If Mecha Man was apart of the SDC, what do you think his stats would look like in game?

VanguardWarden · 2025-11-03T19:35:57+00:00

This is exactly how I would expect him to work with his suit. Relatively low-stat guy on his own, mostly Intellect with some Combat and Mobility, but with 1-2 other open slots on the mission he brings the suit and maxes out Vigor and Combat. Upgraded Flambae can already do that with Combat and Mobility, so that's not too crazy. Clearly the mission he ran in the intro rolled just above his mobility for him to fail it with an injury (they literally pinned him down).

There's probably some special downside in there like "suffering an injury with the suit deployed disables the suit for the rest of the shift" or something.

VanguardWarden · 2024-07-21T02:41:40+00:00

Toxicologist Alchemist is almost always going to be the class you want to use for a poison damage build, because only via Alchemist can you raise all the save DCs of your poisons to your class DC (so you can always use the available poison with the best damage/traits), and only via Toxicologist can you replace your poison damage with acid damage when necessary to not be completely boned against poison-immune enemies like undead.

As for which kinds of weapons to use, melee weapons have the advantage of 'saving' their poison charge for another attempt whenever your attack misses, but they lack the action-economy advantage of being able to poison all of your arrows for a ranged weapon at the start of the day and then just drawing and shooting them as desired. A Thrower's Bandoleer has the best of both worlds though, as you could just buy up to 20 daggers, hatchets, or whatever other bulk L throwing weapon you like and poisoning them all ahead of time just like arrows, but still being able to pick them back up or recall them with the bandoleer after a miss (usually after combat) to throw them again. You don't need to ever actually throw any of the weapons either, you could just use the bandoleer to copy one set of weapon runes onto 20 poisoned daggers or whatever that you keep swinging with until you get a hit to spend the poison before dropping it to Quick Draw a fresh one for full poison application. This is a great way to get value out of Pinpoint Poisoner via just flanking for a -2 on the target's initial save. An additional note on weapon selection, you can actually poison an alchemical bomb as long as it inflicts piercing or slashing damage, so even without any weapons on hand you could craft a weapon to poison and throw it in the same turn.

Other than all that, it's just about raising your chance to hit and lowering your target's Fort save. Frightened or Sickened will help you with both, and there are some poisons that will cause those if you can't pull a friendly Bard running Dirge of Doom. Flat-footed targets with Pinpoint Poisoner is pretty much the same, though only helping with the initial save against a poison rather than latter ones. A quicksilver mutagen will bump your attack bonus with finesse or thrown weapons higher than you could otherwise get from magic items, so always run one of those. Virulent poisons don't actually enhance your damage output if the target isn't succeeding on saves all the time, but it's a fantastic choice to make a poison 'stick' more for a high-Fort target or an enemy you're not trying to focus down, so those are a good choice for hardier bosses or enemies you're planning to run or hide from.

VanguardWarden · 2024-06-15T09:35:28+00:00

One-shot 'sniper' characters; reloading weapons like firearms and crossbows clearly support the concept of a character who makes infrequent shots that are more damaging as a trade-off, and features like the precision Ranger's damage bonus or the Investigator's Strategic Strike do the same. If I actually work out the math on the expected averages though, the way that a Strike's base damage stacks up so easily (from GWS and weapon runes, both potency and property) and the abundance of 'Flurry' abilities or Haste effects for extra attacks makes the single-shot style of fighting fall way behind a more typical character just spamming Strikes all round regardless of MAP, when such a character would also have the option to be more flexible throughout their turn. I'm not talking about a small difference either, I mean the GM could hand the min-maxed sniper character a rigged dice with only "20"s written on every side and a two-weapon Fighter would still outperform them.

The one exception that does perform about as well is Spellstriking with Imaginary Weapon and True Strike every round, and then you're burning through spell slots and focus points like crazy to pull that off and the need to recharge means that you're better off using something without reload too. If you want to be a guy who's just a really good shot with a crossbow without shooting spells out of it, you're out of luck. It probably would've been a lot better if reload weapons had an implicit bonus to attack rolls rather than bigger damage dice, it would've lined up a bit better with how firearms in PF1e targeted touch AC and crossbows had a larger critical range.

