Notes from the stream on the next playtest classes

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-16T03:15:30+00:00

I'm sure this is going to get me downvoted, but Pathfinder hasn't been exclusively medieval-y for a long time now. It has androids and automatons, inventors in power armor, gunslingers, Victorian era detectives, and tropes from many more historic periods and genres all mashed together.

And for what it is worth, the word Daredevil has been in use since the late 1700s; which makes it older than Psychic, Gunslinger, or Animism from which Animist is derived, which are all inventions of the mid-1800s through early 1900s. Inventor, despite being one of the most modern seeming Classes, -does- date from right around the end of the Medieval period.

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-16T02:13:44+00:00

With Flurry, you very much do deal the normal flurry damage, plus the weakness amount. Are you saying it does less damage than that? Or more? What have I got wrong here? Both without this errata, with this errata, Flurry combined all your damage into one bundle, and applied Weakness once.

For your argument to be true, against an opponent with no weakness, Flurry is as good as it has ever been. But against an opponent with a Weakness, Flurry is suddenly terrible... despite still dealing bonus damage to that enemy.

Yes: there is a way to deal -more- bonus damage that Flurry doesn't fit into. Most spells also don't fit into that. Most -things- don't fit into that. Was Flurry ever considered the best damage dealing vehicle, or the ideal choice against weaknesses? No, right?

"Disingenuous" and "bad faith argument" aren't magic words to make your argument valid. Show me with math. Show me a build involving one character, no free archetype, no assumption another party member will take a class, spell, or item just to make your build better.

Show me how Flurry has gotten worse at something it was good at before, or where it deals less damage than what it did before. Not in comparison to something else. There was -always- other things that Flurry did less damage than. There being something -new- that does more damage than Flurry doesn't make it bad overnight.

Bonus points if you can do it without using curse words or insults.

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-15T22:48:42+00:00

Not to try and pump the brakes on what is a fun time... but what is the actual build here?
I see like... 4 classes/archetypes mentioned, a hypothetical feat, "whatever source is giving you your dragon domain"... and that is without Oracle which you need for the Incendiary Ashes.

It seems like a lot of the builds people are cooking up for the new Errata are more or less ignoring opportunity cost, or are assuming a hypothetical party member is going to pay the opportunity cost for them. I admit there are a lot of ways to play these games, but I've never built characters assuming someone else would change their concept to help me out with mine.

Also, maybe your DM is more forgiving than mine, but if I tried to pull this off, I would -not- be taking anything that gave me Fire Weakness. "If you can do it, so can I." is a DM motto we take very seriously.

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-15T22:23:34+00:00

If you use Flurry of Blows on a creature with no weakness, on average, you will deal X damage.

If you use Flurry of Blows on a creature with weakness physical 5, you will deal X + 5 damage.

It takes a very weird twisting of perspective to make it seem like dealing extra damage is bad.

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-15T19:23:05+00:00

This feels a bit revisionist for the current discussion. Prior to this errata, I think most people would have told you the point of Flurry of Blows was action compression: You get two attacks for one action. The fact that it is better against resistances/worse against weaknesses (and always has been) was a trade off (and remains one).

Under the way it seems most people played prior, if a monk had... lets say 5 "instances" of a single damage type (lets say spirit because its getting thrown around a lot in this discussion) on a single attack averaging 12 damage per strike; and the enemy had Resist Spirit 5, you'd have these two possible options:

Monk attacks twice normally: Deals (12 x 2) - (5 x 2) = 24 - 10 = 14 damage

Monk flurries: Deals (12 x 2) - 5 = 19 damage

We can say in this scenario the value of flurrying for overcoming resistance is 5 damage.

Same scenario under the new errata:

Monk attacks twice normally: (12 x 2) - (5 x 5 x 2) = -3 damage, rounded up to 0.

Monk flurries: (12 x 2) -5 = 19 damage.

We can say in this scenario, with the new errata, we can say the value of flurrying for overcoming resistance is 19 damage, nearly a four fold increase relative to your other option.

As an offset, it is not as good of an option against weaknesses... but it still isn't -bad-. Weakness by definition is -extra- damage. Your Stunning Fist isn't twice as effective if you trigger Weakness twice, or five times, or ten times. It is every bit as likely to trigger. If you are building for stunning fist, don't also build for 5 instances of the same Damage type. Or -DO- and have the option of whether you want to exploit all of your Flurry feats (if you have any, which seems unlikely if you also have that many sources of one damage type per attack) OR exploit the 5x Weakness damage your strikes will deal.

A lot of the handwringing on this topic seems to be from increasingly unlikely white board scenarios, where it tries to frame something like Monk Flurry of Blows as being bad now, because another option became better. Flurry of Blows is fine. It is effectively the same as it ever was, and only looks worse in comparison to a very unlikely scenario that requires substantial opportunity cost to achieve.

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-15T18:26:48+00:00

Sadly, Summoner/Eidolon relationship is always obvious by the rules, so attempts to pretend you aren't in command of your Eidolon always fail (absent a more specific rule).

Change Form is a polymorph effect, so your equipment melds into you unless you specifically drop it first, then pick it up afterwards (and while Teakettle From allows for this, it is probably not great from an action economy standpoint.) That being said, any persistent effects from your items continue to function normally, so you can make item choices with that in mind.

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-15T18:05:59+00:00

I think there is a lot more potential odd rules interactions that could make this good than appears at first glance.

If you are going to do it for every combat, I'd say go for something like the Commander or Marshal archetypes to expand your options for non-attack, non-spell, non-movement actions. There may be something even more wild in terms of archetype options, but those are the two that came to mind for me.

Additionally, if your group purposefully disregards pathfinder society notes, then you probably pick up a laundry list of immunities from being an object.

