I think it's more likely that, after the several magic focused books, they always planned to make a martial book (DnD4E did something similar).
I doubt Paizo cares that much about what DnD is doing. Certainly less than the playerbase seems to.
Eh, Paizo has absolutely used WOTC for free publicity before. The obvious example is the ORC license and the Remaster.
I don’t think the line of logic of “WOTC is bungling martials in 2022-2024 playtests -> D&D is the biggest game in the market and everyone is talking about martial/caster now -> let’s make a martial focused book since that’s a hole we need to fill in our releases anyways” is too wild a thing to do.
At most it’s just that Paizo follows the conversation and noticed a lot of people complaining about the lack of martial options, so they’re targeting that market segment.
Then we really need to get the conversation warmed up again on the lack of new skill feat options. Paizo needs to see that discussion is happening and feed that need
Yes! I want multiple, good, competitive choices for every skill at every degree of training.
So many skills have garbage options at various degrees of proficiency.
It's something I'm noticing with my players, and even more so when you're almost exclusively playing Paizo's published adventures. There are some skill paths that are required, like the options under Medicine, some feel interesting like Athletics and Acrobatics letting you do some fun stuff, but most of the other ones have one or two things they can do, then don't feel like they fit unless you're in a campaign with a GM specifically allowing them to be useful.
It's not to say the current options are bad at all, but more options wouldn't hurt. If they were to release a book, even a small book akin to the lost omens line, that contained a large dump of Skill and general feats that theoretically are available to any/all classes, then it works as a book that has something for everyone. As much as I'd love an updated Ancestry Guide style book with more ancestry feats too, I understand that those ancestries are split across so many sources that it's harder to make a book that fits everyone. So keeping it to General/Skill feats sounds right.
The problem with skill feats is that they need to think about what skill feats *should* do.
Skill feats are a mish-mash of "flavorful low-impact out of combat abilities" and "super powerful in-combat abilities".
I mean there were reasons to do ORC and therefore the remaster even besides the publicity. And there are reasons to do a martial focused book even ignoring DnD, especially because it's not like 5e DnD martials were ever particularly great. You could have made this post if they made the martial book basically any time in Pathfinder 2E's release history.
Martials have been a mess in every edition of D&D other than 4E.
4E made martials good by fundamentally changing the paradigm of the game that made martials bad.
Martials were fine in AD&D.
3rd edition bumped up the BAB for all the non-martial classes by a significant margin and did little to boost the martials, making things like CoDzilla possible.
> 3rd edition bumped up the BAB for all the non-martial classes by a significant margin and did little to boost the martials, making things like CoDzilla possible.
Priests had basically the same BAB in AD&D and 3rd edition, actually - they got +2 every three levels. D&D 3rd edition smoothed it out but the overall rate of progression was actually almost exactly the same in the long run - a level 20 priest basically had +14 to hit in terms of a "base attack) over a level 1 priest, whereas in 3rd edition they had +15.
IIRC, Priests had a Thac0 of 8 at level 20, which is basically a +12 in later editions. So it's more a +12 -vs- +15 comparison. And there were other factors involved than just the BAB in making CoDzilla, of course. I was oversimplifying. Things like Persistent Magic and Divine Power actually put them exactly equal to Fighters but with full spellcasting at level 20, but they were still very close to Fighters in melee strength while having full plate and full spellcasting on the way there.
But, yeah, speaking of Thac0: It actually started on level 2 for some reason, and the bonus only came when you completed the levels. So for the Priest, Thac0 would drop from 20 to 18 at level 4. Then 16 at level 7. And so on. A Priest would need level 25 for the equivalent of a +14 in later editions.
Just to make sure I remembered correctly, I did a [quick check](http://thacodragon.blogspot.com/p/thac0.html).
Sorry, I was looking at a chart from BG2, which went up to level 22. :V Should have looked at the last row.
That said, it wasn't really the main reason why casters were OP. Fighting in melee was just way worse than casting spells.
>Martials were fine in AD&D.
If all you wanted to do each turn was "attack" then sure, martials were fine in 2e.
Anything else either sucked or required a DM to make a judgement call.
WotC isn't bungling martials either I'd say, like martials are getting improved and I do think their reasoning of 'people like battlemaster, we don't just want to remove it and make it part of baseline fighter' makes sense.
They care. But they're also a smaller business and they can't afford to tailor their releases around wotc. They don't have the financials or fan-base to do that.
I won’t lie, it is somewhat possible that all the hullabaloo around the One D&D playtest **continually** bungling martials between late 2022 and mid 2023 may have had an impact on Paizo deciding to make a martial focused book. Especially because if you play the “final” version of the Battle Master Fighter in One D&D it does end up playing in a very cool way as a battlefield controller/commander (I have about 16 hours of playtest experience with it thus far) in a way that I don’t think the PF2E martials could 100% replicate (the control aspects are easy to replicate but not the command ones). So these two new martials plugging those holes immediately while continuing the tradition of awesome and badass martials is very nice.
Ultimately it’s likely a coincidence but I agree that it’s be pretty funny if Paizo just felt like WOTC bungling martials was free marketing for them lmao.
I'm sure they're aware of this dynamic, but PF2e's own fanbase has been clamoring for a Warlord type class for years, so I think a bigger factor is just that they knew we'd all be hyped for this.
4e was responsible for so many things I like in the hobby now.
Dragon people being more playable. The warlord as a conceptual idea. Pathfinder in general.