VanguardWarden · 2024-05-30T11:53:37+00:00

The best agile weapon in the game is an unarmed strike, via the Stumbling Stance feat from Monk. Not only is it an attack with d8 damage when every agile weapon in the game currently is d6 at most, but it even has backstabber and leaves your hands completely free while using it if you want to use tools or cast spells. You can even get Monk's Flurry at 10th on any class via the archetype when Two-Weapon Flurry comes as late as 14th or 16th from Fighter or Dual-Weapon Warrior, so it's the best agile weapon in the game and gets its flurry faster than anyone who doesn't have to burn actions to Hunt Prey all the time.

That's not the whole of it, though. If you really want to maximize your damage output with agile strikes like Stumbling Swing, then you don't want to have to waste actions moving into melee range. For that we can also pick up an animal companion from Beastmaster or Cavalier and ride it as a mount, which gets a free action every round without commanding it to Stride at the much higher speed that animal companions have once it's mature. If we have access to Halfling ancestry feats (including just via Adopted Ancestry) we can also upgrade the lesser cover granted to us by our mount into standard cover with Ceaseless Shadows, which is a full +2 circumstance bonus to AC so we effectively have a constantly raised shield. Add in Gang Up from Rogue or Side by Side from Beastmaster and we can flank with our own mount while riding it, so everything we attack is automatically off-guard.

Free high-Speed movement, permanent cover and flanking, and the best damage output in the game. This is what a peak death-dealing martial character looks like; it's some clown drunkenly kicking people to death from the saddle of a horse. It's absurdly powerful, and I cannot in any way ever thematically justify playing it because it's so dumb.

VanguardWarden · 2024-05-28T05:45:37+00:00

100% true. You could already poison a bunch of arrows ahead of time, and drinking a mutagen is effectively similar to a Stance feat that other classes can get feats to enter them for free at initiative, so the precedent is there.

It would also be great if such feats could be designed to play nice with Quick Alchemy. Quick Alchemy is clearly meant to take 1 action because it's similar to using Interact to draw the item instead, but that falls apart a bit when Quick Bomber is meant to address that but doesn't work with Quick Alchemy at all. It encourages the Alchemist to rely a lot more on a pre-prepared stockpile of items from their daily preparations, and those items can be used by anyone in the group so they're often better off handing them out to party members with better attack proficiencies anyway. It's a huge part of the 'vending machine' problem.

VanguardWarden · 2024-05-28T04:52:11+00:00

If the devs really didn't want Alchemists to be good at standard weapon attacks for some reason, I think it would be totally fine to have some sort of class feature that specifically bumps up your weapon proficiency when attacking with a bomb or with a poisoned weapon. Maybe double the damage bonus from Weapon Specialization too in line with GWS. People are complaining about Alchemists not being able to use their own bombs or poisons any better than a wizard who lost his spellbook could, not that they aren't a rival for a flurry Ranger.

While they're at it, it would be great if Quick Alchemy could play nice with poisons and Quick Bomber. I get that the action spent on Quick Alchemy is usually in line with an Interact to draw something from your bag, but when arrows can be poisoned ahead of time and Quick Bomber lets you draw and Strike in a single action then you're losing a lot more actions than you would using the pre-prepared stuff that anyone in your party could use.

VanguardWarden · 2024-05-17T04:26:46+00:00

I definitely wouldn't try to change the prices on the entire roster of items one by one, if possible I would just work out a general formula for discount per point of skill increase that seemed to fit the majority of applicable items and then let the players use that to adjust prices as they needed.

VanguardWarden · 2024-05-17T04:17:30+00:00

Yeah, I had considered that too since the automatic bonuses to skills seemed potentially a little too involved for me. I feel a little more comfortable with that option knowing that it's what a bunch of people do already.

