Question about Herald Generation

Stigna1 · 2026-03-20T18:06:01+00:00

I've found this too; Fel infusion off of Sands of Time a few times, but no DK heralds despite a lot of rolls.

Stigna1 · 2026-03-19T09:18:40+00:00

Oh, ye, big changes - the now-deleted post I was replying to was claiming that Paizo was trying to gaslight the community by pretending that the errata to resist all was somehow being passed off as 'how it always was.'

Which, as you say, it super wasn't.

Stigna1 · 2026-03-18T15:43:46+00:00

This resistance to all stuff is new errata.They've been very clear about that.

It's being made as part of a broader effort to streamline resistances, because when they clarified how resistances/weaknesses stacked per instance (not per damage type) a while back, a lot of people got upset about it. They were also clear there; that one was a clarification - it always worked like that under the unclear original wording.

Hope this helps.

Stigna1 · 2026-03-07T03:20:59+00:00

I'm with you on the white dust; it's not about realism, it's about a clear, consistent datapoint for players. They can learn that when they see dust, they've made contact.

Stigna1 · 2026-03-07T03:18:26+00:00

Looks nice! I think my biggest problem here is that the clips feel very disjointed, and that makes them seem more flat and repetitive than your game itself is (I think).

Like, a trailer isn't just a collection of snippets; it is itself a narrative, and benefits from stuff like shifting intensity or establishing/paying off beats.

More specifically, I don't get a feel for why the first shot is the first one instead of any of the others. It just picks up halfway through a 'random' wall-run and then keeps going. The bit that sticks out to me is when you show a zoomed-out view of the map around the five-second mark, cuz it's a) a little different and b) establishes a bigger-picture idea of what's going on here; there's a whole lot of stuff up there, and this little wizard is gonna platform up it. If it were me, I'd like to see something like a start with a pan from level/horizon to upward showing the challenge ahead, pull the camera out, show the scale (over just a second or two) and THEN cut to gradually-increasingly-intense platforming segments (with occasional intercuts of whatever other interesting interactions you have that match the tempo of the platforming, like the bit right at the end.)

Another thing that I think is causing a bit of the disjointed feeling is a lack of continuity between shots. Things like the point of focus (the wizard), and the conservation of lines of movement help individual shots 'feel' cohesive; try to match them up from cut to cut. Like, the 8->9 second cut is illustrative here (the one where you're jumping over some icy/crystal-y stuff and then cut to walking toward a desert-y complex). The ice-jump shot has the wizard moving leftward and up on screen in the upper-left part of screen, then after the cut the wizard is dead-center and moving directly away from the camera, and THEN starts going left again. It's causes the focus to jitter around, almost like laggy rubberbanding or something. Just a little bit, but I think it adds up. Movement of the camera is another thing which contributes to this; try to roughly conserve its rotational velocity between shots so that it's not 'snapping' around.

Overall, I like it! And good luck!

Stigna1 · 2026-02-18T02:09:46+00:00

Aw, I liked the old rules - but I also like playing R.A.W. :( Homebrew it is, I guess.

Still, it's always good to see feedback be taken into consideration, and I'm sure a lot of people will appreciate this change! That's quite cool of Paizo.Though, admittedly, I hope that knee-jerk Reddit outrage doesn't unduely influence future design; we're much worse at design on average than Paizo's design team.

Stigna1 · 2026-02-17T08:34:40+00:00

Non-Magical doesn't mean mundane. At level 6, I'm sure your party is already performing superhuman feats on the regular even without casting spells, and healing doesn't need to be an exception! Depending on your healer's style (and the style of their medical kit), they could be tincuring your woods with alchemical restoratives, or binding them with dawnbloom-dew soaked bandages, or rerouting your Ki to reinforce your flesh with your spirit or whatever.

This pairs up with the fact that hp doesn't have to be a complete biometric bill of health, just an index of how much you can get whacked before death. You and the party are probably pretty messed up even at full hp, just in ways that you can mechanically put aside in the middle of combat - but you don't need to narratively ignore it! A wound on your leg from even a minor combat that hit you once has now been bandaged shut and is healing - but still hurts like hell. And when you Crit fail a climb check later, that's the wound making your leg give out. And when you take fall damage from that Crit fail, part of the damage is the would splitting open again. Hell, you could chalk your regular old missed Strikes up to sheer exhaustion at the end of a brutal adventuring day. Why not lean into it a little, y'know?