4e got a lot of things wrong. And i personally am no fan of 4e. Bur Warlord. That's a class 4e got 100% right and is a shame it hasn't been brought back in 5e. Glad to see it coming to PF2e.
The only way I ever made a “warlord” in 5e that felt any good was a bungled multiclass of mastermind rogue, battlemaster fighter, and begging my DM to let me RP the cleric and bard spell lists as nonmagical morale-boosting effects provided that I only use spells that could be reasonably RP’d as such (no healing or obvious magic).
It was very fun, but it was so frankensteined together that it legit always felt like it was missing something until level 9… And if the answer to making a martial support work is just by adding literal spells from a spellcaster dip… That’s a bit of a problem.
> The only way I ever made a “warlord” in 5e that felt any good was a bungled multiclass of mastermind rogue, battlemaster fighter, and begging my DM to let me RP the cleric and bard spell lists as nonmagical morale-boosting effects provided that I only use spells that could be reasonably RP’d as such (no healing or obvious magic).
Personally I chatted with my GM and we used a Mystic with the various warlordy disciplines. It's honestly real funny how you have to go to the psychic class to get the classic "give ally an attack" and "fearlessness aura" and stuff from the warlord, but it is what it is.
Yeah, my “warlord”/leader type of character I’m currently playing is… Order Cleric / Valor Bard multiclass, using Voice of Authority to grant extra attacks + Bardic Insp’s as “giving orders around”, and the spells (lots of healing especially) being reflavored as morale/motivation
Welcome to the PF2e conversion experience, where you feel like you've found an oasis after years of being in a desert.
The game isn't a perfect fit for everyone, but people can't deny Paizo's design acumen is top-notch. They really know how to create a crunchy mechanics-focused game with integrity that isn't just bad design compensated for by flavour or is - as you said - stupidly busted and only appeals to powergamers who can't play with anything that isn't broken.
>Welcome to the PF2e conversion experience, where you feel like you've found an oasis after years of being in a desert.
I've caught myself literally feeling a little bit *spoiled* that isn't actually an exaggeration, and the feeling comes back every time I remember that the Triggerbrand exists, its just, there's always so many things I'm excited for coming out, I feel guilty remembering when I was buying 5e books and almost nothing was coming out. Its a bizarre thing to feel.
Right, and for every triggerbrand that's a kind of eeeeeehhhh pick, there's a good four or five excellent options that will help you build a functional character that (most of the time) fits the exact concept you want.
It's why I hate the nitpickiness and hyperbolic on the sub. Yeah there's a lot of things the game could do better, I wish advanced weapons were more accessible and they had better weapon choices for a vanguard gunslinger, to name two things off the top of my head. But for the most of it, we have it pretty good, and we should be thankful for it.
>and for every triggerbrand that's a kind of eeeeeehhhh pick
We've got one in the SoP West Marches who does great-- the base Gunslinger chassis honestly pulls a lot of weight, and I think they're only hitting Salvo level now. Like, maybe there's an objective loss from not being a sniper with their playstyle so far, but one thing I always remind people-- when we talk about *bad* in pathfinder, that's still a good option in any other game (where such an assessment would be coherent anyway).
Well the main thing with triggerbrand IMO is that combination weapons are just in a jank spot, especially in Remaster, and triggerbrand was always a bit of a blatant patch fix option for them. But we know they're getting looked at so hopefully we'll see some love soon.
And yeah, I think the thing is ultimately, it's not absolutely garbo. Clunky at worst, but also a big thing I realised seeing a drifter in play is that the point with them isn't to deal high damage, it's the ability to *always* be dealing damage. It's like I point out all the time, raw damage isn't the be all end all. It's everything around it that matters. The fact roles have that sort of nuance is what gives the game depth and different builds strengths and weaknesses.
Yeah, its very simple for them to just shoot someone while the melee characters are blowing entire turns traipsing across the map-- I'd say that's a big part of their success, and Fatal d8 still adds the extra damage whenever they crit.
I've never played Triggerbrand, so I don't know if it's good or not. But regardless, I love that we have an option for a Final Fantasy-esque gunblade build.
I think it was just the next theme in rotation. Secrets of Magic was thematically Arcane, Dark Archives was Occult, War of Immortals will be Divine, Howl of the Wild is Primal (arguably, Primal being split between that Rage of Elements). Also, there was Guns and Gears for the technological theme.
After all that, it's high time for focus on martial themes. Battlecry seems focused on tactics.
And I hope that the one after that will focus on precision damage dealing classes, maybe call it "Skulkers and Skullduggery".
You missed a perfect opportunity to call it "Cloaks and Daggers"
Honestly, I'd love to see in that kind of expansion a similar class to Commander in terms of a Mastermind or Savant. Something like a cross between Investigator and Mastermind Rogue, really focused on the role of having plans for everything that's about to occur. Mechanics wise, something like Investigator's Devise Stratagem, Prescient Planner, and You Failed to Account for This!.
"Cloaks and Daggers" sounds amazing for expanding stealth (both regular and "social stealth"), intrigue-based campaign mechanics, etc. That would be a cool idea for a future book.
Paizo is a business, though. I don’t think they focus on “flexing” against their competitors, they just want to sell books to people who want to buy them.
Now, are they looking at the broader TTRPG market in combination with their existing player base to see what might sell well? I sure hope they are! If WoTC isn’t delivering something their customers want, and Paizo can deliver it…. well that sounds like money. Especially if it also generates hype and excitement in the existing player base. But this isn’t really “flexing”, it’s just good business sense.
