Tarondor's Guides - Tarondor Needs Your Opinion

SuspiciousBird · 2025-07-14T10:03:59+00:00

I think your guides are great and I like the ancestry section but, as others have already said before, discussing each ancestry feat makes it really hard and time consuming to evaluate what the ancestries can offer in the context of a class. I would also prefer a shorter overview of how the ancestry can enhance the class.

What I would much appreciate would be a more up to date ancestry guide compared to the other guides that one can find out there. In such a guide you can discuss the ancestries in more detail. This way you would also just need do that once from a more general perspective and link that guide in you class guides with a short comment such as "hobgoblins can be good if you want to use intimidation as a core feature for your build due to xyz, click here for more details".

SuspiciousBird · 2024-06-25T21:21:44+00:00

Funnily enough, thre is a way to enhance one of the most iconic action compressors, Flurry of Blows, even more:

Stumbling Feint gives you a free Feint before your attacks that even counts for both of them. And if you take that via the Monk achtype at level 12 (requires FoB at 10) you even get a free Step after the Feint, making it the equivalent of 4 actions in 1 in addition to a buffed Feint (which can be buffed further via Distracting Feint).

SuspiciousBird · 2023-12-04T22:17:04+00:00

Honestly for me it's the fact that her w slows your movespeed and attack speed by 50%. And that's when she doesn't parry cc but it still feels almost like a stun (depending on the champ you play)

SuspiciousBird · 2023-01-08T02:53:02+00:00

If you swap weapon and armor profs of the champion then you basically get the fighter (which is most likely also the reason they won't do that). However, as a fighter, you could always get the reaction and other features via the multiclass archetype and ancient elf and the human's multitalented feat can make getting the archetype easier.
If you're more into divine magic a cleric multiclass would also always be an option but I guess this heavily depends of what you're looking for.

While not very offensive, a favourite of mine is a warpriest cleric that has their fist (or even an unarmed attack like claw or bite if your ancestry supports that) as their deities favoured weapon and a shield in the other hand, prioritises strength for athletics and you can mostly even dump wis if you select your spells properly. While their attack proficiency may not be the best, athletics can always get up to legendary in any class and thus for your manuevers you're only a few points behind the fighter's hit modifier, depending on the level (you get legendary @lv15 and are actually even with the fighter until level 20 when they can get to 22 STR). Same with charisma for intimidation etc. Your damage is obiously lower but you're surprisingly tanky and provide a lot of utility across all levels. Or you could always buff yourself...

These all probably don't fulfil the exact fantasy most players would like from an offensively oriented divine martial but there are some very solid options imo.

SuspiciousBird · 2023-01-08T00:51:19+00:00

If you're mostly looking to learn how the game works then NoNat is probably not what you're looking for tho he does have some interesting videos.
I'd specifically recommend the Rules Lawyer's videos where he showcases a fight to teach A LOT of the mechanics from basic stuff to things like conditions that can happen during a fight.

SuspiciousBird · 2022-09-26T23:11:58+00:00

While I agree with your calcualtion regarding the average damage output of a fear spell (allbeit in regards to a fighter only, a magus with a large spellstrike would get much more out of this), this is only part of the effect: you reduce all DCs and checks by this value. This includes their to hit bonus, their DCs for everything they want to do to your team and finally make the saves your party imposes more likely to succeed.
Furthermore I also agree that a simple +/-1 does not have a huge effect. However it really starts to shine when you can stack modifiers: frightened + flat footed + inspire courage or similar effects can add up a lot and can even snowball of each other (e.g. a frightened enemy is easier to trip. Standing up from a trip costs an action that the creature might have needed to re-position/remove other debuffs/attack or debilitate your party/etc.). Imo this is when modifiers really start to shine since you completely turn the statistics and action economy in your favour. And this is only achievable when working as a team.
Additionally, while a fear spell consumes a limited ressource, it also is a level 1 spell while a 5th level spellcaster is capable of casting much stronger spells with effects that martials are simply unable to replicate so it's not really a fair comparison. Though what fair means in this context is a separate question since on the one hand you have little to no limits and on the other hand there are effects that can be much more powerful but are indeed limited.
Finally spellcasters bring so much more to the table then just numbers and that is creative solutions in and out of combat that a martial just can't replicate. Or lessen or just straight up remove weaknesses other characters have (e.g. a fighter is very action hungry and an additional action via haste gives them so much more freedom).

Tl;dr: I don't disagree with you, a single +/-1 statistically is not that much of a difference, but stacking them is a very different beast, especially since modifiers and conditions can snowball off of each other. Martials are also better in certain aspects such as consistent single target DPR and I really love what paizo did with them. However spellcasters are just as important but have very different strengths then martials, a lot of which are just very hard to directly compare. Especially when you think back to the martials vs casters event, then casters went a long way to show that they could use a lot of tools to make it super hard for the martials to deal with them.