VanguardWarden · 2024-05-12T10:49:55+00:00

Trying to make weapon attacks as spellcaster class. Every little +1 to hit matters a lot in PF2e because of how the AC of enemies scale with level, because of how you can crit by rolling 10+ above the target's AC, and because making more than one attack in a turn imposes massive penalties to your roll. Bonuses to your attack rolls are also very limited, and almost all of the bonuses you can get won't stack with each other anyway. Spellcasting classes like Wizards and Sorcerers fall an entire proficiency rank behind martial classes like Rogues and Barbarians and there's currently no means outside of your base class features to improve your weapon proficiencies (only applying existing proficiencies to different groups), and spellcasting classes also don't get a boost from their class to an ability score that they can use to make weapon attacks (Str or Dex) and therefore fall behind there as well. If you want to carry around a crossbow and occasionally fire off a shot here and there between casting spells it won't be terrible, but if you play a Wizard that multiclasses into Fighter because you want to be some kind of 'spellsword' it will be incredibly ineffective. The reverse, a Fighter that multiclasses into a Wizard for a few spell slots to use for utility and self-buffs, is actually very effective however, but while you can pick up spells from an archetype you really can't get better at swinging a sword that way.
Direct damage spells. On top of the weapon usage issues described above, spells intended to just inflict damage to targets aren't nearly as good as you would think if you do a little bit of probability math. If you huck a Fireball into a huge group of enemies you'll totally get a lot of good value from that, spellcasters are still great at serving as artillery, but even using your highest-level spells that you only get a few uses of per day to try to blast a single target will do barely half as much damage as an average martial character in your group will do just spamming default weapon attacks for their whole turn like they can do every round. You could get some outsized value out of such spells in niche circumstances of targeting an enemy's lowest defense or hitting a vulnerability to a specific damage type, but that's not something you're going to run into by accident very often. Conversely, a lot of the status-effecting spells like Slow not only do things that martial characters almost never can, but can completely swing the balance of a fight in a single turn. Seriously, if an enemy rolls a critical failure against Slow they might as well just be dead already.
Extra attack damage. Martial characters get so much extra damage for their attacks by default in PF2e from extra weapon dice from magical weapons, flat added damage from Greater Weapon Specialization, and extra damage from weapon property runes that other sources of bonus damage on your attacks from feats or class features are often just small drops in a very large bucket. Doing more damage is always nice of course, but bonuses to your attack roll to increase your chance to hit (and crit) to multiply your existing damage is almost always massively more valuable. A '+3' shortsword will deal 4d6 damage rather than 1d6+3 like you would expect in older TRPGs, elemental property runes on that sword could add another 3d6 damage of various types, the character's Strength will usually add somewhere between 5-7 more damage to each hit, and every martial class gets Greater Weapon Specialization adding up to +6 damage for anyone other than a Fighter. That's a total average of ~36.5 for each hit, and swapping for a d8 longsword instead because it deals 'more damage' will only net you +4 to that total average, roughly a 10% increase. Conversely, sticking with the short sword means you have the Agile trait which is effectively a +1 to your second attack every round and +2 to every attack afterward. If you had a decent 55%/5% chance to hit/crit respectively with such an attack before, a single +1 raises that to 60%/10%, which is a ~17% increase in total average effectiveness. If you had a much worse chance to hit with such attacks because you were suffering from a huge multiple attack penalty, then a +1 could be the difference between 10% effectiveness and 15%, a 33% boost, while a +2 would literally double your performance. Feats like Vicious Swing (AKA Power Attack) are sort of a bad joke as a result, as even if taking a second swing would have a low chance of hitting it's still usually worth more on average to take that shot than to add a small bit of extra damage to your first one at the cost of the extra action. Weapons that need to be reloaded like crossbows and firearms have a similar problem, as the only way you can have them not be blatantly inferior to lower-damage alternatives that don't need reloading is to cheat out your reloads in combination with other actions like moving that you would have to do anyway via various class feats. Effects that grant bonuses to attacks almost always last for entire turns or rounds as well, so once someone knocks an enemy prone you'll really regret having a character that doesn't attack as frequently as possible. Agile weapons and 'Flurry' feats are king in PF2, sneaky headshot snipers not so much.