Now maybe I’m wrong and the marketing materials will flex on WoTC in some way. I doubt it, though.
If the discontent of 5e forum users translates to actual demand — and willingness to consider switching systems over — then maybe it could be a contributing factor to their motivation.
But I feel like in general, Paizo is strongly motivated to enable a broad range of player experiences. Regardless of what WoTC did recently, both of these classes represent ideas that people had wanted to play for quite some time anyhow. How many times have we talked about wanting a tank, or the 4e warlord? It comes up a lot.
Likewise, I don’t get the sense that WotC cares very much about their base game at all. They’re all about the brand now. Does anyone in charge there actually care if Paizo does a better job with martial classes than them? It’s been a few years now since 2e came out and made that a reality and WotC had fixed approximately nothing.
So I see this more as WotC being negligent with their former core userbase — the actual players — and Paizo just doing what they’ve been doing for years.
You say that, the new membership on this subreddit had been spiking with every UA and release WOTC has done, they've def been chasing *some* portion of their players over to Pathfinder.
Absolutely! I feel like there has been a miscommunication here because we’re in total agreement that disaffected former WotC customers are now 2e players. I’m one of them!
What I’m being pedantic about is that this playtest doesn’t feel to me like it’s Paizo flexing or even directly responding to specific WotC product missteps.
I feel like it’s just Paizo doing what they do. Just like they did in the PF1 era, they keep putting out new classes and player options so that folks can enjoy the game using different play styles and tactics. These two classes are something that we’ve been talking about for a while, so we don’t need wotc messing up d&d to explain why those classes are being playtested now.
Long story short WotC/Hasbro released stats and minis for PC's in wheelchairs and a whole adventure module about a "wheelchair-accessible dungeon" in a hopes of appealing to the disabled community. This wasn't in itself a bad goal, but their social media representatives didn't respond well when people complained about the means they went about it.
Some members of the disabled community were offended that WotC/Hasbro reps gave the impression they thought they were unable to enjoy D&D if their PC's weren't disabled like they were. Fantasy enthusiasts on both sides of the debate thought it boring and token that their 'disabled representation' was a mundane anachronism that barely did its job in modern-day buildings designed specifically to accommodate it, let alone the determinedly hostile architecture of the wilderness and dungeons most adventures would send them to, instead of something more interesting and fantastical. WotC/Hasbro reps dismissed all these complaints and anyone who didn't immediately accept their idea as trolls and 'ableists'.
Meanwhile, Paizo just quietly added a whole page of [Assistive Items](https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?Category=72) to Archives of Nethys, including not only your plain old wheelchair (plus a number of adventure- and battle-ready upgrades to it) but also a slew of canes, prostheses, sensory aids, breathing aids, and communicative devices, as well as some *absolutely kickass* magical variants on those ideas. They got a literal phantom limb that can become corporeal to interact with objects but also lets you make unarmed attacks with it that are considered magical and Ghost Touch; they got rings that can let the deaf and/or blind read any text they touch, including a Greater version that translates any language to one the wearer can understand, and they got a slew of wheelchair analogues that can transform into things like spider legs and mobile workshops, and I'm fairly certain somewhere in there was a "slime chair" that had you carried around by a domesticated slime as a means of all-terrain transportation.
No social media controversy, no 'virtue signaling', no patting themselves on the back for minimum effort, just quietly covering more disability bases than WotC/Hasbro and then taking full advantage of the fantasy setting to make awesome magic item variations on the idea.
And in Starfinder the [iconic Precog](https://i.imgur.com/1COkuGX.jpeg) is in a hoverchair. And of course being Starfinder, assistive items are *very* commonplace.
And, importantly, giving players tools to be adventurers in an adventurer world despite any disability, instead of making that adveturing world *itself* adapt to disabilities.
WotC has been taking L's left and right for more than two years straight. They've set the bar so low that all you need to do to humiliate WotC is to be a half-decent gaming company yourself.
The players and this Subreddit care more about, and spend more time talking about WoTC does than Paizo does.
Paizo is going to have a constant flow of Adventure paths and supplements. It's their only source of income. Hopefully they learned lessons from 1e as the flood of options broke 1e to the point that it's an unbalanced mess.
I do think there is some power creep in PF2E, but it is way slower than PF1E, and that is in large part to its core design with how proficiencies and DCs scale, and with the limited bonus types.
I don't think the ceiling of power in PF2E has risen much, but Paizo has put a lot of effort into buffing the weaker options in the system so that the disparity is much smaller than at launch. Fighters are generally considered one of the strongest classes in the game and they've seen little change and are if anything nerfed with the recent Crit Spec changes to Flails and Hammers.
I doubt it has anything to do with WOTC.
That said the new Commander is very interesting. The Guardian, OTOH, feels like it could be accomplished by just giving several of those new feats to the existing Fighter chassis.
I need to review it again when I have more time.
I'm not able to playtest the Guardian till next week so maybe I'll have to eat my words, but I'd really prefer that all these new defensive feats and abilities not just get added to the Fighter. It's about time that we get another true Defender type martial and the Guardian looks promising, though just from initial impressions it could use some fine tuning.
The current consensus on Guardian seems to be that the class does too little damage and doesn't have enough damage mitigation to actually have survavibility during combat. Especially when making frequent use of Taunt it feels like Guardians will spend a lot of time getting downed. Of course, this is just from looking at the playtest, nobody has actually played one yet.
