Is Pathfinder a Boon or a Bane?

[McPoyo]

I've succeeded 95% after level 3 unless the creature was built to stop it, or had more than twice my HD. Bullrushing giants 15+ feetas a dwarf with moving type success.

Same deal with tripping, disarming, sundering oh God, etc. If you take the feats for it, priorto 15th its just an autowin. I've played these against a variety of foes, too.

Hell a sixth level alchemist with no magical enhancement bonuses to stats was outgrappling a 12hd vampire because the way the cmb/cmd system works.

[Nytemare3701]

I've had a barbarian in the group who succeeds at grapples 95% of the time, and he's fighting things 2 CR higher than us. Pathfinder made it easier for him to do it using Combat Maneuvers and the extra feats. I'm not big on the nerfed feats, but that's what a discerning DM is for.

tl;dr: Pathfinder is fine with more than a few grains of salt.

[McPoyo]

What's worse is when the DM's four CR-4 creatures locks down the party thanks to grappling and tripping.

[The_Mad_Linguist]

What's worse is when the DM's four CR-4 creatures locks down the party thanks to grappling and tripping.

Or worse, two CR-3 monsters grappling and drowning your whole party.

[Nytemare3701]

I prefer overly effective monsters to useless ones. What happened here is that a mundane tactic got GOOD because of an unbalanced mechanic. If it were a casting mechanic, I'd be leery, but in this case I'm cheering for the mundanes.

[juton]

I've succeeded 95% after level 3 unless the creature was built to stop it, or had more than twice my HD. Bullrushing giants 15+ feetas a dwarf with moving type success.

Same deal with tripping, disarming, sundering oh God, etc. If you take the feats for it, priorto 15th its just an autowin. I've played these against a variety of foes, too.

Hell a sixth level alchemist with no magical enhancement bonuses to stats was outgrappling a 12hd vampire because the way the cmb/cmd system works.

Well, think about what spell casters of the same level can do, is it really so horrible that-non casters can trip/grapple/sunder?

[McPoyo]

Spell casters have saves to all their stuff that takes people put of the fight in of, and saves tend to scale faster than dcs.

[juton]

Yeah, but is tripping somebody 95% of the time better than blinding them and their friends, entangling them or paralyzing them 50% of the time?

[McPoyo]

If those were level one spells doing that, then no. In a lot of instances, its better,  because glitterdust, color spray, and entangle can't let your allies all aoo the enemy, and a large number of the maneuvers do when you pock up the greater version at 6th.

Also, there's a maneuver that entangled with no save, one that blinds with no save, one that dazed with no save, oh wait that's the same maneuver that does all those. Check out the APG.

[juton]

Well like everything given to fighters, it's not that great. The regular and improved versions can be undone with a move action, so it's more versatile but less useful then tripping them. If you trip them they need a move action to stand which provokes, with a dirty trick they can just spend a move action to negate the effect, the don't have to roll and it doesn't provoke. Greater Dirty Trick is a bit better, because you can trade your standard action to negate theirs, the only condition that's really impairing though is blindness, which you have to play mother-may-I with the DM to even be allowed to use. Since you can't inflict a permanent condition stabbing an enemy in the eyes is still out, but more importantly the bonus you get to your CMB from anything weapon specific probably isn't going to apply to your check. Since even trying this maneuver is a standard action it's what you get to do this round, period (unless you're a caster). I'm not seeing the balance of power shifting because of this.

[McPoyo]

Blindness is easy: three stooges eye poke.

Or sand/salt/gravel/ash/pepper in eyes, etc.

Combine it with one of the many ways to nauseate someone, and it gets a lot more potent.

[Sobolev]

Blindness is easy: three stooges eye poke.

Or sand/salt/gravel/ash/pepper in eyes, etc.

Combine it with one of the many ways to nauseate someone, and it gets a lot more potent.

For men, nut kick.

For everyone, you may need to explain to your DM what a liver shot is.

