a "snowflake" lame guy and/or are terrible at having enough of the right spells prepped. The PF Sorcerer gets a bloodline boost that can be very flavorful, if that's the player's thing, as well as allowing specific feats, new skill options, and he gets a HD bump. If the player doesn't want to worry about spellbooks and the time needed to learn new spells and just wants to be magic, the Pathfinder Sorcerer is a good choice.
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Dec 7, 2010 17:00
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Karandras posted:Sorcerors having unique bloodline stuff seems pretty sweet. How do Sorcerors scale though? They seem pretty comparable to Wizards at low levels but getting more low level spells seems like it'd be worst and worse as you get higher levels. Maybe it is only noticable if you have a Wizard and a Sorceror in the same party? Well, basically half the time they're noticeably worse than the wizard (odd levels, when the wizard has much better spells) and half the time they're going to be about comparable. The sorcerer either has to pick his spells known incredibly carefully or else buy lots of wands and etc, but that's not too far short of what the wizard needs to do daily, for that matter, and the sorcerer can keep casting about half again as long from his own spells. I can't imagine a sorcerer in a Pathfinder game feeling useless unless someone else is doing something incredibly crazy or you've got a wizard trying to cover the same roles, and in either case... well, you've got extremely good arcane casting as a class feature.
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Dec 9, 2010 06:03
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Nigulus Rex posted:Thanks a lot. I'm leaning on the Zen Archer, after looking at it, because it looks very cool. Though I'm not entirely certain how to make a stat buy for that (we're doing 25 pt). I presume something like Str > Wisdom > Con, as far as priority goes. How complex are you willing to go for making a souped-up archer character? Monk still has problems with how slowly his to-hit goes up, but the Zen Archer does get Perfect Strike to offset that, at least. You still might be better off (or at least have to roll less times) to run around dipping in classes. If you want to stick with monk, skip the next paragraph; it's the classes. Zen Archer Monk is good for either 2 or 5 levels (depending on how much you like the idea of upping your damage dice), but after that I'd jump into an archer-focused Fighter variant unless you like the random monk features you get after that. Oddly, I can't see many reasons to go into the other primary weapon classes--Paladin would be okay after five levels but kind of isn't a huge help to you except for the weapon divine bond, unless you have high Cha and want super saving throws and some random utility. Ranger might be okay but exchanges your choice of feats for some features you may not use, hence why I'd say the fighter is a better choice for you. Barbarian raging bonuses don't do much for your archery, unless you go for the Serene Barbarian. That would require you to stop being lawful at some point, but you don't lose any Monk bonuses if you do, so it's not a huge problem mechanically. Your top stat is probably Dexterity; you use that to hit. With a feat, you also can translate that into damage at a pretty nice return, and better Dex gives you good AC, which as a monk you're somewhat lacking in; dex is also the prerequisite stat for a slew of useful archery feats, not all of which are on the Zen Archer list. Your second stat is probably Strength, to use the best composite bow you can wield. You technically could replace Dex with Wis for most things, since as a monk you can apply it to your AC and attack rolls, but the latter only comes in at level 3 and you lose the feats I was mentioning before. I see no other benefit to raising your wis, unless you decide to take enough levels in paladin or ranger to get their spells. I'd still have dex and wis with a positive modifier, though; they both stack to AC. Con gives HP but little more to you, int is only useful for the skills you want to have, and cha probably is pointless. So that'd boil down to dex > str > wis >= con, in simpler terms.
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Dec 14, 2010 21:18
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Nigulus Rex posted:Thanks. Yeah I'm not worried about it being too complex. I have an magic archer user rolled up that I made that ended up being 1 fighter/5 wizard/10 edlritch knight/4 arcane archer (not in that order). I'd rather have a non magic user though since I'm playing a cleric in my other campaign. For what you've asked for, I'd say that two levels is the ideal choice. You basically get four archery feats, the saves, and the ability to fight bare-handed if absolutely pressed to. Flurry of Blows might also save you some feats early on, but eventually the Manyshot/Rapidshot options will outweigh it unless you get enough monk levels to keep Flurry up to date, and you won't.