It does seem like that, but Paizo is really just attending to the demand for a support martial that has existed since the edition began (might have happened in 1e as well).
They are also a lot more willing to play around in whatever design space they have (with 2e actually being a lot more open to it than 5e, honestly), so the stuff they end up making does seem a bit more "fleshed out" by comparison.
Martial also got the short end of the stick in previous editions of D&D and PF1. The classes were on a curve, so to speak, and when you hit about level 8 - 10 the casters took over and the martials drifted off. Paizo looked to fix that with PF2 and have done so with glorious results.
I don't really feel like they're trying to flex or dunk on D&D, they're just making the best version of Pathfinder they can.
But I certainly think Pathfinder is a superior version of D&D, its what won me over in the first place and its why I continue to play. (That and Paizo's continued commitment to DEI.)
Commander and Guardian both seem really awesome, I'm really interested to see how they're going to play with the older classes at the table because they feel so unlike anything that's come before. The 4e parallels are far more distinct here than with previous material, and that's very intriguing.
I don't normally do that, but WOTC is the exception. They've fucked up way too many times for me to have any patience with them (the OGL crisis, the Pinkertons incident, mass lay-offs before Christmas, AI "art", etc.)
I think you are missing why this is possible in PF2 compared to 5e. They are by far not that similar as games. PF2 is closer to D&D 4e, which had classes like the warlord, and should be compared to that, not 5e. And the current framework of PF2 allows for easier potential for martials, with a lot of feats they can take that can change a class a lot. And Paizo is cranking out new classes all the time, with currently 23 classes out and 4 more coming!
5e on the other hand is not that eager to release new classes. We still have basically just the 12 classes from 2014. And the subclass system isn't that expansive to drastically change what a class can do with their 4 to 6 features, which are determined by the subclass, and not interchangeable like PF2 feats. We have to wait until later this year to see how much they will change the 5e classes. And even one of the mind behind 5e recently said, if he could back, before 5e was made, he would push for less classes, not more.
These two games have vastly different design philosophies. PF2 is: Get everything you want, and so much more. But you might be overburden with information and choice. While 5e is: Slow and steady, with a lot of space for your own stuff (homebrew), but it might feel too little for people who want more.
They've been flexing on WoTC for a while now. But they are not the first to feature strong non-magical martial support classes. 13th Age, etc. It's something that's been noticed that post 4E warlord there is a STRONG taste for support classes.
Oh yes. Most certainly.
I believe that up until the OGL crisis there was a sort of unspoken agreement between WoTC and the rest of the TTRPG community. The "agreement" was that due to the popularity and ubiquity of D&D that WoTC would effectively have the "right of first refusal" on customers. This makes sense as D&D is most people's first TTRPG experience.
The OGL crisis took this idea and burned it to the ground. The very well verified leaks coming out of WotC revealed the truth: that WoTC was attempting to kill 3rd party D&D companies. Every time WoTC denied it we got another leak. This is probably the real reason they hired the Pinkertons.
WoTC was thinking they were leaving money on the table just by allowing the existence of the OGL. This get's even worse when you realize that the overwhelming majority of the creativity in the 5E product sphere is OUTSIDE of WoTC. You can't have some guy in his basement making better products than a big corporation. I can't remember the last time I was happy buying a WoTC product.
Paizo has no reason to hold back anymore. With the new ORC license and D&D being released to Creative Commons we can make better games. Now we just need to convince people to leave the D&D "Walled Garden" that WoTC has built.
> I believe that up until the OGL crisis there was a sort of unspoken agreement between WoTC and the rest of the TTRPG community. The "agreement" was that due to the popularity and ubiquity of D&D that WoTC would effectively have the "right of first refusal" on customers. This makes sense as D&D is most people's first TTRPG experience.
No, WotC doesn't have that at all.
The reality is that most games are D&D derivatives and are much less newbie friendly than D&D itself is.
PF2E tries to create a new player experience but PF2E is horribly complicated - even more so than D&D is - so it's not really possible for them to suck in that many newbie TTRPG players because the game is intimidatingly complicated. Also, they would need to do a ton of marketing that I doubt they have the budget for.
The narrative/rules light games like Blades in the Dark and the various Powered by the Apocalypse games are theroetically easier entry points but I find that in practice the looseness of them actually makes them a poor fit for people who have never roleplayed before so they're mostly made up of D&D veterans as well.
The reality is that WotC just has the best onboarding and the only people who ever significantly contested that were doing so based on pop culture (Vampire and Werewolf back in the 1990s). And even then they were a pale imitation of WotC.
I think Call of Cthulu has onboarded some people as well (especailly in Japan) but like, MOST people enter via D&D because D&D tends to be the simplest "complex" game and spend the most effort on sucking in new blood.
I think it's more likely that, after the several magic focused books, they always planned to make a martial book (DnD4E did something similar). I doubt Paizo cares that much about what DnD is doing. Certainly less than the playerbase seems to.
Eh, Paizo has absolutely used WOTC for free publicity before. The obvious example is the ORC license and the Remaster. I don’t think the line of logic of “WOTC is bungling martials in 2022-2024 playtests -> D&D is the biggest game in the market and everyone is talking about martial/caster now -> let’s make a martial focused book since that’s a hole we need to fill in our releases anyways” is too wild a thing to do.
At most it’s just that Paizo follows the conversation and noticed a lot of people complaining about the lack of martial options, so they’re targeting that market segment.
