Sup Veeky Forums I'm playing a Pathfinder game at my lgs and I'm having some problems...

well from my experience with sword and sorcery Mages have some crazy shit. Like ability to burn entire army, or destroy a city wall, castle, cliff. But what most people forget is that mages do 1-2 spells per story.

And then they get a sword or a dagger in the chest. And in dnd when wizards have 60-80 hitpoints it is hard to kill him with a 1d8+3 sword strike.

I thought D&D was great but with time I seen how shit it was. With levels it becomes worse and worse. I remember seeing stats for pit fiends, wyrm dragons and thinking "holy crap. This fight will take ages. You will need tactics." And then realizing when you reach the level when you fight those things... you can kill 6-8 of those before taking a rest because they are STANDARD encounter.

my suggestion is to try and play dnd 2ed, warhammer fantasy, dragon warriors, gurps if you want to feel like a hero. Don't know about d&d 5th edition but pathfinder and 3.5 isn't hero game. It is grinding game.

>Is a level 6 Samurai that much weaker then a level 6 Magus?
Yes. Characters without magic are, by design, useless compared to characters with magic.
This is called Ivory Tower Design and is intended to punish new players for not researching the system before play and wanting to play a class that sounds interesting to them.
Pathfinder just copied D&D 3.5, so that design is no longer intentional. They just know that martials are supposed to suck.

Your character as it is now is unsalvageable. You'll have to redo it from the ground up, and that requires the GM's permission.

>in classic sword & sorcery
...which D&D has never been, you mean?

>..which D&D has never been, you mean?
yes, that's EXACTLY what i was alluding to.

Welcome to PF where the tiers system impacts upon play.
Your class occupies a lower tier than the magus, you are going to be mechanically weaker, especially since he's a partial caster.
Bad luck, pal.

You should play 4e or 5e where class imbalance is less of a problem and everyone is useful.

This is an issue in a lot of TTRPGs, but especially 3.X & Pathfinder. Essentially, the martials get the ability to attack, and whilst they're good at it, it's practically the only thing they can do. Even at higher levels, with a bunch of feats, class features, and whatever else, they can pretty much only attack, they just become better at it. There are combat manoeuvres, but it's rare that they are more worthwhile than just dealing as much damage as possible.
Casters, on the other hand, are built for everything but attacking (with the exception of Druids and Clerics when you make a build specifically for attacking). Instead, they get spells, which gives them as many options in each round as they have spells prepared.

Pic related is useful for determining how powerful and/or useful each class is. It's not always entirely accurate (for example, my bloodrager runs circles around my friend's sorcerer because my character is optimised and his isn't), and I think it's a little out of date, but it definitely captures the gist of it. It's also useful for determining how many options each class gives you in game play; the better the tier, the more options it has to resolve any given challenge.

In all seriousness though, spellcasters have a lot more options in all situations and will, thus, be more effective than martials.

I forgot to mention, this means that you're friends magus is 2 tiers higher than your samurai, and there's also the possibility that their character is optimised whilst yours isn't.

>you're friends magus
Meant 'your'. I haven't slept properly in days.

Honestly, everyone should.

>why pick anything besides magic,if magic is an option.
Because they system tells you they're both equally powerful? it takes the same level of XP to level a samurai than it takes to level a magus, both facing the same level threats. That can only mean they're both equally powerful, or is the system an asshole for no reason?

>There are combat manoeuvres, but it's rare that they are more worthwhile than just dealing as much damage as possible.
In PF combat maneuvers are ubershit, CMD from monsters escales so fast compared to their AC is insane. Only a handful (I lie, less than a handful) of builds can make maneuvers more or less ok

And this without taking into account some monsters are outright immune to grapple, trip or whatever

3.PF lies to you. It's okay. You can play an all-martial game and have fun with martials, but the second you involve a min-maxing fullcaster, martials are no longer having fun in combat.