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Dec 14, 2010 22:30
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Well, if you absolutely have no other use for feats, you can always throw in Toughness, the saving throw boosters (though for once that's actually not near as important thanks to the monk levels), or start tossing things in for melee-range combat: Weapon Focus (greatsword) and Power Attack or something. Other situationally useful feats: - Blindfight (if you're human, you don't have lowlight vision/blindsight, so possibly useful) - Endurance (solely for Diehard) - Far Shot (really situational--I don't know Kingmaker and if it'd come up) - Fleet (help keep away from enemies, and depending on your character flavor, might be good for 'being a monk' without having that actual class feature) - Focused Shot (if you happen to also have an intelligence bonus after all your other ability requirements) - Improved Grapple, or any equivalent boosting feat (If you want to mess around with the combat maneuvers when you get into melee) - Quick Draw (this is especially good if you have a back-up melee weapon and so may shift from one to the other in one fight) - Mobility (to work towards Shot on the Run) If none of that sounds appealing, you can dip into the "Serene" Barbarian type or maybe Paladin. Those will give you full BAB and random other features you might feel useful.
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Dec 15, 2010 06:47
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Well, there's also the option of something like the "Dungeoncrasher" fighter variant. Pity PF is essentially locked into the 3.5 Fighter idea; I'd seen a few other suggested houseruled classes that would have made for pretty nifty fighters that can actually hold their own against casters, though they wouldn't have been so familiar, either. One I saw gave fighters full good saves, extra reach with every weapon, and the ability to follow 5ft steps, so a wizard couldn't just get away by shuffling away and casting Will Save-or-Lose or Wall of gently caress You. Still wasn't as good, but was much more comparable. If that had been the PF Fighter, I would have been very pleased. Just at the moment, I can't even find it, though... e: Here it is. Figures I find it immediately after posting. ZeeToo fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Jan 10, 2011 |
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Jan 10, 2011 20:41
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Red_Mage posted:Heh. Frank Trollman's fighter fix. Is it? v  vIt's still about as nice a fix as you're going to get if your initial feelings on the matter are that magic can do anything if the caster gets one spell off and that people with weapons can't so anything on that scale, so it's about as good as you're going to get, here.
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Jan 11, 2011 01:18
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Sure. For a given value of "low-level". I just yesterday gave up on trying to run a campaign in Pathfinder when hitting level 3 made things irritatingly hard to present an interesting encounter that's neither trivial nor instantly lethal. It doesn't make anything much better than 3.5. A level 1 wizard still has Sleep and Color Spray, and it gets worse from there. Barbarians having interesting totems and fighters getting even more +1s to hit doesn't ever even it out. Pathfinder is an improvement over 3.5--some spells got slightly nerfed, and if you don't allow APG stuff, even though it's OGL, it doesn't introduce much else that a a glance is fight-ending spells. It's got a better skill list. The combat maneuvers section is a nice clean-up from 3.5's mess of individual rules. More +2's in racial statlines mean more races can work in more classes. The new favored class rules give bonuses for sticking to a base class and thus discourage prestige class abuse, without 3.5's weird rules on experience penalties. Items no longer cost xp to create. Polymorphing spells, while still a bit messy, seem to be clearer than 3.5. There are no changes from 3.5 to Pathfinder that I can think of that are negatives. I'd say it's still outweighed by the fact that at every spell level the wizard has fight-ending spells and there's an absolute, clear hierarchy of class power, from the full casters at the top to the monk at the bottom. It's the same basic mess of system mastery and class divisions as ever, but it's still better than it was.
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Feb 13, 2011 02:15
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The wizard/cleric/druid/sorcerer classes. Wiz/sor spell list is practically made of save-or-lose, the druid is a whole party all by himself, and the cleric probably isn't quite as bad but is still pretty much godly. Alternately, ban everything but those four. But there's no real way to balance a PF wizard and monk in the same party without extensive homebrewing. A guy swinging a sword/axe/bare hands just can't compare in a party where another party member can cast... well, anything. Even without save-or-lose, 2nd level spells and lower allow for lots of spell combos that tend to leave the swordy types in the dust--Invisibility, True Strike, Fog Cloud, Enlarge Person... The primary casters are just better, and can do more stuff.
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Feb 14, 2011 07:52
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Mantle of Spell Resistance or a Manual/Tome of whatever score you could use a boost in most occur to me first and foremost. If you've got good Use Magic Device, you could go buy a stack of level 9 scrolls.
