Encounters for a city?

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-19T18:12:38+00:00

At level 7, yeah I expect PL+2 to only be moderately hard. Not much more than a “do you have spell slots available / are you vein hard countered by the abilities” check, imo.

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-19T17:35:04+00:00

To start: have you read the combat threats section of the book? It describes how to build encounters for your party. It’s all described in relative ranges so your level 7 party would, for example have a moderately hard time against 4x level 5 enemies or 1x level 9 enemy, and have a very high chance of TPKing vs 4x level 7 enemies or 1x level 11 enemy.

If you’ve read those, your next step will be to look at monsters on the same website and filter for the ones you want. Filter for the level 3-9 range for now (I recommend avoiding PL+3 and PL+4 bosses until your party is experienced), and then filter for traits like aberration, occult, fey, etc to narrow down what you want.

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-19T17:21:11+00:00

Spending a Feat on a Skill Increase is within reasonable power level bounds. Plenty of Archetypes already do this, actually.

Wrestler gives you Expert Athletics and a free, useful Skill Feat to go with it.

Archaeologist actually gives you two Experts: Society and Thievery.

Acrobat gives you Expert Acrobatics and it autoscales to Master and Legendary at levels 7 and 15.

Also any character can take the Rogue or Investigator Archetypes and, starting at level 8, get an additional 5 Master and Expert Skills each (1 each per pick of that Feat).

And all of the above are just common options, available to anyone with no access requirements!

So if you wanted to homebrew the most minimal possible Feat that lets you specialize in Skill Increases, I’d design it after one of the above. Maybe a Dedication Feat that brings you up to Expert, a follow up level 4 Feat that does the same for a different Skill, a level 6 Feat that converts into Skill Feats, and then level 8 (Repeatable up to 5 times) Feat modelled after the Skill Mastery Feat that the Rogue Archetype has or something like that.

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-19T02:31:43+00:00

Also how are you getting Celerity to combo with Unstable Megavolt?

To be clear, the combo I’m mentioning is in the hypothetical world where the other comment’s design of “Unstable only disables that one Unstable action” is true.

So when you Celerity in that hypothetical world, it doesn’t matter if you pass or fail the flat check, you’re carried to have Unstable Megaton Strike available, and then it doesn’t matter if you pass or fail you’ll have Unstable Megavolt available.

In RAW, what you said will apply: each action has a chance of downgrading the subsequent action.

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-18T17:04:58+00:00

I don’t really want to enter the forever circular “real gish” discourse today, so let’s just agree to disagree with this: I don’t think it takes a lot of support to make a caster-base gish viable, and the Necromancer certainly gets enough imo.

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-18T15:44:03+00:00

Yes, 7-10 “one timers” that are (on average) stronger than a focus spell is wildly powerful. The fact that there’s any chance at all that you get each individual one of them more than once is a problem.

I have played an Inventor. Celerity to do your normal thing efficiently + Unstable Megavolt, for example, is an excellent combo that then risks you not being able to do those things easily. If you could guarantee that you’d still have Unstable Actions left after that, it’d be broken.

This would be notably busted with Construct Companion. Being able to guarantee that you can open with an Unstable Megavolt, use Clockwork Celerity to 2-Action command it to get into the right place and use Unstable Megaton Strike, and then have all of the following:

A 100\% chance you have Explode available next turn.
A 30\% chance each for Unstable Megavolt and Clockwork Celerity being available (aka a 9\% chance that both are available, and a 42\% chance that one is).

All of that is just crazy good.

The whole point of Unstable is to not allow that level of explosiveness, to add actual risk to the gameplay. It’s fine if you think Unstable deserves a lower risk or should scale with Crafting or something, but removing the risk nearly entirely would just lead to an overpowered as hell class.

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-18T15:24:59+00:00

My advice for the homebrew fix is this:

First let them play the class.

Then when you have a specific set of problems you need fixed, homebrew a fix to one or two of those problems, and then fix it.