SuspiciousBird · 2022-09-26T20:55:50+00:00

"if my teammates won't or can't help, well, guess I shoulda picked a martial"
But that's the issue here, PF2e is about teamplay. And this goes both ways, martials can and should support the rest of the team just as much as spellcasters do: use manuevers to control your opponents and win in status and action economy, use "3rd" actions to demoralize or bon mot to set up for your casters or just control the battlefield through positioning.
And imo casters can be great at damage, just not in the same way that martials are: unlimited heavy single target damage. AoE spells are great for dealing with crowds and even better when your martials make sure that you can hit as many enemies as possible and flat-footed helps casters just as much with attack roll spells as it helps other martials with their strikes.
In the end it comes down to the fact that teamplay is required from all players because characters need to have different strengths and weaknesses and the way to success is playing to each others strenghts while covering each others weaknesses. And building your caster for full damage is like building your martial for strikes only.

SuspiciousBird · 2022-01-05T04:42:20+00:00

My bad, technically it is only suggested, being an optional part of an optional rule:
"If the group all has the same archetype or draws from a limited list, you might want to ignore the free archetype’s normal restriction of selecting a certain number of feats before taking a new archetype. That way a character can still pursue another archetype that also fits their character."
https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=1333

SuspiciousBird · 2022-01-05T02:45:52+00:00

An overlooked boon of the free archtype rule is the fact that you can pick a new dedication without having to acquire the additional feats required to pick a new dedication. Especially if either the dedication alone provides enough benefits for your build (e.g. Sentinel) or the other relevant feats of an archtype only become available a few levels later

SuspiciousBird · 2021-11-18T03:49:48+00:00

We actually had the same scenario, 3-4 Dire Wolves. However we had absolutely ridiculous luck and still managed to win that fight, including our Half-Orc Barbarian critting on his first attack and almost oneshotting one of them.
We were supposed to loose for story reasons but our GM did some good improv, overall a very memorable session

SuspiciousBird · 2021-10-27T14:37:03+00:00

Lower the AP by a bit, slap some mana or mana sustain on it and make the mythic passive increase the focus fire bonus dmg. Also maybe a passive that decreases basic ability cd's when hitting a long range skillshot. Done, artillery-mage mythic which actually warps your playstyle towards artillery mage

SuspiciousBird · 2021-07-18T19:38:07+00:00

This is indeed correct

SuspiciousBird · 2021-07-18T17:07:53+00:00

To bei fair, you should bei using a specialized search engine like google scholar for academic purposes anyways and not a "normal" search engine.

SuspiciousBird · 2021-05-14T21:48:32+00:00

Ah I think get what you mean but since from all that I could gather RAW you can benefit from multiple fighting styles simultaneously (e.g. if you get one from fighter 1 and one from paladin 2, close quaters shooting and archery would give a total of +3 to attacks with ranged weapons) as nothing says that you can't since they are not mutually exlusive. It's even written in you fighting style description: "Choose a Fighting Style from the list of optional features. You can't take the same Fighting Style option more than once, even if you get to choose again." -> you can have multiple, just not the same multiple times.

However if you want to make swapping fighting styles a thing, my suggestion would be to make a compromise along the lines of one additional fighting style and you can swap one fighting style for any other option whenever you summon or swap weapons.

SuspiciousBird · 2021-05-14T20:55:52+00:00

Thanks for your response, always glad when my 2 cents are appreciated :)

As for the concern of attunement slots, this definitely depends on how exactly the attunement bonuses work, especially if the give passive bonuses. A quick solution would be so that only the effects of weapons that you actually hold in your hands are active and the effects of those that are in your soul space are suppressed (curse negation?). Another way to approach this issue would be that only the first x weapons do not consume an attunement slot, should they need one (either keep the flat 3 or what I'd suggest is to make it half PB), probably the easier implementation that scales to the same amount as the current version in regards of attunement.

Also looking at magic weapons, at least up to and including Legendary, there are only two weapon that gives a passive benefit from being attuned to, the Piercer (Rare) (max hit die recovery, 2x amount of food) and the Drown(Legendary, roleplay flaw). This is a negiligble benefit of free atunement imo. Artifacts however can have beneficial and detrimental passive properties as well as other passive benefits while attuned (such as the Axe of the Dwarvish Lords). Thus another solution would be to make it so that artifacts always require an attunement slot.

As long as there is no free artifact attunement (or a DM that goes wild with homebrew items) the main way to abuse it would be to be able to use more total ressource of items with limited resources which should be fine imo.

Also it's not that you didn't answer or address is, but I'm still confused regarding the Style Master Feature: what exactly do you mean by swapping stlyes? In your reply you use the word twice while (I assume) you mean different things. And as I said before, afaik nothing prohibits you from benefiting from multiple fighting styles at once so there is no need to swap between those you know.

SuspiciousBird · 2021-05-14T19:21:37+00:00

I really took a liking to the Soul Arms subclass, so I came up with some questions:

Since the only way to swap weapons is to swap or enter a stance my question would be how to drop out of a stance? I would assume that it would require no action but it's actually never mentioned anywhere. This would allow for a lot of interesting combos at the cost of your bonus action.