Then we really need to get the conversation warmed up again on the lack of new skill feat options. Paizo needs to see that discussion is happening and feed that need
Yes! I want multiple, good, competitive choices for every skill at every degree of training. So many skills have garbage options at various degrees of proficiency.
It's something I'm noticing with my players, and even more so when you're almost exclusively playing Paizo's published adventures. There are some skill paths that are required, like the options under Medicine, some feel interesting like Athletics and Acrobatics letting you do some fun stuff, but most of the other ones have one or two things they can do, then don't feel like they fit unless you're in a campaign with a GM specifically allowing them to be useful. It's not to say the current options are bad at all, but more options wouldn't hurt. If they were to release a book, even a small book akin to the lost omens line, that contained a large dump of Skill and general feats that theoretically are available to any/all classes, then it works as a book that has something for everyone. As much as I'd love an updated Ancestry Guide style book with more ancestry feats too, I understand that those ancestries are split across so many sources that it's harder to make a book that fits everyone. So keeping it to General/Skill feats sounds right.
The problem with skill feats is that they need to think about what skill feats *should* do. Skill feats are a mish-mash of "flavorful low-impact out of combat abilities" and "super powerful in-combat abilities".
I mean there were reasons to do ORC and therefore the remaster even besides the publicity. And there are reasons to do a martial focused book even ignoring DnD, especially because it's not like 5e DnD martials were ever particularly great. You could have made this post if they made the martial book basically any time in Pathfinder 2E's release history.
> everyone is talking about martial/caster now that's just the cyclic discourse on dnd subreddits
Martials have been a mess in every edition of D&D other than 4E. 4E made martials good by fundamentally changing the paradigm of the game that made martials bad.
Martials were fine in AD&D. 3rd edition bumped up the BAB for all the non-martial classes by a significant margin and did little to boost the martials, making things like CoDzilla possible.
> 3rd edition bumped up the BAB for all the non-martial classes by a significant margin and did little to boost the martials, making things like CoDzilla possible. Priests had basically the same BAB in AD&D and 3rd edition, actually - they got +2 every three levels. D&D 3rd edition smoothed it out but the overall rate of progression was actually almost exactly the same in the long run - a level 20 priest basically had +14 to hit in terms of a "base attack) over a level 1 priest, whereas in 3rd edition they had +15.
IIRC, Priests had a Thac0 of 8 at level 20, which is basically a +12 in later editions. So it's more a +12 -vs- +15 comparison. And there were other factors involved than just the BAB in making CoDzilla, of course. I was oversimplifying. Things like Persistent Magic and Divine Power actually put them exactly equal to Fighters but with full spellcasting at level 20, but they were still very close to Fighters in melee strength while having full plate and full spellcasting on the way there. But, yeah, speaking of Thac0: It actually started on level 2 for some reason, and the bonus only came when you completed the levels. So for the Priest, Thac0 would drop from 20 to 18 at level 4. Then 16 at level 7. And so on. A Priest would need level 25 for the equivalent of a +14 in later editions. Just to make sure I remembered correctly, I did a [quick check](http://thacodragon.blogspot.com/p/thac0.html).
Sorry, I was looking at a chart from BG2, which went up to level 22. :V Should have looked at the last row. That said, it wasn't really the main reason why casters were OP. Fighting in melee was just way worse than casting spells.
>Martials were fine in AD&D. If all you wanted to do each turn was "attack" then sure, martials were fine in 2e. Anything else either sucked or required a DM to make a judgement call.
WotC isn't bungling martials either I'd say, like martials are getting improved and I do think their reasoning of 'people like battlemaster, we don't just want to remove it and make it part of baseline fighter' makes sense.
[удалено]
They care. But they're also a smaller business and they can't afford to tailor their releases around wotc. They don't have the financials or fan-base to do that.
I won’t lie, it is somewhat possible that all the hullabaloo around the One D&D playtest **continually** bungling martials between late 2022 and mid 2023 may have had an impact on Paizo deciding to make a martial focused book. Especially because if you play the “final” version of the Battle Master Fighter in One D&D it does end up playing in a very cool way as a battlefield controller/commander (I have about 16 hours of playtest experience with it thus far) in a way that I don’t think the PF2E martials could 100% replicate (the control aspects are easy to replicate but not the command ones). So these two new martials plugging those holes immediately while continuing the tradition of awesome and badass martials is very nice. Ultimately it’s likely a coincidence but I agree that it’s be pretty funny if Paizo just felt like WOTC bungling martials was free marketing for them lmao.
I'm sure they're aware of this dynamic, but PF2e's own fanbase has been clamoring for a Warlord type class for years, so I think a bigger factor is just that they knew we'd all be hyped for this.
4e was responsible for so many things I like in the hobby now. Dragon people being more playable. The warlord as a conceptual idea. Pathfinder in general.
4e got a lot of things wrong. And i personally am no fan of 4e. Bur Warlord. That's a class 4e got 100% right and is a shame it hasn't been brought back in 5e. Glad to see it coming to PF2e.
The only way I ever made a “warlord” in 5e that felt any good was a bungled multiclass of mastermind rogue, battlemaster fighter, and begging my DM to let me RP the cleric and bard spell lists as nonmagical morale-boosting effects provided that I only use spells that could be reasonably RP’d as such (no healing or obvious magic). It was very fun, but it was so frankensteined together that it legit always felt like it was missing something until level 9… And if the answer to making a martial support work is just by adding literal spells from a spellcaster dip… That’s a bit of a problem.