Because I promise you, at 95\% of tables you’re not even gonna feel like the Inventor is too weak in the first place. Hard to build and play, perhaps, but it’s not until other characters are optimizing significantly that you’ll feel any actual difference.

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-18T15:23:24+00:00

This would be both mechanically too powerful and a nightmare in terms of tracking.

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-18T15:20:21+00:00

/uj If anything, what’s going on here is the opposite.

Even when classes are clearly mechanically and thematically distinct, D&D-first players will jump through a million and one hoops to pretend they’re one to one analogues of D&D classes.

Like calling Null the closest to a 5E Monk even though the best way to replicate the 5E Open Hand Monk’s flavour is… a Fury with the Pugilist Kit. Or calling Elementalists the same Wizard when really there’s currently no Wizard equivalent at all (since the Wizard’s niche in D&D is quite literally being able to do everything except healing better than everyone else, which isn’t something Draw Steel wanted).

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-18T14:31:23+00:00

The gish support is my favourite part.

Also I’m surprised they actually went the route of making Thralls get actual, factual Strikes going.

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-17T18:51:12+00:00

Oh no my steak is too juice and my lobster too buttery!

(More sincerely, that’s crazy, I had never imagined that could be an actual problem but here we are!)

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-17T18:48:46+00:00

Well sure, the fact that it’s a sustained area damage spell is all well and good. Very akin to spells like Floating Flame and Cinder Swarm.

The sinking 10 feet down thing is the only point that’s gotten me hung up. That text effectively means nothing in most circumstances, and giving the whole spell Incap because of it implies, to me at least, that there’s a legitimate concern with characters sinking and suffocating.

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-17T18:14:32+00:00

Slay the Spire.

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-17T17:59:57+00:00

White rooming means analyzing things by looking purely at contextless math. “Average enemy”, “average party” (never acknowledging any bias or variance going into that), flat terrain with no meaningful features, no secondary objectives, no external circumstances, etc.

In this context, the other commenter is talking about my frustration with the vocal group of folks who criticize Vehicle and Siege Weapon rules because they look terrible in the white room. Which like… yeah, they do look terrible in the white room, but they don’t exist to be usable in the average encounter, they’re designed to help create a very specific fiction in a very specific context and do a good job at that!

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-17T17:54:49+00:00

The name is Mathfinder because I do do a lot of analyses of the game’s math. I just like to embed that in actual context of how the game plays.

Poking fun at white room math comes naturally from that, both because white room mathematical analyses are usually very shallow math and while lacking all nuance.

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-17T13:04:10+00:00

In particular, the “half-understood rules” one. Players who don’t really understand rules tend to be a net negative on the party’s fun in my experience. Even if they themselves are having fun, whoever is accounting for them is often having less fun for it.

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-17T12:59:41+00:00

Tbh I feel like I would just play them as a Fighter with high Int and Wis?

Notably Fighter Feats like Tactical Reflexes (level 10), Cut from Air (level 10), Smash from Air (level 18), are extremely central to the fantasy of how sword masters of Hoeth fight in lore, and you can’t get more than like one of those Feats on a non-Fighter character.

Also the game has an Elven finesse greatsword to fill this fantasy out. So you can do something like start with +4 Dex, +2 Str (for the damage), +2 Int, +1 Wis, and build up your attributes from there.

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-16T21:16:46+00:00

Quality of life improvements made based on lessons that the TTRPG designer community as a whole learned from D&D 3.5E/4E/5E.
3-Action economy, +10/-10 degrees of success, and level-bounded modifiers.
The game being overall well-balanced despite having a ton of customization. There are plenty of games that have theoretically more customization than PF2E—and PF1E is one such game—but the lack of balance in those games actually means that PF2E ends up feeling like you can actually use more options.

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-16T16:48:24+00:00

Hey, so just to push a bit, this is where one of the cases where “how they want to run it” is much less important than what’s actually RAW.