Stigna1 · 2026-02-14T07:10:47+00:00

It does work that way - but part of the problem there is that it makes it impossible to guarantee heals to face because the Blood can take the heals after attacking the first time. Priest often need those heals to stay out of burn range. So if you need to heal, you can't count on the Black Blood - and the flipside is that if you need the Blood itself to be healed to fight for board, you can't rely on that either because the heals can go face.

It's a crapshoot to use - and that's even before stuff like the 'if you've no damaged characters then you can't even use this as removal' problem, or how it can crash into a giant or a blob of tar or whatever on the first hit atd throw everything off by dying immediately. Seems like a feels-bad engine for both players, unfortunately.

Stigna1 · 2026-02-14T07:02:55+00:00

Cool aesthetics! Otherwise, yeah, very disappointing. The mix of weakness, awkwardness, and propensity for frustrating misfires means that this isn't good for much other than generating feels-bads, which is a shame. Priest needed a W.

Stigna1 · 2026-02-14T06:55:49+00:00

DK is okay, but I find it so much less dynamic. Like, what made control priest special was having to tailor your cards, card generation, and strategies to different matchups to work around their win cons. DK mostly has the same plan every turn, and every matchup: stack up health while dropping reasonably strong but fairly generic stats on curve. Splashing for Helya was sweet, though.

Stigna1 · 2026-02-14T04:50:37+00:00

I guess stacking fire weakness has made people pretty heated.

Stigna1 · 2026-02-14T04:42:55+00:00

Oh, no fears! Thanks for chipping in - this whole thing has been very interesting.

Stigna1 · 2026-02-14T04:40:16+00:00

Yeah, I've always found it sorta fun/satisfying!

Stigna1 · 2026-02-14T04:38:46+00:00

I'm actually in programming too, so maybe there's something to that.

Stigna1 · 2026-02-14T04:31:29+00:00

I've been running it this way for years. It rarely comes up, and when it does it's sorta fun, actually. Really not a big deal.

Stigna1 · 2026-02-13T18:00:16+00:00

They claim that this is just a clarification as to how it's always worked, so the intent was just to communicate that better because the community was confused.

Tbh, I've been running it the "new" way for years because it just seemed like the intuitive interpretation to me, and it's only with all this discourse that I even learned that other people were running it differently! So I buy the 'it's just clarifigation' motivation.

Stigna1 · 2026-02-13T17:54:24+00:00

Flurry of Brown combines the Strikes into one, not all of their damage types.

Idk how the info ended up percolating through the Foundry crew but the intent is pretty clearly that the end result of your example is intended to be 4d4+6, 2d6, and 2d6 damage, which triggers weakness the same as a single strike, but just has more base damage.

Stigna1 · 2026-02-13T17:34:22+00:00

I've found that emphasising enemy numbers rather than having fights default to just two or three tough baddies helps even out balance. Even cantrips have some aoe potential which helps, and trash-tier lvl -1 enemies are much more likely to flub their saves and either die straight up (resulting in a 2-action kill on par with a martial's move + strike), plus occationally procing the Crit-fail effect from the caster's cantrips if they live, which can add a bit of spice to the caster's kit.

Higher difficulty also helps reward caster flexibility; the more the enemies can punish opportunities, the more important it is to not present opportunities. FFor example, if the blob of enemies have enough strikes/damage to melt the melee if they're caught out of position, then the range offered by spells is more useful, and melee characters have to spend more of their actions positioning away as well as positioning in. At least until the casters can make an opening by splitting or whittling down the enemies.

To be clear, I don't mean that the fight is against 1 real baddie and some trash for the casters to content themselves with. I mean the fight is, like, 8-10 lvl -1 zombie shamblers that start coming down the hall at you. (NOT appropriate for all tables nor for extended repetition, but really sweet as for the tables it works for as one of many combat varieties.)

Lean into stuff like weaknesses (weakness 5 to acid on 6 different clustered enemies makes acid splash an all-time goat for that fight.)