[Sunic_Flames]

On topic (again): What specific mechanical changes have people liked about pathfinder? I for one am very happy with the Combat Maneuver system.

You mean the nerf system?

Because beatsticks kind of need to both reliably pull off maneuvers, and those maneuvers do something meaningful.

[Senevri]

Sunic, nerf? numerical proof or it didn't happen. ( a link suffices. ) Bonuses from size are significantly reduced for monsters, and there's the important rule that everything that affects attack or defense, usually also affects CMB/CMD.

Frankly, I'm not sure why you hate PF so much... has someone forced you to play it at gunpoint or something?

Of course, the whole everything-affects-CM? thing sort of complicates the otherwise nice "I want to do something odd in combat" / "Okay, roll CMB vs CMD" thing.

In actual gameplay ( where, remember, inter-class balance doesn't matter ) PF works about as fine as other 3.Xs do, and you can use most 3.x splats with a moderate amount of conversion effort.

the thread's long so tl;dr and all, but has the reason why Fighter must remain a simple class been hashed?

[juton]

I think Sunic is just bored, if he had something better to do he wouldn't have necroed a two year old thread. I don't know why he hates Pathfinder so much either, I had a bad time playing 4e and I just don't bring it up, it's not worth my time.

[veekie]

The CMB/CMD thing helps a lot with streamlining the special combat moves I think, and actual gameplay does make them work often enough with a reasonably optimized build, rather than a fully focused one.

One nice thing about Sunder, you can choose to destroy a successfully sundered object or simply inflict the 'Broken' condition to it and leave it at 1hp. Pretty decent debuff, even if disarming is probably better, since you still get your loot afterwards.

Hungry Ghost is lame, but check out the Zen Archer monk down at the bottom of the page. 

8 bonus feats in 6 levels and wis as an attack stat makes for a pretty cool variant archer that challenges an equivalent level fighter or ranger as a ranged combatant while maintaining higher saving throws and remaining decent in melee as well.  Standing in place to flurry-shoot (and therefore gain full BAB) solves one of the monk's main problems. 

At higher levels, you'll have more ranged attacks than any other character (+18/+18/+18/+18/+13/+8/+3), with each arrow dealing your unarmed damage (2d10, or more if large-sized - and why wouldn't you be?), and arrows are automatically lawful and adamantine on top of whatever your bow's giving them.  Add in the homing property, the ability to take AOO's with your bow and not provoke them either, and you have a pretty sweet package altogether. 

Now if only they could do something outside of combat.

Hey, if you want to be completely useless when what you do isn't called for, more power to you...

Wait, are you saying that shooting somebody isn't a legitimate answer to every encounter?

Enlightenment is like firing arrows.

[Sunic_Flames]

Sunic, nerf? numerical proof or it didn't happen. ( a link suffices. ) Bonuses from size are significantly reduced for monsters, and there's the important rule that everything that affects attack or defense, usually also affects CMB/CMD.

Frankly, I'm not sure why you hate PF so much... has someone forced you to play it at gunpoint or something?

Of course, the whole everything-affects-CM? thing sort of complicates the otherwise nice "I want to do something odd in combat" / "Okay, roll CMB vs CMD" thing.

In actual gameplay ( where, remember, inter-class balance doesn't matter ) PF works about as fine as other 3.Xs do, and you can use most 3.x splats with a moderate amount of conversion effort.

the thread's long so tl;dr and all, but has the reason why Fighter must remain a simple class been hashed?

All you have to do is read the descriptions of all the relevant material. Which means the Improved Trip feat, Spiked Chains, and the tripping rules themselves. The others were never worth it to begin with, but were still made worse.

As for why I smite Pathfailure so much, people should be warned against playing terrible games. People should be warned why those terrible games are terrible. It's a public service. Friends don't let friends play terrible games. And even if they aren't your buddy, still don't. Pathfailure isn't something you should will upon your worst enemy.

[Senevri]

Gee, a slight hyperbole there. Reading...