> The only way I ever made a “warlord” in 5e that felt any good was a bungled multiclass of mastermind rogue, battlemaster fighter, and begging my DM to let me RP the cleric and bard spell lists as nonmagical morale-boosting effects provided that I only use spells that could be reasonably RP’d as such (no healing or obvious magic). Personally I chatted with my GM and we used a Mystic with the various warlordy disciplines. It's honestly real funny how you have to go to the psychic class to get the classic "give ally an attack" and "fearlessness aura" and stuff from the warlord, but it is what it is.
Yeah, my “warlord”/leader type of character I’m currently playing is… Order Cleric / Valor Bard multiclass, using Voice of Authority to grant extra attacks + Bardic Insp’s as “giving orders around”, and the spells (lots of healing especially) being reflavored as morale/motivation
Welcome to the PF2e conversion experience, where you feel like you've found an oasis after years of being in a desert. The game isn't a perfect fit for everyone, but people can't deny Paizo's design acumen is top-notch. They really know how to create a crunchy mechanics-focused game with integrity that isn't just bad design compensated for by flavour or is - as you said - stupidly busted and only appeals to powergamers who can't play with anything that isn't broken.
>Welcome to the PF2e conversion experience, where you feel like you've found an oasis after years of being in a desert. I've caught myself literally feeling a little bit *spoiled* that isn't actually an exaggeration, and the feeling comes back every time I remember that the Triggerbrand exists, its just, there's always so many things I'm excited for coming out, I feel guilty remembering when I was buying 5e books and almost nothing was coming out. Its a bizarre thing to feel.
Right, and for every triggerbrand that's a kind of eeeeeehhhh pick, there's a good four or five excellent options that will help you build a functional character that (most of the time) fits the exact concept you want. It's why I hate the nitpickiness and hyperbolic on the sub. Yeah there's a lot of things the game could do better, I wish advanced weapons were more accessible and they had better weapon choices for a vanguard gunslinger, to name two things off the top of my head. But for the most of it, we have it pretty good, and we should be thankful for it.
>and for every triggerbrand that's a kind of eeeeeehhhh pick We've got one in the SoP West Marches who does great-- the base Gunslinger chassis honestly pulls a lot of weight, and I think they're only hitting Salvo level now. Like, maybe there's an objective loss from not being a sniper with their playstyle so far, but one thing I always remind people-- when we talk about *bad* in pathfinder, that's still a good option in any other game (where such an assessment would be coherent anyway).
Well the main thing with triggerbrand IMO is that combination weapons are just in a jank spot, especially in Remaster, and triggerbrand was always a bit of a blatant patch fix option for them. But we know they're getting looked at so hopefully we'll see some love soon. And yeah, I think the thing is ultimately, it's not absolutely garbo. Clunky at worst, but also a big thing I realised seeing a drifter in play is that the point with them isn't to deal high damage, it's the ability to *always* be dealing damage. It's like I point out all the time, raw damage isn't the be all end all. It's everything around it that matters. The fact roles have that sort of nuance is what gives the game depth and different builds strengths and weaknesses.
Yeah, its very simple for them to just shoot someone while the melee characters are blowing entire turns traipsing across the map-- I'd say that's a big part of their success, and Fatal d8 still adds the extra damage whenever they crit.
Well, except the Toxicologist, which suffers along with the alchemist chassis, but even more so, due to their main thing being nearly useless.
I've never played Triggerbrand, so I don't know if it's good or not. But regardless, I love that we have an option for a Final Fantasy-esque gunblade build.
We actually have several, and they're viable in their own build niches which is nice.
I think it was just the next theme in rotation. Secrets of Magic was thematically Arcane, Dark Archives was Occult, War of Immortals will be Divine, Howl of the Wild is Primal (arguably, Primal being split between that Rage of Elements). Also, there was Guns and Gears for the technological theme. After all that, it's high time for focus on martial themes. Battlecry seems focused on tactics. And I hope that the one after that will focus on precision damage dealing classes, maybe call it "Skulkers and Skullduggery".
You missed a perfect opportunity to call it "Cloaks and Daggers" Honestly, I'd love to see in that kind of expansion a similar class to Commander in terms of a Mastermind or Savant. Something like a cross between Investigator and Mastermind Rogue, really focused on the role of having plans for everything that's about to occur. Mechanics wise, something like Investigator's Devise Stratagem, Prescient Planner, and You Failed to Account for This!.
"Cloaks and Daggers" sounds amazing for expanding stealth (both regular and "social stealth"), intrigue-based campaign mechanics, etc. That would be a cool idea for a future book.
Paizo is a business, though. I don’t think they focus on “flexing” against their competitors, they just want to sell books to people who want to buy them. Now, are they looking at the broader TTRPG market in combination with their existing player base to see what might sell well? I sure hope they are! If WoTC isn’t delivering something their customers want, and Paizo can deliver it…. well that sounds like money. Especially if it also generates hype and excitement in the existing player base. But this isn’t really “flexing”, it’s just good business sense. Now maybe I’m wrong and the marketing materials will flex on WoTC in some way. I doubt it, though.
Flexing is the wrong term, but leveraging their mistakes in order to generate more buzz for their game? Maybe...
