Ooooh hey pathfinder. It's like D&D 3.5 but hates martials more.


>u>

What makes you say that? There's so many awesome martial builds you can do in pathfinder. Getting feats every other level instead of every 3 levels helps considerably

I don't know how things are now with the ToB-alike released, but previously they removed a lot of things that made Martials effective and then added class features to casting classes. Nerfing Improved Trip and Power Attack were pretty big ones. Pathfinder still lacks the variety that 3.5e grants, and lacks the useful templates that helps breach the gap between a full caster and a beatstick. They also annihilated the Spiked Chain which sucks massively for anyone that actually hits things. So you had less options, the options you retained were less effective, and casters got a mixed bag of nerfs and buffs. The only Tier 1 class that really got nerfed are Druids, whereas the others are untouched or even better in some respects.

I've only played 1 game of pathfinder before, and this design I have here is for a game that we still haven't started yet. According to our GM, Martial classes are overpowered in early levels and fall short in the late game, and I tend to believe that considering the fighter we had in my first game wrecked face while I flailed alchemical bombs at the enemies general direction, haha. I haven't reached a level 20 pathfinder game, so I can't say I have a strong opinion on this matter though; the best I can do is take my GM at his word I guess.

I have a friend of mine who's played pathfinder for several years after moving on from 3.5e, and came back and basically said that pathfinder is entirely inferior to 3.5e.

Yeah, like I said, I can't have a strong opinion because I've only played a short pathfinder campaign before, and I haven't played any other D&D rules before. I'm a newbie to tabletop RPGs.

Basically the quality of the games is from best to worst is...


3.5e, 3.p, 2e, 5e, 4e


4e and 5e basically being stripped down 3.5e, and pathfinder being 3.5e but made by a different company that tried to improve on what 3.5e did but didn't really get the problems of 3.5e. The Pathfinder Societyfor example retires characters at level 12, because at level 13 casters become insane. Casters get their 7th level spells at that level for instance. Here's an article that kind of explains why it's better than 4e and 5e, but less good than 3.5e: http://www.toplessrobot.com/2014/04.....der.php?page=2


That article doesn't go into some of the other issues with Martials being weak, such as Feat Bloat. Instead of a feat giving a scaling ability or a really powerful ability immediately they split them up like arcane feats; only casters are perfectly powerful even without a single feat; whereas martials need all the feats they can get. Multiclassing got nerfed hard as well which really only hurts martial characters (again). Increasing your trip/grapple/disarm/etc. checks in 3.p is also much harder since you only get 1/4th the bonus for being a larger size. Enlarge Person only grants you a +2 to grapple checks now, instead of the old +5. So while players don't get much benefit from being larger size, due to having lower stats; large monsters will almost always have a massive strength bonus behind their size which makes the size bonus basically irrelevant.

You also have the Rainbow-Warsnake-in-a-can that is the Para-Surge Oracle. Their Errata policy is so bad that they can't even fix the rules right to make it less broken.