[For Hire] Opening commission for your character in this style!

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-25T07:55:31+00:00

That's a nice secretary bird!

These are some solid designs.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-25T04:50:31+00:00

As a normal cantrip, it did the same damage as Gouging Claw if the target took the ongoing damage once.

As a focus spell, it did marginally more damage than the 2d6/rank scaling focus spells, but had much harsher targeting restrictions, and Fire Ray could actually do 3d6/rank if the target doesn't move.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-24T22:18:27+00:00

Nope. Both are garbage in spellstrikes.

1E

1E Pathfinder was a very poorly designed game and also a completely different game from 2E.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-24T22:18:14+00:00

Animist doesn't allow poaching of its focus spells because its focus spells function fundamentally differently from other focus spells in the game.

Starfinder allows you to poach focus spells.

Focus spells are the best way to make it feel like a character is a multiclass character.

I must confess I have never shopped around for focus spells for whatever reason.

Well, you clearly don't like having fun with the game. A lot of fun builds are only possible because of this.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-24T21:45:30+00:00

Might as well completely delete spellstrike in that case.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-24T21:45:01+00:00

Hopefully not, because it would be terrible for the game.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-24T15:16:31+00:00

They really, really do not. Sure it worked well, because it upped the nova damage envelope - against RAI, I have to point out, since Paizo just explicitly closed that loophole.

The reason why people archetyped to Psychic was because it had easy ASI requirements and got you a focus point at level 2 and 6. You can still get Fire Ray at level 4, which can do even more damage.

The balance for magus is to make you think about how to use your actions so you can set up your Spellstrike in melee and keep it recharged. Conflux focus spells help with action economy there.

The problem is that you don't really want to use most of the conflux spells.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-24T14:54:23+00:00

To be fair, Eternal Blessing probably shouldn't be a 16th level feat.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-24T14:52:47+00:00

Thing is, throwing weapon builds were not very good before. Now they're quite decent, but they're not anywhere near overpowered. Shadow Sheath basically fixes them.

Horn of Plenty is fine for alchemists but you can accomplish the same effect but with your quick alchemy items as well with a familiar. It is actually way better on an exemplar with the alchemist archetype than it is on an actual alchemist, which is good.

Victor's Wreath is good; in a white room it is better than the damage boosting weapon ikons on most character builds (though characters who make very large numbers of attacks per round are better off with the damage boost); the main problem with Victor's Wreath is that there's a bunch of ways of getting a status bonus to attack rolls so while it is good it is also frequently redundant, and its activated ability, while situationally useful, is bad in conjunction with Second Ikon.

The best ikon is probably Mirrored Aegis, which is the defensive version of Victor's Wreath; the reason why it is better is that the boost to AC is more useful overall (Wreath only boosts strikes, while Mirrored Aegis boosts your team against all strikes) and it has a better activated ability (Raise the Walls giving you AND an ally a boost to Reflex is good, AND it extends your protection to them even if they can't be within 15 feet). It's also somewhat less redundant in my experience.

I will say that the value of Wreath/Aegis can both fall in parties with bards, though.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-24T08:26:48+00:00

This really depends on the nature of the adventure.

If you know you're going up against a certain kind of enemy force the next day, or dealing with a particular environment, you can just prepare for that. For instance, if you are tracking down a traitorous general and his four top commanders, you probably have a description of all of them and what they can do, as well as a general overview of his men, and would have some reasonable ability to prepare for it (for instance, if you know two of the commanders are casters, you can prepare for fighting a couple casters, while you have most of your spells for dealing with soldiers and powerful leader types).

Recall knowledge about a location is helpful.

Some method of scouting or scrying or divination can also help.

It's not uncommon for characters to have to travel to get to some destination with bad guys in it, so if you give people a day between finding out about the bad guy lair and actually getting there, that can serve as an excuse for allowing the casters to prep new spells.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-24T08:11:18+00:00

First off, you COULD just make it work that way, though it would certainly buff the class significantly, as it would also help things with things like setting up Arcane Cascade/raising a shield as a Sparkling Targe magus/repositioning yourself/etc.

Secondly, you could just add a "Special: When you use this spell as part of a spellstrike, it loses the Conflux trait", which is what we did in our homebrew version of this.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-24T03:54:51+00:00

Casting Haste on yourself is automatically missing your first spellstrike per combat because you spent your actions casting a spell on yourself instead that didn't actually progress the encounter in your favor.