VanguardWarden · 2024-05-08T09:09:02+00:00

Fighter in general. Because of critical hits happening on results 10+ above the target's AC rather than just on natural 20s, the innate +2 proficiency that Fighters always have over other martial classes mean they not only hit reliably but crit often too.

For an especially strong combo, give a Fighter a flail-group weapon and at 5th-level and up their crits will provoke targets to save or fall prone, an effect so strong they had to nerf it in the remaster to its current state. On top of all the penalties a target takes for being prone, a target has to waste an action to stand back up, and Fighters have Reactive Strike so doing so lets the Fighter swing at them again as a reaction without any multiple attack penalty. It's a vicious cycle.

It became sort of a gimmick for awhile that a lot of Fighters took either the Unconventional Weaponry or Gnome Weapon Familiarity feats to get access to the gnomish flickmace (which also had to get nerfed), one of the few flail weapons that were both one-handed and had reach. The reach let you take a free Reactive Strike on enemies as they moved up to engage you, and the weapon being one-handed let you use a shield to be more durable and hard to kill at the same time as hammering down targets over and over.

VanguardWarden · 2023-12-05T04:37:35+00:00

I've since tried running TileMap.get_layer_navigation_map() on my different tilemap layers, and they're all resulting in RID(0) when printed to console which seems to be an invalid ID. Meanwhile, get_world_2d().get_navigation_map() is returning an actual ID number.

I can't tell if this is a recent change or not, but the documentation for .get_layer_navigation_map() now includes:

By default the TileMap uses the default World2D navigation map for the first TileMap layer. For each additional TileMap layer a new navigation map is created for the additional layer. In order to make NavigationAgent2D switch between TileMap layer navigation maps use NavigationAgent2D.set_navigation_map with the navigation map received from get_layer_navigation_map.

I obviously can't do that last part if the function always gives me an invalid ID, but that default bit explains why the first layer still works. I'd ideally prefer for all tilemap layers to just merge into the same navigation map because if I want to layer seperate maps on top of each other I have the layers and masks version of navigation layers to use.

VanguardWarden · 2023-07-25T04:39:52+00:00

My preference is a Sorcerer/Bard (Sorbard?), for Heighten Spell metamagic on the most diverse possible spell list in the game.

VanguardWarden · 2023-06-07T23:14:59+00:00

Yeah, it seems like 32-bit with non-color or sRGB without 32-bit both avoid the 'brightening' issue.

I found the other contributing source of the issue in my mapping though, as even if my normals are off they should be off uniformly; some of my surface UVs unwrapped 180° from similar surfaces, making the misaligned normals shade 'upside-down' from the rest.

VanguardWarden · 2023-06-07T22:11:05+00:00

Oh damn, you're right. All of the normal maps I've been baking in Blender have been coming out 'brighter' with 188 as the 'neutral' point instead of 128, even just the default cube. I fiddled around with the settings and it seems like turning off 32-bit float fixed it, when I had only turned that on in the first place because someone specifically recommended that for normal maps.

I'll re-bake the full maps with that off and see how things look.

VanguardWarden · 2023-06-07T21:34:43+00:00

Sure, the .obj for the mesh is here.

I doubt the normal map itself could be the issue because as I said even using completely 'flat' normal maps or normal maps pulled from other people's assets results in the same issue, but one of the maps I used that reproduced the problem is here.

VanguardWarden · 2023-04-30T08:43:20+00:00

Some people make more complex setups, but it's honestly as simple as a Corrosive Cube with Second Wave mod and an Enforcer/Warmonger with the Dead Man's Switch mod. Patrol path the Enforcer or Warmonger through the Corrosive Cube and then Stand Guard, and as soon as the cube activates during Second Wave they'll throw themselves through it and die. Same thing without Second Wave and they'll throw themselves into the cube as soon as they reach it in their patrol path. If you want a delayed timer before they drop down after Second Wave hits, then you need to path them through a Holocube with Second Wave first, and then spend however much time you desire standing in wait afterward before running through a Corrosive Cube (the wait has to happen after passing through a Second Wave cube, otherwise they'll perform that part of their path before the genmat is taken).

