If you're going to write a post as if you're quoting bits of someone else's post, you should actually quote bits of their post. It's a pain to keep having to refer back to see what you're talking about because you don't give enough context.
"Your" and "You're" are still different, you end sentences with a single question mark, not two, and "I" takes a capital letter. If you can't even remember simple rules of English grammar, then I'm definitely going to suspect your ability to remember the huge number of arcane and complex rules required to create an Epic character. And if you don't want people correcting you, you shouldn't get simple things wrong in the first place.
Aren't there abilities in IH that grant reduction to being critically hit?? If not, there should be. And since you all have already created new epic feats and various tired abilities, if such does not exist, clearly you have no problem creating new stuff.
You haven't read the IH? How can you possibly comment on the impact of the sweeping rules changes you're proposing without having read the rules being used? Critical hit immunity is deliberately impossible to get without some other restriction (being an undead, elemental or ooze, or wearing heavy armour, all of which lock out other options). If it were easy to become resistant to critical hits, everyone would get it, and you may as well do away with the entire critical hit mechanic and just have an arbitrary damage multiplier ability. The randomness of critical hits is irrelevant when you're dealing with the threat ranges and number of attacks per round involved, so it just becomes extra damage that applies in some circumstances and not others.
The current situation, where many things are Crit immune but Moderate Eradication penetrates crit immunity 50% of the time is fine, it increases randomness, which is the point of the critical hit mechanic (which gets lost due to expanded threat ranges and überflurries), and it means crit immunity is worth something. Heavy Eradication is so expensive that its benefits are dubious at this level. I don't think anyone in this thread has it.
Also, it's "tiered".
It would be an easy "fix" to grant upper undead and constructs this, while lesser ones would not have em. Which, in this case basically means the PCs don't change at all, unless one summons lots of weaker undead or constructs. Problem solved.
"'em" has an apostrophe at the beginning. I assume you're talking about Unholy Toughness, because you didn't establish the context of this paragraph. Unholy Toughness is totally inappropriate for Constructs (It has 'Unholy' in its name, for one thing, and most Constructs have poor Charisma scores, so it wouldn't do anything, and more universal abilities which go off Charisma is exactly what the IH doesn't need.) And really your 'fix' is to remove most of what made Constructs and Undead unique, which isn't really desirable.
As for the races and monsters and whatever, only the ones that actually factor into this game need to be worried about. It's not like you need to go about re-doing the entirety of 3.5 races/monsters for this game, as the vast majority of them aren't being used at all.
Same for classes and spells.
Every monster factors into the game. Druids at this level can turn into anything that's not a Construct, Undead or Outsider. And in combat, one will probably use multiple Wild Shape uses per round. If you don't convert every monster, you're selling the Druid short. And if you only convert as needed, you end up with the very awkward situation of having to make up rules in the middle of combat, which inevitably becomes "the DM decides who wins based on what rules he makes up". Spells are the same. If a Sorcerer knows every spell, either you convert every spell or you don't let him use his best ability. And if you convert on the fly, bad things happen.
To be honest, the only real thing I want from Pathfinder is the classes/PrCs and archetypes. Everything else, feats, spells, etc can stay the same as far as I'm concerned.
And honestly, I am not saying only the PF classes should be used, but use those classes in conjunction with the rest of the 3.5 ones. Oh and regarding conversions, many have already been done, thanks to the lovely fans over at Paizo.
...and its Favoured Class rules, right? Since PrCs in Pathfinder don't get Favoured Class benefits, they're going to be buffed up in order to compensate.
Anyway, so you're 'only' interested in the most problematic change Pathfinder made, which was to power up classes across the board (even without the other changes Pathfinder made, every base class is pretty much strictly better than its 3.5 equivalent). This affects more than just the classes themselves, because races with many racial HD, high-LA templates and Divinity now look worse in comparison, which means rebuilds for everyone, since every character in this thread has at least one of those three, and in some cases, all three. And even if conversions for all the classes in this thread (and all the templates and races) were already there, you're still saying to everyone 'Rebuild all of your characters because I say so.' I think Anaesthesia's character sheet is twenty-five pages long. While that's probably the longest, due to being an all-class-level build with four base classes, in general, rebuilding a character takes hours, minimum. You can't just sub out one class for the updated one, as you have to consider how to best use their new abilities, whether you want to invest in them, whether you need other things you've got (which may have been taken to patch holes in the build which no longer exist) and so on and so forth. This is work you are telling us to do.
Belzamus said:
About critical hits:
In all honesty, we should probably be using the rules U_K has up on his website. I feel like they would be a lot more interesting and fun to play with, rather than dealing with such a stark contrast the way immunity currently works.
That said, I never got around to testing them in any of my games, but I don't think they'd be hard to implement, if I remember correctly.
Those rules have issues. The first being that 19-20 weapons end up actually doing more critical damage than 18-20 weapons, even if base damage were the same in both cases, when usually 19-20 weapons have a larger damage dice. It doesn't fix the minor issue in 3.5 that threat range is usually better than multipliers, but instead makes it worse. Suggesting that Improved Critical should stack with Keen, and similar is of dubious sanity, as it means everyone will have the Divine versions of both abilities, and end up deriving about 80% of their damage from criticals.
As for the multiplier reduction replacing crit immunity, it seems to be based on the assumption that weapon enhancements should stack with feats for criticals. Without it the listed values end up being effective crit immunity anyway. Whether or not Eradication should still exist is also an issue. And in general, stark contrasts are more interesting than universal numerical modifiers. If crit immunity becomes 'slight crit damage reduction' at high levels, there's little incentive to not stick all your eggs in one basket.
Also: U_K seems to have given incorporeal creatures the best kind of crit immunity, even though in 3.5 they don't have any kind of crit immunity, purely on the basis that 'ectoplasm' sounds a bit like 'plasma', even though there are many incorporeal creatures that have nothing to do with ectoplasm, and that actually, the 'plasm' suffix has nothing to do with the physical concept of plasma or incandescence.
I don't like that he makes no distinction between creatures which have internal components and a fluid-based metabolism and those which doesn't, even though he clearly could (since there's no reason to not have a -1 section between no immunity and -2). Part of the reason why critical hits work is that if you stab someone in the wrong place, they'll be dead of blood loss in seconds. While there are bits of an Inevitable that will take more damage from being stabbed than others, non-fluid systems can't suffer any analogue to horrible blood loss.
The penalties to sneak attack seem to be a bit of a slap on the wrist. Having die size reductions rather than dice pool reductions makes more sense, since that scales with level, rather than becoming increasingly irrelevant.
It's a nice idea, but in its current state it doesn't really solve more problems than it creates. If one wants to retain the difference between creatures we currently see, perhaps certain creatures should reduce threat range instead of multiplier, based on some distinction between physical construction, so there's still a difference between creatures.