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Apr 5, 2011 03:11
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Does it ignore magical armor as well? I can't seem to grab the playtest rules for myself right now; if it ignores magical armor, too, that just seems like sort of poor planning. And if it doesn't, it's not going to be a 'touch' attack for very long.
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Jul 5, 2011 04:37
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ThaGhettoJew posted:Has anyone done a concise, tiered analysis of the PF classes yet? Something like dividing them into their hypothetical roles and judged how well they're able to do them? I realize one of the PF ideals is not having combat roles defined (particularly with the lego-block multiclass system) and to distance classes from having directly comparable mechanics. Here is a stab at arranging the 3.5 classes into tiers. Scroll down about halfway and it has a link to their explanations of why they put each class where it is. Now, this is 3.5, not Pathfinder, and it sometimes assumes core or not, but the explanations of why should explain it. I'm not super-up on Pathfinder optimization and evaluation, but I've never seen anything to suggest classes shift two or more tiers here, so it's not likely to be very wrong. Ignore the 3.5 classes that didn't get reworked for Pathfinder and know that some of these may shift by a tier with Pathfinder rule and class changes. I've seen a few attempts to redo this for PF, but none I'd really trust, so 3.5 version it is. GaryLeeLoveBuckets posted:I was hanging around after a game last night with a new group and they started talking about monks. When I mentioned that they were pretty terrible, every one of them had a story about an awesome monk they or someone in their group played that blew everyone else out of the water. I guess they're either bad at optimizing 3.5/PF or evaluating effectiveness. The question is what level they're at. Monk is a pretty front-loaded class. Grab a couple of bonus feats (even if not from a great list), evasion, good saves, and at least the option for bare-handed fighting and flurry of blows in just a couple of levels, and you've got a pretty nice thing going there. If I were playing in a one-shot of level 5 or lower, I might take monk. It's just that as level goes up, casters get higher level spells, Fighter types start getting their feat chains completed or big benefits to rage or the like, and monks start getting stuff like... jumping bonus, slow fall, and purity of body. Extremely situational and not really stuff to greatly improve your core competency. Doubly so since you're getting medium BAB, lower HD, and can't use as many weapons or armor.
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Oct 14, 2011 21:39
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pawsplay posted:For instance, GURPS has no marking mechanic, despite being a mat-friendly game. Mutants & Masterminds has no marking mechanic. I'll be honest, I find marking a bit weird, and I think taunt-forces are not an ideal approach to design. It's an artificial structure that removes player (or GM) agency while also not clearly mapping to anything I would consider part of the in-game reality. It's sort of meta, even, dare I say it, dissociated. I'm not saying it's bad, but I would not think less of a game for not having it. I think marking has to be justified by the abstractions you bake into the system. My default assumption as a designer is marking = no, taunt-force = proceed with caution.
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Oct 14, 2011 22:36
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I think we're looking at different things, then. I'm curious what about the logic of marking itself makes it a severe break. If anyone could take a feat to be able to mark, would it still be a conceptual problem? You mentioned not using it as a designer, for instance, and I know you write Pathfinder supplements. So I was figuring you meant it as a general, nebulous concept, not specifically in a D&D 4e scenario.
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Oct 14, 2011 22:59
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Yeah, fair enough. I don't really agree, but I can see what your logic is. I pursued it because I thought we were still looking at it in a context of Pathfinder, just taking mechanics from 4e.
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Oct 14, 2011 23:38
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Pawsplay, out of curiosity, what should a high level fighter be able to do? Fighter is basically built out of feats, and you've expressed a strong distaste for quite a few potential things that could be turned into feats (marking, maneuvers, SAGA Edition powers, etc). So I'm curious what a Fighter should be able to actually accomplish as he nears 20th level. Not looking for a recommended feat list. What should he be able to do? A quick glance over the cleric and wizard spell lists says that at this point in their career these guys can cross planes of existence, resurrect the dead, summon powerful monsters to fight for them, blast their enemies with massive firestorms, create absolute defenses to block out all effects, kill with a word, stop time, transform their bodies into war machines, trap the souls of dead foes, and wish for other effects beside. It's not a leading question. I'm just trying to establish a baseline. Should any of these be cut from the expected abilities of spellcasters? Whether that's the case or not, what is a fighter supposed to be able to do himself that matches these guys and merits being the same level as them? Just... be tough? Have a couple of tricks that can stop enemies from quickly closing with the casters? This seems like such a wide disparity that I feel I must be missing something. e: sorta beaten by a more succinct Benly.