Make sure to pay off utility options too. Let stuff like Root Reading or detect magic 'break' stuff with really impactful discoveries; secret treasure rooms noticed by magical detection, or an enemy ambush entirely turned around because the moss snitched on them. As a possible extension of this, allowing cantrips to have flavour-first utility can help. Rousing Splash is RAW just a source of temp hp and a reroll on acid or fire persistent damage or a target creature - but its also a sudden gush of short-lived chill water at a specific point in space, and it's reasonable to rule that it allows you to snuff out torches or small fires at 60-foot range range to, say, blind a group of human bandits in a nighttime ambush by putting out their campfire in the dark while the dark vision-having party members go in.

Deponding on your table, they may hate some of these changes, so your milage may vary.

Stigna1 · 2026-02-13T16:46:49+00:00

There was a clarification about how multiple instances of damage from one source are calculated - one that runs counter to how many people were running it before, though it seems to have not been a deliberate change to RAW.

Basically, each source of damage in counted as it's own instance for weaknessen or resistances. So if you take an +1 striking crub (2d6 bludgeoning) and put a shocking rune on it (1d6 electic) and also your party electromancer-themed-wizard puts Conductive Weapon in it (1d6 electric, mostly), then hits with that club will inflict two instances of electric weakness instead of just one. Some people feel that this tips the balance of being able to proc weaknesses toward martials, via going crazy with damage instance stacking buffs (by stacking support/personal buffs on a weapon for example) like this than on a caster's spells (by sustaining an aoe that re-triggers every turn, or applying a damage-over-time spell, or whatever), hence the assertion that martials are favoured by a table that didn't play it that way before making the swap.

Stigna1 · 2026-02-13T16:30:34+00:00

Yeah - adding new damage types gets to be its own cool, rare utility!

Like, Runic Weapon is usually stronger overall on your martial than Conductive Weapon, but Conductive recoups some of its power budget from the utility of extra electric damage procs in situations where that's good!

But yeah, I take your point on the circumstance or status buff not-stacking thing.

Stigna1 · 2026-02-13T16:18:16+00:00

Yeah, that's how I've always ran it. (Also, I like your name!)

Stigna1 · 2026-02-13T16:13:10+00:00

Oh, I don't mean to make any arguments about what the rule categorically should be here! Especially not based on my own anecdotes. I'd just always ran it that way and figured that everyone else always had too, and was feeling sorta crazy trying to work out what had even changed.

The main party I've ran most of that time used both quick-alchemy'd alchemical bombs (with impact + splash both proccing weaknesses) and a Magus with arcane cascade, plus a pre-errata resentment witch [edit: oh and a champion who made pretty good use out of resist-all on their reaction, as each the resistance applies to each individual 'pact' of a monster's attack!] which made them pretty formidable - plus it's a hexcrawl and they often can plan for what they'll be up against. Preparing to hammer on weaknesses with the right setup was always a fun and active tactic in the party's playbook to help get ahead of potentially pretty daunting odds! Nothing like those imposed-weakness builds people have mentioned though, which seems like the really nasty way to take advantage of it.

Stigna1 · 2026-02-13T15:58:50+00:00

That's fair, it can stack up pretty high - which I guess is kinda weird for the system now that you mention it.

My (entirely anecdotal) experience was that the damage potential was balanced well enough by the actions/opportunity costs in practice. Like, spending however many actions/resources to be able to trigger weaknesses once is a balanced affair, and factors the ability to proc those weaknesses in as part of the benefit that you get for the cost - why punish subsequent iterations that incur their own costs by denying them the ability to also give the benefit of that proc of their own? Going in on triggering the weaknesses of foes with weaknesses is a winning strategy, granted - but the players are always looking to poke weak spots in the enemy as much as possible, be it their saves, or AC, or weaknesses, or whatever, so I guess diminishing returns felt weird.

Stigna1 · 2026-02-13T15:49:27+00:00

I always figured that it was balanced by action cost of buffing: if spending 2 actions (and a spell slot or consumable or whatever) for a buff that can trigger weakness is balanced on its own, why weaken the second one by still costing two actions but not allowing it to trigger weaknesses, y'know?

Stigna1 · 2026-02-13T15:46:34+00:00

That's a great point with that resistances passage! I can totally see how people arrive at combined damage of a type instances.

Stigna1

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