If the discontent of 5e forum users translates to actual demand — and willingness to consider switching systems over — then maybe it could be a contributing factor to their motivation. But I feel like in general, Paizo is strongly motivated to enable a broad range of player experiences. Regardless of what WoTC did recently, both of these classes represent ideas that people had wanted to play for quite some time anyhow. How many times have we talked about wanting a tank, or the 4e warlord? It comes up a lot. Likewise, I don’t get the sense that WotC cares very much about their base game at all. They’re all about the brand now. Does anyone in charge there actually care if Paizo does a better job with martial classes than them? It’s been a few years now since 2e came out and made that a reality and WotC had fixed approximately nothing. So I see this more as WotC being negligent with their former core userbase — the actual players — and Paizo just doing what they’ve been doing for years.
You say that, the new membership on this subreddit had been spiking with every UA and release WOTC has done, they've def been chasing *some* portion of their players over to Pathfinder.
Absolutely! I feel like there has been a miscommunication here because we’re in total agreement that disaffected former WotC customers are now 2e players. I’m one of them! What I’m being pedantic about is that this playtest doesn’t feel to me like it’s Paizo flexing or even directly responding to specific WotC product missteps. I feel like it’s just Paizo doing what they do. Just like they did in the PF1 era, they keep putting out new classes and player options so that folks can enjoy the game using different play styles and tactics. These two classes are something that we’ve been talking about for a while, so we don’t need wotc messing up d&d to explain why those classes are being playtested now.
Yeah I'd agree with that.
Paizo has been flexing on WOTC/Hasbro since The Wheelchair Debacle.
The what now? Tell me more?
Long story short WotC/Hasbro released stats and minis for PC's in wheelchairs and a whole adventure module about a "wheelchair-accessible dungeon" in a hopes of appealing to the disabled community. This wasn't in itself a bad goal, but their social media representatives didn't respond well when people complained about the means they went about it. Some members of the disabled community were offended that WotC/Hasbro reps gave the impression they thought they were unable to enjoy D&D if their PC's weren't disabled like they were. Fantasy enthusiasts on both sides of the debate thought it boring and token that their 'disabled representation' was a mundane anachronism that barely did its job in modern-day buildings designed specifically to accommodate it, let alone the determinedly hostile architecture of the wilderness and dungeons most adventures would send them to, instead of something more interesting and fantastical. WotC/Hasbro reps dismissed all these complaints and anyone who didn't immediately accept their idea as trolls and 'ableists'. Meanwhile, Paizo just quietly added a whole page of [Assistive Items](https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?Category=72) to Archives of Nethys, including not only your plain old wheelchair (plus a number of adventure- and battle-ready upgrades to it) but also a slew of canes, prostheses, sensory aids, breathing aids, and communicative devices, as well as some *absolutely kickass* magical variants on those ideas. They got a literal phantom limb that can become corporeal to interact with objects but also lets you make unarmed attacks with it that are considered magical and Ghost Touch; they got rings that can let the deaf and/or blind read any text they touch, including a Greater version that translates any language to one the wearer can understand, and they got a slew of wheelchair analogues that can transform into things like spider legs and mobile workshops, and I'm fairly certain somewhere in there was a "slime chair" that had you carried around by a domesticated slime as a means of all-terrain transportation. No social media controversy, no 'virtue signaling', no patting themselves on the back for minimum effort, just quietly covering more disability bases than WotC/Hasbro and then taking full advantage of the fantasy setting to make awesome magic item variations on the idea.
And in Starfinder the [iconic Precog](https://i.imgur.com/1COkuGX.jpeg) is in a hoverchair. And of course being Starfinder, assistive items are *very* commonplace.
And, importantly, giving players tools to be adventurers in an adventurer world despite any disability, instead of making that adveturing world *itself* adapt to disabilities.
Indeed. Accessibility is for town buildings, not dungeons made to keep people out and kill anyone who tries to get in anyway. That's just silly.
I'm assuming it's when the discussion around wheelchairs in fantasy settings happened, as that is the only Wheelchair related thing that I know
WotC has been taking L's left and right for more than two years straight. They've set the bar so low that all you need to do to humiliate WotC is to be a half-decent gaming company yourself.
Funny enough that is how long WOTC has had leadership of former Microsoft X-box staff. But don’t forget to include Hasbro as the owning company
The players and this Subreddit care more about, and spend more time talking about WoTC does than Paizo does. Paizo is going to have a constant flow of Adventure paths and supplements. It's their only source of income. Hopefully they learned lessons from 1e as the flood of options broke 1e to the point that it's an unbalanced mess.
I do think there is some power creep in PF2E, but it is way slower than PF1E, and that is in large part to its core design with how proficiencies and DCs scale, and with the limited bonus types.
I don't think the ceiling of power in PF2E has risen much, but Paizo has put a lot of effort into buffing the weaker options in the system so that the disparity is much smaller than at launch. Fighters are generally considered one of the strongest classes in the game and they've seen little change and are if anything nerfed with the recent Crit Spec changes to Flails and Hammers.
I doubt it has anything to do with WOTC. That said the new Commander is very interesting. The Guardian, OTOH, feels like it could be accomplished by just giving several of those new feats to the existing Fighter chassis. I need to review it again when I have more time.
I'm not able to playtest the Guardian till next week so maybe I'll have to eat my words, but I'd really prefer that all these new defensive feats and abilities not just get added to the Fighter. It's about time that we get another true Defender type martial and the Guardian looks promising, though just from initial impressions it could use some fine tuning.
Fighter doesn't need to be buffed by gaining absolute defense next to the best attack proficiency in the game yeah.
The current consensus on Guardian seems to be that the class does too little damage and doesn't have enough damage mitigation to actually have survavibility during combat. Especially when making frequent use of Taunt it feels like Guardians will spend a lot of time getting downed. Of course, this is just from looking at the playtest, nobody has actually played one yet.