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Oct 17, 2011 08:32
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Okay. Fighters are conceptually weaker than wizards. Why are fighters conceptually weaker than wizards? You've made two implicit assumptions that I can't find I agree with just now, and one explicit one. One of these is that magic is omnipotent. Magic is versatile, magic is reliable, magic is swift to evoke, magic is safe for the user, magic is good at direct combat, magic can shut down major portions of the battlefield, magic can be used quite a number of times per day, and more, off the top of my head. Change just a few of those assumptions and there is no reason that a magic user should be omnipotent, compared to a really scary swordsman. Why is magic all-encompassing? The second implicit assumption I can't really follow is the assumption that a fighter can't do any of these things. Why is the 'conception' of a warrior someone who must be an utterly mundane man? Why isn't the conception of a high-level warrior Conan or Theseus or Lü Bu or Cú Chulainn or Lancelot or Inigo Montoya or... The explicit assumption I have trouble with is that magic-users are conceptually stronger. You made an analogy, but I don't see how it applies. How is 'use of magic' so inherently a stronger concept than 'use of weaponry'? If I try to extend the analogy, I get that 'use of magic' automatically contains all end effects that 'use of weaponry' does--which seems to be limited to "hurt things real bad" and "severely hamper enemy tactical movements" so far. Is this correct? If so, why is that so? And my really most basic question honestly wasn't a big theorycrafting bit, not that I mind that. I just want to know what "a 20th level Pathfinder Fighter" should be capable of in your eyes as a Pathfinder developer. In my last post I had a list of expected things that a high level cleric or wizard should be expected to be able to do. What is the pinnacle of the Fighterhood ideal supposed to be reknowned for in tales of his exploits?
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Oct 17, 2011 10:45
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Well, thanks for your responses, pawsplay. We're at the point now where I understand what your feelings are. Again I don't agree, but I've no interest in pursuing an argument where neither of us sees things the same enough to convince the other.
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Oct 17, 2011 21:49
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This is specifically 3.5, but in PHB2 the cleric options included a rule for swapping out your ability to spontaneously cast cure spells for instead spontaneously casting domain spells from one of your domains. Slightly different option, but sounds like it might be even closer to what you want, if you can use 3.5 material.
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Oct 18, 2011 00:22
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Idran posted:With all the fighter discussion going on here, I'd like to ask the opinions of people that have better skill with mechanics than I do: What about FrankTrollman's fighter revamp? I know he can be extremely grognardy, but his mechanical stuff seems solid to me, though I've never been a great judge of that. I've been using what's basically just a merger of the PF fighter and his custom fighter since if nothing else, it at least feels like a vast improvement. But I'd love a second opinion. You could build a not-terrible fighter class out of the movement powers, Lunging Attack, and Combat Focus. However, note that this is really intended to be played with other Tome material (look at Great Shields, Combat feats, command rating...), and most of the Tome material I've seen is somewhere between lackluster and bad. Even beyond the Pathfinder conversion, this does need tweaking to fix its Tome heritage. I'd still prefer a Warblade, personally.
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Oct 18, 2011 22:09
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Two different things, both with "Tome" in the name here. "Tome of Battle: Book of the 9 Swords" is an awesome 3.5 supplement that has very interesting fighter classes that use maneuvers that they ready and execute in combat to have more flexibility in effects. Some people don't like it, because they disagree with some of the fluff, which is fair enough. One of the classes in this book is Warblade, which I like as a Fighter substitute. Then there's another Tome-something that Frank Trollman wrote; it's a 3.5 hack that really isn't very good, aside from the Fighter hack you posted a little bit ago. I do like that one. It's supposed to be in "Races of War"; I'm not completely sure why Tome gets used in association with that, but on the D&D Wiki, all his classes for this are marked "Fighter (tome)", "Samurai (tome)", or the like. Basically Tome gets used too much.
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Oct 19, 2011 03:25
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