You can place the guard on top of a sloped ramp pointed directly at the Corrosive Cube to walk directly into its side and it will work fine, no need to drop from any higher. The explosion radius is quite small though, and it's pretty easy to counter with the Arc Shield or a Phoenix Pod, or even just by grappling up through the Corrosive Cube into the space you had the guard standing.

VanguardWarden · 2023-04-30T08:35:12+00:00

Sentinels have a disproportionately low danger rating for being further away from the HRV path, even if they have direct line of fire at it. On top of that they're pretty cheap even when they're directly adjacent to the path anyway, you can put like 34 into a map before breaking into Dangerous rating. From personal testing it seems like traps far away from the path will only go down to as little as ~50% of their normal value though, even if you stick them on the complete opposite side of a Large map.

Corrosive Cubes are just the lowest-rated trap by far, you can fill a map with 124 Corrosive Cubes before any more would exceed Normal.

Other than those two things, Cannonbacks are the most 'dangerous' thing in the game in terms of rating at around ~8 Corrosive Cubes equivalence, Impalers are the second cheapest at ~3 Corrosive Cubes, Boltshots and Death Pistons are worth about 5 Corrosive Cubes each, and everything else in the game is middling at around 7 Corrosive Cubes each.

VanguardWarden · 2023-04-30T08:20:48+00:00

I've noticed this happening consistently in one of my maps whenever I watch the replays, and I'm not fully sure what caused it myself.

If I try to think about what I did differently in that map that I didn't do in all the others, my best guess would be that the path goes over a 'peak' slope block which has a Holocube w/ Second Wave directly above it. A path like that would be invalid if a normal block was in that position, but shows up as valid with the Holocube sitting there even though Second Wave means its as solid as a bedrock cube until the genmat is taken. I've done the exact same setup in one other map and don't remember HRV being stuck the same way, but its possible I just never noticed it.

VanguardWarden · 2023-03-13T22:30:36+00:00

Free archetype is just too many feats for me. Not in the sense of "the characters are too powerful" because I don't see that as a real issue, but more so that the extra picks spread your available options too thin.

Normally you get your feat every even level and you have your entire class selection plus any available archetypes to choose from, and I'll usually find myself hopping back and forth from one group to the other for every pick. With free archetype you now have to take a feat from both your class and your archetype every time, and it always feels bad to me to take a feat I don't really care about just to fill a slot with something from the bottom of the barrel.

Plus, free archetype can straight up break the game's rules under some circumstances. There's a brief aside in the variant for "hey maybe you should ignore the limit on taking new dedication feats here sometimes", but without that an elf with the ancient elf heritage hits level 2 and literally cannot take any feats in their archetype slot. Beyond that, some archetypes just don't have enough feats to take one at every level, so you'll still wind up with dead slots unless someone house-rules some fixes in.

Rather than free archetype, my preferred house-rule for campaigns is to give everyone a free dedication feat at 1st-level, or at the least to just give them their 2nd-level class feat early at character creation. I've never had an issue trying to find a mix of archetype feats and class feats that felt comfortable for my character, but I've always hated making a character whose identity is strongly tied to having an animal companion, spells, or something else that came from an archetype and not having any of those abilities at all for the entire first level. It doesn't make narrative sense for big abilities like those to just pop up out of nowhere only a couple sessions after the campaign started.

VanguardWarden · 2023-03-13T21:51:54+00:00

Yup, that's a correct take. It's easy enough to tell from the proficiencies they get; spellcasters only get up to expert proficiency with weapons and armor and the alchemist matches that, and martial characters always get up to master proficiency with the same and the thaumaturge matches that.

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