High-level overview of Pathfinder vs 3.5

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I thought the idea of Wizards in 3E was *not* to use too many direct attacks, instead focusing on battlefield control?

That's 4E speak, and still it ends up with a lot of damage powers...

 

[Grymar]

The easy fix for the monk, who get's high movement that he can't use with his signature ability (flurry), is to give him the Scout's Skirmish ability and to allow flurry to be used as a standard attack.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

The easy fix for the monk, who get's high movement that he can't use with his signature ability (flurry), is to give him the Scout's Skirmish ability and to allow flurry to be used as a standard attack.

That's a good approach to fix the contradiction of flurry of blows combined with fast movement. I think it's a good start.

Flurry of Misses still will stay this way. The problem off course being that everyone wants to play an unarmed Monk, but unarmed attack enhancements are expensive. I am still not convinced that the medium BAB can be compensated sufficiently with this, but it supposedly works for the Rogue...

 

[Nifft]

That's 4E speak, and still it ends up with a lot of damage powers...

Incorrect. "Battlefield control" has been in the 3e lexicon for years.

The usual advice is: color spray, grease and utility at 1st level, scorching ray and direct-damage from 3rd to 10th level, then segue into insta-kill. Always have a some battlefield control spells, and start paying a lot of attention to them around the time you get wall of force.

4e seems to allow decent battlefield control starting at 1st level, but it's always been a consideration for the Wizard worthy of his Int bonus.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Banshee16]

Hm. There's a thought. A fighter gets a silver weapon, he can hurt a devil. What if a fireball mage could get some sort of icy silver wand to transform his fireball into a cold ball? I mean, they do have energy substitution metamagic rods, but I was thinking of something that would affect all your spells. Maybe require it to be 'primed' by expending a spell slot of Xth level of the appropriate energy type.

Isn't there an Energy Substitution feat that does this?

Banshee

 

[Banshee16]

Which kind of leads to a another issue: mutliclassing. I hope everyone involved manages to sort out a system for multiclassing caster with non-caster classes, so that people are generally satisfied with the results. This is a huge area of concern, for many folks.

I think a "simple" fix to this would be to use the ideas that the Fantasy Flight Games team came up with for Midnight. Basically, your caster level is the same as your character level.

So, if you are a fighter 10/wizard 10, for instance, you can only cast up to lvl 5 spells....but you cast them as a lvl 20 wizard. It's a relatively simple fix, easy to remember. It still won't really beef up spells like fireball any more than they are....they still have damage caps etc. And it doesn't give you any more spells than a wizard 10 would have, or higher level.

Would that work?

Banshee

 

[Aus_Snow]

I think a "simple" fix to this would be to use the ideas that the Fantasy Flight Games team came up with for Midnight. Basically, your caster level is the same as your character level.

So, if you are a fighter 10/wizard 10, for instance, you can only cast up to lvl 5 spells....but you cast them as a lvl 20 wizard. It's a relatively simple fix, easy to remember. It still won't really beef up spells like fireball any more than they are....they still have damage caps etc. And it doesn't give you any more spells than a wizard 10 would have, or higher level.

Would that work?

Interesting idea, and good question. My answer is, 'I don't know.'

An abundance of feats (well, in the gaining of) and some more of those ones as found in Complete Adventurer and later books, I still believe could work.

So, instead of increasing sneak attack or favoured enemy or whatever else, you actually gain new spells per day/known (but *more slowly*) as if you'd gone up in Wizard, Cleric or what have you.

It's possibly a bit clunky, I know, but there is a precedent, and OGC versions of any combination would be fairly easy to knock together.

Then it'd be down to how they play out. . .

 

[Banshee16]

I sent the link to the Pathfinder Alpha out to my group yesterday, and the reaction was pretty positive. Some of the guys wrote in talking about how it fixed some of the things they were worried about, and how many character ideas they were getting from the revised classes.

They all want to try it out now...

Banshee

 

[Caedwyr]

In case anyone is still interested, there's been some discussion on high level play and the problems it entails over on the Pazio forums.

Link

Relevant posts for discussion purposes:

Lisa Stevens wrote

Hey y'all:

My biggest beef with 3.5 is high level play also. I ran my Shackled City campaign until 16th level and it actually had me in tears at one point I was so frustrated. I've told Jason that this is one of my top priorities (the other was fixing mechanics and spells that were simply broken) for the Pathfinder RPG. Since we are still a year away from the release of the final rulebook, I really think that we can attack this problem as a community. Just because we haven't solved it yet doesn't mean that the Pathfinder RPG can't before we send it to the press next year. This exact problem is one of the main reasons why we went with the open playtest...I want to get the largest number of brains working on these problems. Jason was under a very crazy time crunch to get the Beta out by GenCon, and that didn't allow a lot of creative time to tackle the toughest problems. But now we have time going forward. I would encourage all of you to help us tackle this problem. Otherwise I will only be playing campaigns to about 12th level or so before starting a new one. And that would be really, really sad to me. :/

-Lisa

James Jacobs wrote:

To paraphrase Lisa a bit... we have about a year of playtesting of the Beta right now. The alpha was the place to test out some of the more extreme ideas we had, and it was a rolling buildup (but not a complete game by any means) to the Beta.

I've said this elsewhere: The playtests for the Beta are, I feel, the MOST important part of the equation. We'll be starting up a few Beta RPG playtest games in the office very soon, and at Gen Con that'll be expanding out into the world for everyone and anyone who wants to help. One of the goals during this section is to, hopefully, have lots of folk actually RUN 1st to 20th level campaigns. Every time something that's not fun happens, hopefully those playtesters will let us know and we'll do our damnedest to fix it. Can we fix it? I hope so! I think so!

We've got a year to try, at the very least!

EDIT 1: To give just one example of one thing I think could be done to make high-level play less onerous: Limit the number of "buff spells" a person can have on him to 3 or 4. Makes it easier to track, makes it easier to handle dispel magic attempts, and I suspect it'll add an interesting tactical element to combat preparation.

EDIT 2: As for the low level end of things, I'm pretty sure that the changes we've made to increase the power level of PCs will help with survivability and choices here as well, especially since several of these increases aren't of the power increase level that scales as PCs level up. In other words, having more hit points at level 1 isn't as
"overpowered" compared to 3.5 at 1st level as it is at 20th level. Same goes for the increased racial ability score mods.

So it looks like the Paizo people are wanting to do something to make high level play more enjoyable and are soliciting suggestions on what are the things that bog down high level play and make it unenjoyable.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

I thought the idea of Wizards in 3E was *not* to use too many direct attacks, instead focusing on battlefield control?

Well yes, if you want to be the most optimized wizard. Unfortunately, some of us (like me) still would like the option of playing an Evoker, tossing around spheres of pure elemental destruction, and actually being able to keep up with the Warblade's sharp metal stick for damage. Crazy concept, isn't it?