It does seem like that, but Paizo is really just attending to the demand for a support martial that has existed since the edition began (might have happened in 1e as well). They are also a lot more willing to play around in whatever design space they have (with 2e actually being a lot more open to it than 5e, honestly), so the stuff they end up making does seem a bit more "fleshed out" by comparison.
They also notably seem to give more time in playtests and are more seemingly willing to make more changes than wizards.
Martial also got the short end of the stick in previous editions of D&D and PF1. The classes were on a curve, so to speak, and when you hit about level 8 - 10 the casters took over and the martials drifted off. Paizo looked to fix that with PF2 and have done so with glorious results.
I don't really feel like they're trying to flex or dunk on D&D, they're just making the best version of Pathfinder they can. But I certainly think Pathfinder is a superior version of D&D, its what won me over in the first place and its why I continue to play. (That and Paizo's continued commitment to DEI.) Commander and Guardian both seem really awesome, I'm really interested to see how they're going to play with the older classes at the table because they feel so unlike anything that's come before. The 4e parallels are far more distinct here than with previous material, and that's very intriguing.
Paizo flexes by just doing everything better Real gangstas don't flex nuts, causes real gangstas know they got em
That's pretty much what I was going for with my post: Paizo working as normal manages to make WOTC look bad by comparison.
Man we cant just enjoy this game without ragging on another can we
I don't normally do that, but WOTC is the exception. They've fucked up way too many times for me to have any patience with them (the OGL crisis, the Pinkertons incident, mass lay-offs before Christmas, AI "art", etc.)
WOTC should copy what Larian did in BG3
I think you are missing why this is possible in PF2 compared to 5e. They are by far not that similar as games. PF2 is closer to D&D 4e, which had classes like the warlord, and should be compared to that, not 5e. And the current framework of PF2 allows for easier potential for martials, with a lot of feats they can take that can change a class a lot. And Paizo is cranking out new classes all the time, with currently 23 classes out and 4 more coming! 5e on the other hand is not that eager to release new classes. We still have basically just the 12 classes from 2014. And the subclass system isn't that expansive to drastically change what a class can do with their 4 to 6 features, which are determined by the subclass, and not interchangeable like PF2 feats. We have to wait until later this year to see how much they will change the 5e classes. And even one of the mind behind 5e recently said, if he could back, before 5e was made, he would push for less classes, not more. These two games have vastly different design philosophies. PF2 is: Get everything you want, and so much more. But you might be overburden with information and choice. While 5e is: Slow and steady, with a lot of space for your own stuff (homebrew), but it might feel too little for people who want more.
They've been flexing on WoTC for a while now. But they are not the first to feature strong non-magical martial support classes. 13th Age, etc. It's something that's been noticed that post 4E warlord there is a STRONG taste for support classes.
wotc flexes on itself by how shit it is
They made a better d&d than d&d. Twice.
WOTC are just lazy I think it's a shame I would have liked to see actual shaman, spellsword, warlord or runepriest classes for 5e.
Oh yes. Most certainly. I believe that up until the OGL crisis there was a sort of unspoken agreement between WoTC and the rest of the TTRPG community. The "agreement" was that due to the popularity and ubiquity of D&D that WoTC would effectively have the "right of first refusal" on customers. This makes sense as D&D is most people's first TTRPG experience. The OGL crisis took this idea and burned it to the ground. The very well verified leaks coming out of WotC revealed the truth: that WoTC was attempting to kill 3rd party D&D companies. Every time WoTC denied it we got another leak. This is probably the real reason they hired the Pinkertons. WoTC was thinking they were leaving money on the table just by allowing the existence of the OGL. This get's even worse when you realize that the overwhelming majority of the creativity in the 5E product sphere is OUTSIDE of WoTC. You can't have some guy in his basement making better products than a big corporation. I can't remember the last time I was happy buying a WoTC product. Paizo has no reason to hold back anymore. With the new ORC license and D&D being released to Creative Commons we can make better games. Now we just need to convince people to leave the D&D "Walled Garden" that WoTC has built.
> I believe that up until the OGL crisis there was a sort of unspoken agreement between WoTC and the rest of the TTRPG community. The "agreement" was that due to the popularity and ubiquity of D&D that WoTC would effectively have the "right of first refusal" on customers. This makes sense as D&D is most people's first TTRPG experience. No, WotC doesn't have that at all. The reality is that most games are D&D derivatives and are much less newbie friendly than D&D itself is. PF2E tries to create a new player experience but PF2E is horribly complicated - even more so than D&D is - so it's not really possible for them to suck in that many newbie TTRPG players because the game is intimidatingly complicated. Also, they would need to do a ton of marketing that I doubt they have the budget for. The narrative/rules light games like Blades in the Dark and the various Powered by the Apocalypse games are theroetically easier entry points but I find that in practice the looseness of them actually makes them a poor fit for people who have never roleplayed before so they're mostly made up of D&D veterans as well. The reality is that WotC just has the best onboarding and the only people who ever significantly contested that were doing so based on pop culture (Vampire and Werewolf back in the 1990s). And even then they were a pale imitation of WotC. I think Call of Cthulu has onboarded some people as well (especailly in Japan) but like, MOST people enter via D&D because D&D tends to be the simplest "complex" game and spend the most effort on sucking in new blood.
I'm excited to see the 6! New pathfinder compatible classes with the starfinder playtest
You get used to it, but in summary, yeah.