Finding the Path: Off the Chain

In my previous posts about the classes of pathfinder, I mentioned a few of the classes had flaws: the rogue is often bad in combat, the fighter is a bit boring, and the barbarian requires far more maths than you should have to think about when playing a melee smasher with anger problems.

On the flip side, there is the summoner, a class I have barely mentioned. Mistakes were made. They gain their arcane spells more slowly than wizards, witches and sorcerers, to make up for the fact that they have an animal-companion-like creature called an 'eidolon' that is very good at fighting. But, their spell list grants them many arcane spells at a lower level than the other arcane casters, which defeats the entire idea of gaining spells more slowly. The summoners early spells also let them do crazy things like make wands of haste, a spell that is normally too high level to put in a wand. And when you start hasting an eidolon, everyone else in the party may as well just go home.



And so we come to a book named Pathfinder Unchained, which seeks to fix all of this, by having modified versions of these classes, as well as a host of other things intended to simplify the rules. And while I don't think it succeeds at the latter, from what I have seen so far, it certainly succeeds at improving the classes that needed a little bit of love. And in nerfing the summoner. Or so I hear. I haven't seen the new one in action yet, so I will reserve judgement for now. I do encourage all fighters, rogues and barbarians to consider the unchained versions of their class, which I allow in my games.

Art by Lydia Schuchmann

Fighter
The fighter is often boring. You just hit stuff with your weapons. You're really good at it, but still, it can get a bit mindless. Technically, Unchained does not give us a new fighter class. What it gives us is a feat called Combat Stamina that grants the player access to a pool of stamina points (linked to your constitution) that can be spent to boost attacks. It can be thought of as a similar idea to the arcane pool used by the magus. It differs, however, in that it then provides you with a list of combat feats that can make use of stamina in different ways to boost their effect. Such favourites as power attack, cleave, quick draw and weapon finesse all have optional stamina costs for better effects. Unchained also suggests that the fighter class should gain Combat Stamina as a free first-level bonus feat, which I fully agree with. The fighter class really only does one thing - gain lots and lots of combat feats. So the stamina pool dovetails perfectly with what the fighter class is already doing. And it gives fighter players something to think about, keeping track of a limited resource and making shrewd tactical decisions about when to spend it. It does require you to invest It ups the complexity of the class a fair bit, so perhaps it's not for very new players, but if you've played for a while, it breathes new life into the class.

Illustration by Viktoriya Yarova

Rogue
The unchained rogue gets everything except the thing people most wanted: a full attack bonus. And to be fair, it makes a lot of sense - rogues are meant to rely on backstabbing and subterfuge, not have martial prowess comparable to fighters, barbarians and cavaliers. So what new stuff does the rogue get? Finesse training. This gives the weapon finesse feat for free, allowing them to use their dexterity instead of their strength to boost their attack. This is really cool. Actually, this is really, really, really cool, because it also lets them add their dexterity bonus to their damage for certain weapons. This is something that is ordinarily very hard to get, requiring either an expensive magical weapon or a string of feats. At last, the rogue is the dexterity master it was always trying to be! On top of this, they get things called 'skill unlocks' which grant entirely new ways to use skills. So not only do they get to have more skills than any other class, they also get to use them better than anyone else. Skill monkeys! Honestly, I'm not so impressed by the skill unlocks, but it doesn't really matter because Finesse Training. Did I mention how cool it is?

Illustration by Akeiron

Barbarian
The barbarian is in a pretty good place power-wise, but it suffers from a couple of problems. Firstly, it's signature ability, rage, increases your characters strength and constitution by a significant amount. This is really cool and powerful, as it boosts your attack, damage and health, but also math-intensive, as changing these stats changes all sorts of others things as well, to the point that you pretty much had to have two separate character sheets, one for raging, and one for not. Secondly, when you stop raging, you lose all of that, including the health boost. This means that if a barbarian is raging, and gets knocked to zero health and falls unconscious, thereby losing their rage, it is highly likely they will drop to a negative health value low enough to outright kill them. And lastly, the barbarian has a number of powers they can use 'once per rage', which leads to people taking a bunch of feats and powers that let them drop in and out of rage every turn to keep using them, which is actually pretty silly and metagamey.

To fix these problems, Unchained simplifies rage significantly. Instead of boosting strength and constitution, it grants them a straight +2 attack, +2 damage and +2 temporary health per level. This is mostly equivalent to what they had before, but much easier to keep track of, and the fact that the health is now a straight temporary increase means that you no longer drop into the negatives if you fall unconscious. I should point out that this is actually a nerf, as you miss out from the other benefits boosted stats gave you (+3 damage with a two-handed weapon, better maneuvers, and +1 fortitude), but having played both versions of the class, the slight nerf is a very small price to pay for the awesomeness of getting simplified math and a better chance of not dying.

Lastly, Unchained changes rage powers significantly, replacing once-per-rage powers with rage stances, that give you a continuous benefit while you are raging instead of a once off boost. This completely removes the need for rage cycling, but the fact that you can only use one stance at a time, makes it a nerf as well. But I don't care, cause rage cycling feels cheaty to me and I don't like teaching new barbarians that you need to use it to play a good barbarian.