>3.x
>expecting a purely martial non-ToB/PoW character to compete with a caster

It's a well-known problem with the system. Either git good or play another system.

>min-maxing fullcaster
No need to minmax at all, Druid, a druid with whatever feat, whatever race is going to be better than more than half the martials. If you pick Bear, T-Rex, Spinosaurs, or other cool looking Animal Companion you're going to be better than 98% of the martials, and again, feats, races and whatever are inconsequential, so no minmax.

Similar happens with cleric as long as you don't have downs.

>is the system an asshole for no reason?

It's asshole for historical reasons. When D&D 4e, lots of people who grew up with 3.x threw a fit because people who start with 3.x tend to hate even the idea of learning another system. So Paizo took advantage of the circumstances and the OGL(which lets them essentially copy-paste large parts of 3.5) and made PF, which was marketed as "fixing" 3.5, but in reality they just patched some of the more obviously broken spells, then nerfed martials to compensate since their target audience doesn't actually WANT a balanced system.

>This is an issue in a lot of TTRPGs
Such as? 3.PF is pretty singular in how fucked up the martial-caster divide is, as far as I know.

Shadowrun and Runequest, to a degree. WoD if you play multi-splat game.

>3.PF is pretty singular in how fucked up the martial-caster divide is, as far as I know.
Well, he did say ESPECIALLY 3.x

I had a whole thing typed out about how 3.x is so bad at class balance it makes everything seem balanced by comparison, but basically what said.

>Runequest, to a degree
Except there's no classes and any character can take magic skills.

Even without classes you still get specialists, because in a party of characters being competent at a lot of things the other characters can also do well is not as good as being great at something no-one else can do well.

I said min-maxing because some people play buffing mages instead of going "I cast X and Y, the encounter is now void." Buffing mages are fine if you want martials to be awesome.

You don't even need to mix splats with WoD, at least old WoD.

I mean 5 dot in potence gets you like, really strong man!

5 dots in presence means you mindrape everyone in the room into submission.

SR 1E/2E player here. It was no issue in those editions at least. Yes, casters can pull shit. But in general a Street Samurai can kill that caster before he can even blink.

Welcome to the world of 3.PF.

Can a caster bind spirits in those editions? I remember that being kinda game breaking in 3-4-5.

they straight conjure nature spirits or elementals. but without being minmaxed without spell locks that protect from damage and grant high initiative, they still die to street samurais. and if the street samurai is packing heavy arms...

I hate when people bitch about psionics so much, they're the most balanced casters ever yet they threat them like broken stuff while praising CoDzilla

I know that feel, my first time in 3.PF I played a monk...there was a druid and a summoner in the group, their pets were like me 2x each. Playing the meaningless, useless comic relief char becomes boring pretty fast.

This is why I usually play the comic relief character while also being the strongest in the group.

Doing inane shit and getting away unscathed is awesome.

yeah but if you do a buffing mage, you get to watch the martials have all the fun....is a buffslut a thing?

Still here OP?
I'm going to suggest something that people suggested to me when I asked about it, and the answer is Path of War.

Initially, I disregarded it as it wasn't named "samurai/sword saint", but it's an exceptionally easy to understand add-on to martials that make them more fun and versatile without being overpowered, and THEMATICALLY they can be anything, even a Samurai.

Basiy, there are 3 classes, essentially tank/buff warrior/stealth assassin. You pick one, which has basic abilities as any class, but then you also pick "maneuvers", an example might be "Weaboo Strike - your weaboo prowess lows you to make a charge attack, you do an extra 1d6 damage and inflict a -4 penalty to attack". You can pick and choose your maneuvers, and many sulport different fighting styles or weapons. Give it a look, you will be more useful too.

Granted, all that said. I've made unchained monks fun and OP even tho they're considered bottom tier. It really depends on how outside the box or one-trick you're willing to go with these classes. That, or other party members not being optimized.