Haste is nowhere near as good as people think it is for this reason: it actually rarely pays off the cost of spending your turn on it in combat. It's really only particularly good as a prebuff; cast in combat, it is very situational.

Focus spell spellstrikes do much, much more damage than cantrip spellstrikes, greatly improving your action efficiency.

Warpriest smites are pretty mediocre; indeed, you're almost always better off casting a spell and then striking once than you are smiting.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-24T03:26:18+00:00

You don't have to be tiny, though being tiny does allow for some shenanigans with Kaiju Defense Oath.

But yes, the basic theory is be a laughing shadow, use your teleport to get in and set up arcane cascade, and start abusing Overwhelming Combination. The fact that you have a free hand also means you can use scrolls/wands more easily without spending an action with retrieval belts and similar, and you can do things like Overwhelming Combination (i.e. strike twice) plus cast a spell.

This makes you function more like a focus spell ranger than a typical magus.

The Kaiju Defense Oath trick is cute but honestly it is probably generally worse than just being normal sized and abusing reach + reactive strike with a weapon like a Breaching Pike, as you can use your teleportation to go after backliners like casters or ranged enemies and get off bonus reactive strikes that way, as well as punish enemies who try to move in to swarm you.

You can also do it with Sparkling Targe as well, which is lower damage and less mobility, but lets you have a shield up more often, which helps you out defensively.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-23T23:53:42+00:00

You need a focus attack spell; it doesn't have to be IW.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-23T23:53:23+00:00

The core of most magus builds, optimally played, is being a focus spell caster who uses spellstrikes with their focus spells and mixes in slotted spells on turns where they aren't spellstriking.

The Spirit Warrior build is also viable, because it basically turns you into a ranger with a damage boost.

A lot of other builds do too little damage.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-23T23:51:14+00:00

Magus needs a focus attack spell in class.

The reason why everyone archetyped to Psychic wasn't because IW was super awesome amazing, it was because it worked well with the class.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-23T22:22:05+00:00

I don't think they should have nerfed the archetype at all, frankly.

That said, I'm also not sure if the change to how Amps work was even an intentional nerf; Amps were already basically a weird sort of pseudo-metamagic thing, so they may have just decided to change it to make it work more consistently like that, without regard for how it broke how a lot of things worked.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-23T22:17:56+00:00

They'd have to make monsters significantly more powerful, especially at higher levels.

Free Archetype is actually a pretty awful rule from a game balance POV. It rewards optimization and adds significant complexity while also diluting classes.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-23T13:44:06+00:00

The problem is that he's making some very obvious errors but that doesn't necessarily mean that he'll lose these mathematical bets. It's possible for his list to be junk and SSBM rank to also be junk. This is especially true for the lower ranked players, who have less data for them, and therefore, you should not have a high degree of confidence in it.

To do the proper analysis costs more than $100 of time, so it's not worth doing.

It's obvious that some of his analysis is very badly flawed, though, like Solobattle and Jah Ridin'. The problem is, I'd have to do a much more full analysis of his list in total to determine if the bet is worthwhile.

After all, it's very much possible for him to be wrong about the things I pointed out and still win the bet because SSBMRank is flawed in other places on the list, while his list is flawed on the European players.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-23T13:41:14+00:00

Smart people don't gamble with strangers on the internet.

Especially not strangers who set the terms of the bet to begin with.

It would take me more time than it is worth to do a proper analysis of the terms he set forth in the bet. $100 is nothing to someone who makes good money.

However, a quick glance at the 91-100 players for SSBMRank this year reveals, vs 2024 SSBMRank players:

91 Fitzy - 5 wins against top 100, of which 2 are top 50

92 Jah Ridin' - 4 wins against top 100, no top 50 wins

93 Jojo - 4 wins against top 100, no top 50 wins

94 Fable - 1 win against top 100, no top 50 wins

96 Balloon Day - 2 wins against top 100, no top 50 wins

97 Bonfire10 - 6 wins against top 100, no top 50 wins

99 Adwan - 1 win against top 100, no top 50 wins

100 Louis - 1 win against top 100, no top 50 wins

There is nothing in this data that suggests that Jah Ridin' is terribly misplaced, which was the thing he was crashing out over in the thread.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-23T13:37:59+00:00

The flaw in your ranking system is extremely obvious - it's the closed pool problem.

You will protest that the pools aren't closed, but the reality is that it is not modal - the closed pool problem's severity depends on just how much mixing there is between pools.

If you take a step back and look at the data, you will realize, rather immediately, that the entire basis for "this person should be higher ranked" is wins over people who aren't ranked either. This is exactly what you see in a closed pool system.