Question about the hungry ghost: Why is it so bad? It reads like free ki points to me, which is... significant. Is it the cost in losing standard monk abilities? I could see a keen / imp crit cestus-using monk being workable, threat of 17-20 with 7-8 hits is quite possible.

In our pathfinder game, the Monk was usually the first to ask about resting, interestingly enough, which probably means monks don't get enough ki points.

Btw, wholeness of body is actually semi-cool, with the heal level in HP using ki, albeit I'm not sure why it wasn't set at 1 ki point per usage.
*edit*
Okay, spiked chain isn't a reach weapon any more, which is... meh, really. You can just use a guisarme + spiked gauntlet.
Improved Trip only gets +2, although you also get +2 on defense vs. trip. So yeah, unlike most other greater feats, improved + greater doesn't give much more than the old 3.5 improved trip, +2 defense hardly counts. OTOH, the mechanic is different.

OLD TRIP with Improved Trip(3.5):
Touch Attack (BAB+STR) vs. Touch AC (10+dex+misc), goes from ~25-30% miss probability to 5% miss probability over career, mostly.
on success, you make an opposed STR check vs. opposed STR or DEX check. In addition, larger opponent gets +4 per size category difference. The success chance for this isn't really all that good, except against medium humanoids. -20% success chance per size category difference, so -60% vs. colossal, or equal vs. large.

Improved Trip effectively makes you 1 size category larger for the purpose of tripping.
on success you also get a FREE attack vs. the tripped opponent.

Optimal case, a strongman tripper vs. medium opponent, only fails on rolls of 1. Bad case, vs. a Titan, an optimized 20th-level character
(say, BAB +20, STR 42, large, improved grapple) would have a trip modifier of +44 vs. +52, or basically... best case 45% fail chance, average 85% fail?

NEW TRIP with Improved Trip(3.5):
CMB (BAB+STR+Misc) vs. CMD (10+BAB+STR+DEX+Misc), fail probability starts at about 35-40%, with stronger and more capable characters gaining advantage as levels increase, but not scaling to auto-hit or auto-fail.

As size modifiers go 1-2-4-8, +2 actually equals to two size categories.

Greater trip: You get an Attack of Opportunity vs. target.

Optimal case, a tripper (STR 42) would have +40 CMB to trip vs. an average CMD of... oh, maybe 40 or so, so a 5% chance of failure.
Bad case, again goes pretty impossible vs. colossal dragons, Balors and Pit Fiends having around 60% fail chance.

Result: Mmh. On average, tripping works fine in pathfinder, and is easier against strong characters... basically, it's more tied to character's level and combat abilities rather than just STR score, which I like. On the other hand, trying ANY type of a combat maneuver is futile against any colossal cr 20+ challenge... or is it? This is just the flat score, not taking into account the other possible bonuses, such as from charging, aid another, flanking...

Here's the key:

Add any bonuses you currently have on attack rolls due to spells, feats, and other effects. These bonuses must be applicable to the weapon or attack used to perform the maneuver.

Enhancement bonus on a trip weapon? Weapon Focus? Those Fighter's +1s to attack start to stack up here pretty fast...

Oh, and here's one thing I really like in PF ( which can be backported to 3.5 easy enough as can most good PF things ) -
It allows fighters to craft their own weapons. Master Craftsman, TYVM.

[juton]

The usual critique of tripping in Pathfinder is: it takes an extra feat for it to work kind of like in 3.5 (imp.trip+great.trip) and that the spiked chain the only weapon to give reach and work up close has been nerfed to not work like that. You can use a heavy flail + lunge, but you won't have reach when it's not your turn.

[Senevri]

Eh, considering you effectively net 2 more virtual size categories, and that spiked chain was 'too good' a weapon... that is, it was a no-brainer choice out of all of the exotic weapons.

Y'know, the weapons themselves could use a boost, all around. Maybe go with Conan weapon dice, at least - or increase the die size a bit. 1d12 bastard swords, 2d8 greatswords... or even fun dice like, oh, 1d8+1d10, or something.