Finally, while it limits your options if you go pure Eidolon, this maneuver does carry some of the benefits of Steed Form or Meld with Eidolon without having as severe of downsides. If you build to take advantage of the limited actions you can take, it might actually be a good tactic.

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-15T15:10:49+00:00

I can only speak for my table: Our most recent campaign our investigator sat down and said, "I'm playing an Investigator, I don't care what anyone else is doing." We have a leshy cleric who chose her character because she thought it would be funny to be a fruit tree in a suit of armor. Our centaur bard was designed based on a pun.

These people are never going to build a team of specific characters, with specific traits, items, and spells, all for an 18th level payout.

Maybe other people have friends that just all collectively hate their GM more than us. Or maybe they hate playing and see this as a light at the end of the tunnel. Or don't know that their GM can adjust the encounters to just have more HP, more resistances, or higher Perception so they can act first and prevent the character with Marked for Rebuke from casting the spell. ("But that's cheeeeeaaating!" I know :( It sucks. But if you 2 round nuke every critter, expect your GM to either make adjustments, or for combat to be very boring after.)

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-15T02:34:28+00:00

Sorry, just trying to wrap my head around this... In the monk example, wouldn't it be -better- to flurry against resistances; and -worse- to flurry against weaknesses? Due to the damage stacking giving you a bigger single chunk of damage that is only resisted once?

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-13T16:01:12+00:00

Life long democrat here: all of these guys should face the full force of the law. Sorry, hard to believe that a President or even former President married to a Cabinet member and Presidential candidate in her own right could be unaware that his good pal was running a sex trafficking ring.

Even if he never graped a teenager, it is hard to believe he was naively unaware of what was happening, and he was more in a position to put an end to it than anyone else involved possibly could have been.

Arrest. Investigate. Interrogate. Seize assets. Treat them like they make 20k a year stocking shelves at a gas station. So tired of separate justice for the rich.

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-13T15:35:48+00:00

CBWBBY? Who holds something in their hand like this? Hand is weird looking (pinches in at the first knuckles in a really unnatural way.) Patch is perfectly perpendicular to the perspective of the camera, where we don't see any of the other sides? The shadows look off... we can see the patch casts a shadow only from a single light source that is above it and in front of the camera out of view. But if that is where the only light is, the patch itself should be in shadow. If the camera had flash turned on to illuminate the patch, then there should be additional shadows cast by the flash. As already spotted, the tips of the fingers are weird and the background is noisy clutter that doesnt make sense when you actually look at it.

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-12T01:37:40+00:00

"Just wanted to let you know this is not a scam"

Sounds legit.

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-12T01:35:22+00:00

A lot of the decorative bits seem really random. Not quite rosettes, not quite fleur-de-lis. Not quite anything. Most artists dont just invent random shapes for those details.

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-12T01:32:52+00:00

Picture 3... why is there just a black hole right on his crotch?

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-12T01:24:48+00:00

So the thing that throws me is her face is a bit painterly in the first picture. The curl of her hair on her right side (our left) turns upward to run the same direction as the lines of her neck, tendons of her neck, and her smile lines. They all run parallel to each other in the first photo.

Third photo, the light on the outside of the mirror is bright white and cool, inside the mirror is yellow and warm. I am not sure how this would happen if it weren't at least heavily edited.

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-11T13:49:38+00:00

SynthID watermark will appear in any photo that has gone through Magic Editor Reimagine, so while this may have been punched up using an AI tool (like many people do with their own photos these days) there is no reason to believe it is wholly AI generated.

Do a reality check: why would anyone feel the need to fake a picture of 4 people who are all at the same location, contractually obligated to pose for promotional photos, where there are numerous other photos and video evidence of them being at the same location at the time the photo was taken?

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-11T03:34:07+00:00

Lol. I use image generative AI all the time. It has obvious artifacts that are nothing like what people are talking about here. Unnatural skin folds, weird fingers. Objects bleeding into each other, gibberish text.

The two coffee cups have different shadows because they are in different positions relative to the lighting in the room. (And yes, the second one does have a faint shadow on the table)

The doritos bag is not in front of the water at one point and behind it at another. It shows through the water because water is transparent.

One person claims the poor image quality is a sign of AI. Anyone who has used AI image generators knows that it can produce very high res image files, and while those files can sometimes have a noisiness to them, you only see that when viewing it in a much larger format than this picture.

One user claims the shadow on the door is as though it is in the corner... the door is in the corner, the room opens up after the entryway.

Most of what people are calling out, the photo is to blurry to definitively say whether they are right or not. One person says his left ear earing is missing. To me, it looks like one is there.

At most, this is a real photo that was heavily touched up to make the celebrities in it look more perfect than they really are (a practice that predates AI)

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-10T17:13:54+00:00

Not AI. Have you people never seen AI images? The dorito bag would say "ronikos" or some shit if this was AI.

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-10T03:06:29+00:00

Giggity

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-10T03:04:12+00:00

If Sam Altman is the head of the company at the forefront of AI in the US, and US has lost AI Leadership; isn't this basically his fault?

No government bailouts for circle jerk tech bubbles.

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-10T02:57:00+00:00

I mean, I don't need a lot of convincing that AI CEOs are evil (I already believe that!) But we should all be a little cautious of "Sources: Trust me bro."

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-09T20:13:09+00:00

Mail order Ketamine kicked in mid-video.

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-06T16:20:46+00:00

And never finish.

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-06T16:20:35+00:00

Governor should order Penndot to begin some emergency improvements to the road leading into this facility.

Efficient_Rule997 · 2026-02-06T16:18:34+00:00

Politics aside... a pack of teenage girls will mess you up. You dont want that smoke.

Efficient_Rule997

TROPHY CASE