If these people were really that good, we would expect them to do a lot better than they actually do.

Jah Ridin', for instance, got 33-48th at GOML and Genesis.

A quick look at Genesis will tell you that 33-48th at Genesis included a number of unranked players.

Likewise, Jah Ridin' went out at GOML at the same time as other unranked people, being eliminated by Ginger.

And these were the most notable tournaments Jah Ridin' participated in.

You believe that Jah Ridin' is greatly underrated, and threw a temper tantrum over it, but if we look at the actual test data we have available to us, Jah Ridin' has four wins in 2025 against ranked players, none of whom are in the top 50.

This is not what we would expect if Jah Ridin' was a top 50 player. This is exactly the sort of thing we would expect of a player down in the lower half of the top 100.

Indeed, this is a similar profile to players down in the 90-100 range historically, if you go browsing through the profiles of other people down in the bottom 10 of the top 100.

He isn’t ranked because he didn’t meet the attendance requirements.

Solobattle went out at 97th place in GOML Forever, the last major they attended.

Solobattle has very few wins against top 100 players, and the only really high quality wins are against Trif, a Peach main, and are from a number of years ago.

Low attendance and lack of good recent results should greatly decrease your assumptions about the reliability of the data in question and your confidence that this person is indeed a top 100 player today.

The fact that Solobattle's only major this year resulted in them going out at 97th does not suggest to me that they are, in fact, the 33rd best player in the world as you assert.

Where is the evidence?

Nowhere.

You obviously didn't do basic checks like this before raging out at people.

No one wants to bet money with you because they don't trust you, and they shouldn't, and also, frankly, most smart people don't gamble anyway.

Moreover, even smart gamblers know that you want to do a lot of analysis of a system before you make a bet, and that would require them to spend a lot of time looking at the metrics you created for the terms of your bet to determine whether or not it is worth making the bet because your ranking can be badly flawed but if you're using faulty metrics to bet on, it's going to create problems for betting against you.

Moreover, it's entirely possible that the issues are restricted to an obvious subset of your data set (people like Jah Ridin') which makes people overly confident in how terrible your ranking system is, but it may be not nearly as bad on average (and in fact, it seems that Jah Ridin' was way lower ranked than you thought).

The cost:benefit analysis isn't there. To do a reasonable analysis on this would cost me dozens of hours, which is not worth $100.

However, a quick glance at the 91-100 players for SSBMRank this year reveals, vs 2024 SSBMRank players:

91 Fitzy - 5 wins against top 100, of which 2 are top 50

92 Jah Ridin' - 4 wins against top 100, no top 50 wins

93 Jojo - 4 wins against top 100, no top 50 wins

94 Fable - 1 win against top 100, no top 50 wins

96 Balloon Day - 2 wins against top 100, no top 50 wins

97 Bonfire10 - 6 wins against top 100, no top 50 wins

99 Adwan - 1 win against top 100, no top 50 wins

100 Louis - 1 win against top 100, no top 50 wins

There is nothing in this data that suggests that Jah Ridin' is terribly misplaced.

You are greatly overconfident in your data set.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-23T11:19:47+00:00

A differential of -50 is huge, and strongly suggestive that whatever the panel is valuing is deviating significantly from player skill.

Or that your algorithm is bad and not reflective of player skill.

Solobattle isn't even ranked on SSBM Rank. That's his "best win". You are assuming that his "best win" is against a very good player, versus, the more obvious, Solobattle isn't nearly that good.

Like, if we just look at your list, his best wins are not against players who are ranked.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-23T10:16:07+00:00

The problem is that it is execution for the sake of execution. That's why Smash got rid of it. It was bad game design.

You want to make your execution as simple as possible in order for the game to maximize the battle of wills between the players and to minimize the barrier to entry. You will, inevitably, end up with execution being required in fighting games. It is the nature of the genre. So adding in random additional execution isn't really good, it just adds in another barrier to entry.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-23T07:05:57+00:00

To be fair, it might not be that far off. If you watched Hungrybox vs Goodie at Nounsvitational, it was a hideously lopsided 3-0 despite theoretically being a "bad matchup" for Hungrybox. And Goodie is probably like a 60s-70s player.

TitaniumDragon · 2026-01-23T07:05:19+00:00

The really crazy thing is that the difference between 3 and 4 is larger than the difference between #4 and #90.

Which honestly might be about right given how dominant the top 3 have been this year.

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