Pathfinder: path of war

My group is currently sperging out about path of war one group says its balanced while the other says its actively ruining the game for others im neutral. What does Veeky Forums think?

Path of War is not unbalanced.

Well, it is, but only if you're an idiot.

Path of War is innately stronger than default Pathfinder Martials.

But default Pathfinder martial characters suck so much balls they need a serious power boost to actually work.

Path of War is still far, far weaker than casters, but it makes martial characters who are competent, have an array of interesting and varied abilities and are straight up fun to play. I'd never play in a Pathfinder game not using it.

Pathfinder is shit, but Path of War does make it a bit more bearable.

A DSP-only game is the only PF game I would play.

Path of War characters have higher effective in combat utility and increased minimal out of combat utility.

This makes them stronger than most 1st party paizo-only martials, but still significantly weaker than full casters.

Their effective rating can be roughly around hybrid caster classes or there about.

tl;dr better than a fighter or rogue, worse than wizard/cleric/oracle, can be optimized as much as a paladin, inquisitor or other half caster.

This is true out of combat. Some initiators can easily outperform most casters in combat.

Zealots shit on everyone except full prepared casters. They do better than a bard and inquisitor AT THE SAME TIME. They laugh at most enemies and simply are hyper efficient combatants.

Only if the casters are bothering to interact with HP, and even then casters can outdo them.

Initiators have much less ability to just completely neutralize a combat encounter with a few spells, although I'd consider that good design.

I feel like you don't actually play from that statement.

The optimization options for the Inquisitor and Paladin don't even bring it past an optimized paizo-only Fighter.

Path of War, meanwhile, is comparable to spontaneous casters in combat.

Zealots can do the same thing with 1 maneuver. Destruction zealots can cast dominate monster as a cone (albeit lasting only a few rounds). There are PLENTY of save or suck maneuvers and defenses that casters could only dream of (infinite SR being one).

Optimized Oracles have a hard time competing with optimized zealots and optimized ravenlords.

Broken Blade is totally broken.

Broken blade does lots of HP damage and not much else. It's as broken as an empowered fireball.

Anything that gets within 200 feet of someone with broken blade dies that round, unless they are immune to HP damage (even then it can get around that with higher level BB stuff).

>pathfinder
>my group is sperging out
What did you expect OP?

the smart autists like that speechless girl hopfully

You can't charge and do a strike maneuver, bro. 30 feet is your limit + any extra move or range. How are you getting 200 feet?

And unless all your foes are lined up all next to each other you're limited to one kill at a time. No real movement options with Broken Blade.

You can with one feat.

It's fine, but can be a little overwhelming if the GM has no idea how to properly GM for it.

Path of war is unbalanced for Pathfinder.

Pathfinder wants to play nitty gritty
Path of War wants to play dynasty warriors.

If your GM runs it like the former, you're going to be imbalanced
If your GM runs it like the latter, you'll be fine.

>Pathfinder wants to play nitty gritty
>Core casters

Uh, what?

DSP-only PF is like banning core in 3.5, then?

Yeah

The thing is, Path of War has a lower optimization floor than most paizo content (In simpler words, there are no trap options and grabbing what you like will almost always give you a functional result unless you intentionally screw your build up.). If your party is the kind that normally went fighter, skillmonkey rogue, blaster wizard and healbot cleric or equivalent, the casters need to get good.

It's ToB + XPH + MoI only.

Oh? What feat's that?

Core casters+Witches, Oracles, Summoners, and Arcanists are not nitty gritty, user. They're whacky gonzo fantasy superheroes.

Hell, Paizo's limited progression gish classes like Inquisitors, Alchmists, Magi, and Bloodragers are still pretty high-fantasy.

PF is only nitty gritty if you stick to martials only.

Speaking of the gonzo stuff, they can combine really well with the PoW materials.

Not that anyone reading the Kamen Rider class would ever fail to realize, mind.

Legend does Kamen Rider better.

Legend does a lot of things better.

True, but I was trying to introduce that concept gradually.

Legend always makes me sad. It's such a cool core of a game, but it's just utterly lacking in support and development is basically dead.

It's better than the other way around.

>i have never actually played a wizard
k.

>I only theorycraft classes over level 15
k.

PoW is poorly designed and doesn't solve any problems that pathfinder has. Martials have never needed to do MORE damage than they do now, they just need to do more thing out of combat.

PoW "fixed" this by giving martials way to much fucking damage at every point in the game. Raging barbarian levels of damage is the baseline for a un-optimized PoW character.

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>Anonymous 07/20/16(Wed)18:35:19 No.48370
I agree with this, martial powers should have been more about flexibility than MOAR DMG!!!!!1111