Pathfinder 2E PF2E Gurus teach me! +

[Gammadoodler]

You can make it work after a fashion with a wizard or sorcerer with an Archetype Dedication to a fighting class, but unless its its a free archetype game that's not a cost-free option.

And it is decidedly "after a fashion", though, if you pick the right archetypes and general feats, perhaps it is less noticeably so until the mid levels when the proficiency scaling stalls out and you run out of ways to boost it.

It's certainly nowhere near the bananapants things 5e enables.

 

[Gammadoodler]

Its less true with some non-core material, though. As I noted, some of the more unusual Ancestries are more Golarion-specific.

Agreed.

The nice thing is that these are generally tagged as "uncommon" or "rare" in the books, so it's not too difficult to put a fence around it and then decide what you're ok with.

 

[Staffan]

Or a divine Sorcerer, though I've heard some complaints that's one of the weaker sorcerer takes (I don't have enough context to say why).

Well, here's the thing. In theory, the four tradition spell lists are balanced against one another. In practice, they are built around the wizard, druid, cleric, and bard classes. Out of those, the Arcane list is the strongest, which is balanced by the rest of the wizard being weaker (worse hp, less exciting class feats, and so on.

The sorcerer gets to choose a spell list, but the rest of the class is based more-or-less around the wizard chassis. So if you put the cleric divine spell list on a wizard-like chassis, that's going to have a little less oomph.

In addition, the divine list is heavy on heals and condition relief, and low on offense – particularly general-purpose offense. Many of the divine list's offensive spells are alignment-based and require a deity (because by the book their alignments are limited by the deity's alignment – it would be reasonable to use the sorcerer's alignment for these spells, but that's not RAW).

Further, condition relief leans heavily on the counteracting mechanic, which wants you to use high-level spells to counter high-level threats. But it's hard for a sorcerer, with their limited repertoire, to be ready with dispel magic, remove curse, remove fear, remove paralysis, remove disease, neutralize poison, and whatever else all at high levels. The cleric can even take a class feat that deals with this (Channeled Succor), but the sorcerer has no such luck.

The primal and occult lists also have a lot of condition relief, but they have enough offense that you can focus on that instead. The divine list does not.

I haven't noticed any, partly because Golarion elves, dwarves, gnomes and so on are, in practice, pretty conventional for the D&D-sphere.

I was mainly thinking of feats like Devil's Advocate, which requires Chelaxian nationality. The Character Guide has some similar feats for other ancestries, like Wildborn Magic which is only accessible to a particular elven ethnicity.

The baseline ancestries as described in the core book are pretty vanilla, yes. The Character Guide gives more Golarion-specific information about different ethnicities and cultures belonging to the various ancestries.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Edit: Nevermind, I've had this tab open for too long and didn't realize I was like a day behind when I came back to it.

 

[Justice and Rule]

It's certainly nowhere near the bananapants things 5e enables.

Yeah, recent events made me really appreciate the simplified multiclassing here. I'm in a 5E campaign (probably the last one my group does for a while) and one of the players is switching to a new character, and she wanted to do a Cleric/Artificer. At that point, me and another player were like, trying to figure out if that was a worthwhile choice and how that would work and I almost got a headache. There is just so much that goes into the straight "Mash these two classes together" multiclassing that you can do some wild stuff with it, but trying to guide other people through it is just a straight-up hassle, especially when you are trying to avoid having a useless combo.

 

[niklinna]

Link here appears to be related to PF1.

Drat it, that gets me more often than I'd like. 2nd edition doesn't seem to have a central discussion of concentration. I can't even find text explaining how the trait applies to casting spells!

 

[Gammadoodler]

Further, condition relief leans heavily on the counteracting mechanic, which wants you to use high-level spells to counter high-level threats. But it's hard for a sorcerer, with their limited repertoire, to be ready with dispel magic, remove curse, remove fear, remove paralysis, remove disease, neutralize poison, and whatever else all at high levels. The cleric can even take a class feat that deals with this (Channeled Succor), but the sorcerer has no such luck.

One thing I'd note is the moment to moment flexibility the sorcerer has in spell selection as a spontaneous caster (who can use any of spell slots they have of a particular level to cast any spell they know at that level) vs. the cleric as a prepared caster (who has to assign each spell slot to a particular spell as part of daily prep).

Divine Font (which gives clerics some bonus "free" Heal spells) + the feat you linked helps a lot with this, bit it's a difference worth highlighting.

 

[Gammadoodler]

Folks vastly prefer Foundry and from what I heard its not much of a competition when it comes to PF2.

We played one session in Roll20 before switching over. Roll20 at the time needed a whole bunch of custom formulas and such to get things to work even decently.

Foundry's stuff is almost 100% drag and drop (e.g. if someone casts enlarge on you, you can drag the effect from chat onto your token, it will make your token the appropriate size and put all the relevant bonuses into your character sheet) and nearly every feature has continued to improve over the last couple years.

I haven't played 5e on it, but I wouldn't be shocked to find out that the 5e experience is superior as well.

The main thing roll20 has going for it is that it's the most convenient place I'm aware of to look for players/games.

 

[niklinna]

Drat it, that gets me more often than I'd like. 2nd edition doesn't seem to have a central discussion of concentration. I can't even find text explaining how the trait applies to casting spells!

Ah, the nut of it is in the Sustain a Spell activity. You can spend one action to sustain a spell—which means you can sustain up to three spells, if you don't mind not doing anything else. Or two spells, and do one other thing (which will probably not be casting a new spell, as most spells cost two actions).

And here I had assumed you could only concentrate on one spell at a time, just like in 5e, because of that word being there. Like learning a foreign language similar to your own but a couple essential words have very different meanings!

 

[Lord Shark]

Drat it, that gets me more often than I'd like. 2nd edition doesn't seem to have a central discussion of concentration. I can't even find text explaining how the trait applies to casting spells!

If you're thinking of concentration as a spell duration, see the Sustain a Spell action.

It's important to note that in PF2, just getting hit does not make it impossible to Cast a Spell, Sustain a Spell, or do other actions with the Concentrate trait (unless you have an ability that says you do, like the fighter's Disruptive Stance).

Does this mean casters can just wade into melee in PF2 without fear of losing spells? Yeah, but going over to stand next to the angry guy with a battleaxe when you've got a bathrobe and 14 HP probably isn't an optimal strategy.