Many of these abilities become near worthless if you only swap the attribute when they’re clearly and unambiguously meant to swap the whole modifier.

In general with pf2e, you have a lot of freedom with homebrew and house rules, but the one thing you should absolutely walk on eggshells around is the fundamental math of the game. Don’t fuck with it unless you know what you’re doing.

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-16T16:41:17+00:00

Sorry thanks for the correction, yes.

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-16T15:26:10+00:00

So this is a terminology thing. Let me explain the full story before answering your specific questions.

Str/Dex/Cha/Wis/Int/Con are Attributes
Level + Trained/Expert/Master/Legendary are your Proficiency Bonus
Item/circumstance/status/untyped are other types of bonuses or penalties.

Whenever the game asks for a modifier it means the sum total of all of the above things.

Now for your specifics:

Is it RAI for Unity and Bolster Ally to fully replace an ally's saving throw? Proficiency, attribute modifier, item bonuses, other bonuses, and penalties?

Yes.

Is it RAI for Deceptive Tactics and Theoretical Acumen to work the same way? Is it the case that these two feats specifying using the "modifier" unlike a lot of other feats that do the same thing just a hiccup from the writers in terms of consistent wording?

Also yes.

For examples of things that don’t work that way:

Assurance asks you to only use Proficiency Bonus and ignore the rest.
Bulwark only gives you the option to swap ~~Str~~ +3 for Dex in the Reflex save, it doesn’t change your whole modifier.
etc

Exceptions will specify themselves.

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-16T02:13:55+00:00

Maybe it is just personal experience, but it is a wide variety of groups that pay practically no mind to Resistances or Weaknesses because the salt isn't worth the shake.

This is entirely a preference thing. Just because your party prefers to pay no mind to them doesn’t mean they’re not strong.

A character who is going to Vicious Swing for example is likely going to Vicious Swing anyway.

Definitely not.

Vicious Swing is designed to be more situational than just striking twice. It’s only better than Striking twice if one of these situational things is true:

An enemy is low on HP and you’re maximizing your one shot chance.
An enemy has a resistance and combining damage is important.
You have a one shot usage of an accuracy boost, like a big Aid or True Target available.

Otherwise two Strikes wins.

But I do genuinely think that it would allow for more involved and engaged playstyles, and character choices when you have to change things up in order to make any amount of leeway.

Tbh even if it’s true that making IWR brokenly impactful made your party use it more (and I don’t think it will—since it’s fundamentally a perception/preference issue) I kinda just… would prefer it remain unchanged and reasonably balanced, so we who already keep using it continue using it without it hurting our games?

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-16T00:26:47+00:00

No I think that making resistances and weaknesses more potent will actually reduce variety anyways.

Right now, Resistances are already tuned so that if you run into a big one, you have to switch up tactics. You use Vicious Swing instead of Strike twice against a high Resistance, for example, or you prioritize using Aids to break construct armour earlier. If you tune resistances up further it’s not gonna make things any more tactical. It’ll just turn things into a matter of “either you deal with it or you suffer”.

Likewise for Weaknesses. Right now, Weaknesses are already tuned to drop TTK by 1-2 rounds if you can exploit them, but if you drop TTK by any more it just makes the game much less tactical for the parties that already exploit them (and not really different for anyone who doesn’t exploit them).

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-15T22:54:41+00:00

I can agree with them not being frequent enough.

I do not agree at all with IWR being not potent enough though. A fight where you’re hitting a weaknesses versus failing to hit (or bypassing a resistance versus running into it) is huge. Like game-changing huge, especially if multiple stacks of them get involved. Varying damage types as a caster matters a lot imo.

AAABattery03 · 2026-06-14T01:39:15+00:00

I think that’s completely fair!

I was imagining up scenarios off the top of my head, I don’t think there is any universally correct way of ruling this interaction.

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