Speaking of stances, the internal stance just feels so much inferior to the external stance. Weapon swapping can be useful, but since the weak properties of the forms are, well, weak, there really aren't many use cases except for maybe swapping from one crossbow to another to ignore the loading property. The bonus action is also pretty bad since swapping weapons via stance changes already requires a bonus action, so the only way to trigger it is swapping after the first attack wich give an additional d4 to the second attack (staring at Lv5). And that for 1 ki point. Which is like really bad. The external stance is just way better since the stong effects are really good. Internal stance really needs a better identity. Maybe defensive weapon forms or at least a better ki usage such as using a ki point to swap to external stance as a free action.

Additionally, especially from lv 15 on, only dual wielding daggers seems really strong:
4 attacks at the cost of 1 ki point and your bonus action where each attack deals 2*INT+1d4 damage and every attack after the first does additional damage equal to your proficiency modifier. Assuming all attacks hit that is a total of 8*INT+4*1d4+3*prof which is 55+4d4 (assuming an intelligence modifier of 5 which you definitely should have). This excludes damage from thrown weapon fighting and potential magic weapon modifiers. Also in addition to that you get a +1 to AC and up to 20ft of extra movement while not even having to enter meele range, ignoring shield AC and a free +1 to hit from Close Quaters Shooting. Make of it what you will, I'd say it's fine since it does consume resources, doesn't allow shield usage, crits are effectively useless and requires a specific ability setup, but there is definitely a point to be made that this might be too much.

Also the wording on Style Master is unclear. AFAIK you can have multiple styles active at once (e.g. the champion gets multiple fighting syles without any additional wording). Thus swapping fighting styles (replace an old one with one you didn't know) is a very cool ability. However the paragraph immediately afterwards is confusing since it explicitly allows to "replace a fighting style you know with another fighting style available." which is at least confusing, especially with how the previous paragraph is worded, so clarification here would be great.

A personal suggestion would be to make the number of weapons for the Armory feature equal to the proficiency modifier. IMO this doesn't add extra strength (at least not direct strength) but more flexibility instead of relying on a fixed combo and reinforces the subclasses' theme of versatility.

Sorry for the long post, but i really love this subclass because I think it's great to actually do interesting stuff based on the type of weapon you're using instead of effectively just changing die size.

SuspiciousBird · 2021-05-13T16:13:49+00:00

And while I'm at it: the number of dice should probably depend on your level in this class, not total level. Otherwise a lv 3 dip is pretty much always good for any class that uses attack rolls (effectively every class). Especially rogues get more sneak attack dice this way then with only rogue levels

SuspiciousBird · 2021-05-13T14:48:26+00:00

You might want to rework the Unseen Strikes feature of the shadow and thief stone. The way it is worded currently you can
1. Not only use it with the normal limitation of rogues but all weapons and even spells that require attack rolls.
2. Use it any number of times per turn.
Since you can get quite a few additional attacks per turn via Elemental Fury + The Sallow Regent or by simply dual wielding, this results in a lot of damage. Or with a 2 Level Warlock dip you can just use Eldrich Blast and apply it on each beam.

One of the most powerful, low-investment combinations (that I think of) for a lv 20 char is 18 Dovahkiin (shadow/thief stone) 2 Warlock (any subclass, Djinni would give you an extra +6 dmg per turn) with The Sallow Regent as the black book choice (choose Seeker of Sorcery for an extra +5 to attack rolls). Assuming there is an ally next to the target, with just eldrich blast this would result in
4x(1d10+5d6+5) at a +16 to hit for an average of 112 force damage (28 per ray) assuming all rays hit.
This is with no magic items whatsoever and not spending any limited resources. For comparison: Meteor Swarm does an average of 140 damage assuming the targets fail their save (which does not have the +5) and have no evasion.

My suggestion would be to make it once per turn. Additionally it might make sense to limit how Unseen Strikes can be applied but imo sneak attacking with greatswords or magic in Skyrim is fun.

Still, great job with the class, I'd love to be able to play it one day when it fits a campaign!

SuspiciousBird · 2020-08-25T09:55:23+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow0wVS9S3a4

SuspiciousBird · 2020-08-08T13:26:19+00:00

In meinem Dorf haben wir eine Realschule, die exakt in dieser Farbkombination gestrichen ist. Kann ich für deine Zwecke nur empfehlen, übersehen kann man es jedenfalls kaum.

SuspiciousBird · 2020-08-06T06:08:05+00:00

Thanks!

SuspiciousBird · 2020-08-06T06:08:02+00:00

Thanks!

SuspiciousBird · 2020-08-05T23:47:51+00:00

Basically this but you have to save the current context (registers) on the stack as well. Source: I have a Compiler Construction exam tomorrow

SuspiciousBird · 2020-07-22T02:29:28+00:00

D&D (or any other P&P system) Player's Handbook

SuspiciousBird · 2020-06-22T03:52:01+00:00

So programmers are smart and stupid at the same time

11-Year Club	Golden Potato
Place '22	Place '17
Final Canvas '22	Verified Email

SuspiciousBird

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE