Does anyone here still follow the lore or read lorebooks?
If so, can you tell us, how did that "no slavery in Golarion" thing pan out? What the hell did that mean in the long turn? What happened to Cheliax?
>Groups you see taking on +8 enemies are most likely playing with the Proficiency-Without-Level (PWL) optional rule, which removes your character level from all your bonuses
You're probably right, thank you for that insight.
>I thought Inventor looked neat, wanted power armor, and thought having a mechanical pet would be useful. Well, turns out the non-Innovation companion for Inventor is bad and requires like 6 or so class feats just to keep pace, which could go into handing out consumables or an AoE line attack, or some other kind of utility. So now I get to choose between burning a feat at level 1 for flavor or locking myself into a track that's just not very good. Inventor is worse about this than some other classes, but it's a recurring problem, especially when certain things are transparently exclusive for balance reasons (like all the companion feats).
Jesus christ how horrible. To be clear, a game could be splatbook-trap-option-charop-hell even if it didn't have any "tracks" beyond class levels. The idea that you have to build an optimized higher level character before you can optimize your low level character is some next-level sh*t, it's like they took everything that I hate about late 3e imbalance and buildhom*osexualry and then they intentionally built their game around it.
That feat in particular highlights a thing I really hate about Paizo's design. It feels like Paizo designers want you to roll just for the sake of rolling. Like they're scared players will get bored if they're not constantly chucking dice. Now instead of being conpetent at what they do, characters have a chance to enact their favorite circus buffoonery as the RNG causes them to bumble about like clowns, exciting!
I think it's a weird way of shilling the Assurance feat maybe. Like they realized the only about 5 general feats are actually worth a damn so they added a bunch of pointless roles to gaslight you into thinking Assurance is good.
The best part about Armor Assist is that it doesn't do anything even when you succeed the roll. Donning light armor goes from one minute to thirty seconds which is still five rounds of combat, most encounters don't go that long. Heavy and Medium armor will take you two and a half minutes: a whopping 25 rounds. So when is this useful? When you're on the clock but not being ambushed? How often will you have two and half minutes to don armor but not five?
Armor assist isn't the only one like this. A Home In Every Port let's you burn a day finding free food and lodging for the party. Cool right? But the feat is level 11 and a good meal and a bed costs about 1.3 silver per PC. If you're master level in a skill and spend that same amount of time earning income you'll generate 8 gold pieces just doing what you're good at. Mechanically the feat only pays off if you have ~60 characters that need shelter somewhere. Narratively it can be replaced just by doing actual roleplay. The frick is it for then? I dunno.
Say That Again is another baffling one, although I think it only exists as a character feat for an NPC in Kingmaker.
>if you are trained in Athletics
>and an enemy critically fails while trying to lie to or Demoralize you
>you can use a reaction to Shove
>if this would start combat, you get to use your Intimidation bonus for Initiative
A few of the Kingmaker skill feats are like this, and I genuinely wonder if they're even useful in the AP they're built for given how specifically they're written.
What's frustrating is that Assurance is close to being worth taking but the normal DC math screws it over. It does at least function OK on a group Medic so you spend less time pissing around on medicine checks, for example. The problem is that the one thing you'd really want to use it on - scaling skill checks for stuff like Marshal or Inventor - have their DCs set too high for it to ever work. Assurance works for Overdrive at level 7, and no other time. It's the one check your class should always be best at, that you'll want to make in every combat, and you simply can't automate it with a general feat because I guess it would just be too good even though you're already behind on melee accuracy and durability and have a worse version of Focus Points. Why would you possibly be allowed to spend a skill feat to make yourself capable of performing your core class ability with consistency?
I am generally confused by how high DCs in PF2e are across the board. The Rusty Shanktown meme at low levels feels way more true in PF2e than it has in my 5e games just because the normal DC you're expected to pass is at least 15 and you only ever start with a skill at +6. 40% chance to flub the thing you're supposed to be pretty good at feels like ass and it doesn't meaningfully get better until you have several Skill Increases under your belt.
rofl
Now someone explain how heal checks work and how to optimize them. IIRC it's way too many steps and substeps and it all boils down to "don't even try unless you're an optimized healer no really the system will punish you for trying".
