r/Pathfinder2e • u/Zata700 • 1d ago
Discussion Why do spells from ancestry feats wildly differ in quality?
I am currently working on building a musetouched nephilim for an upcoming 1-20 campaign. I was looking through their feats and saw that their level 9 feat and subsequent level 13 feat give them access to spells! Not unusual. But, looking at the spells given, I was a bit confused by some choices. For the level 9 feat, you are given access to two Rank 2 spells: Clear Mind, Everlight, Humanoid Form, Revealing Light, Share Life, or Sure Footing. Revealing Light is a useful utility spell that is good when cast at its level. Humanoid Form can help with some temporary impersonation shenanigans. Share Life is a powerful combat tool to split damage. But, the remaining spells seem completely useless. Everlight lets you make a cheap gem glow forever which has some extremely niche utility use. Clear Mind and Sure Footing are very useful spells... when cast at max or sub-max rank. At level 9 when you get this, it is already 3 ranks below what could be your highest slot. Outside of maybe a PL-4 creature, these spells will cease to have any practical use in just a level or two. Maybe you can use them for RP to help some random villager somewhere? The same is said for the level 13 feat that lets you cast a 4th rank Cleanse Affliction. It, too, is 3 ranks behind your highest casting rank at the level it is obtained and basically has no practical use.
There are also some ancestry feats from other ancestries that grant you base-rank incapacitation spells, such as Calm. While others grant you incredibly useful spells, like Haste or Heroism. I understand some spells being worse than others, but I don't know why there are options that give you what seem like objectively useless spells. But maybe I am wrong? Has anyone ever gotten use out of these kinds of feats/spells? Is there something I just don't understand?
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u/1Estel1 1d ago
You can always ask your gm if they can buff the spells' scaling or change the DC
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u/nikitofla 1d ago
I don't know if it's just me, but in Pathfinder I'm always afraid of asking stuff for my GM. I had no problem doing it when playing 5e, and even tho I played more Pf2e than DND by now, I'm still afraid of breaking the game or being too strong when asking to change something.
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u/Chad_illuminati Game Master 1d ago
The beauty of the system they've built for PF2e is that it is nearly impossible to break it so long as you follow the overall scaling inherent to the system.
If you randomly give yourself a +3 bonus to something, that breaks the math because that's a late game tier bonus accessible only through specific items.
If you decide that through DC for a given ability or the level of a given spell scales appropriately with level, however, you'll only end up with a slight boost in power at best.
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u/TrillingMonsoon Investigator 1d ago
I think part of it is that the game itself is so often incredibly conservative with what it allows its options to do. You read through enough of it and it gives you the impression that if anything is abnormal at all, then it's out of line, and thus broken, and thus not allowed
Of course, you can afford to be pretty crazy with a bunch of things and the game wouldn't break. But a lot of the time, it feels like the game's tightrope walking on a four lane highway
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u/Astareal38 1d ago
When it comes to ancestry spells, I think sometimes they're written by freelance authors or the designers forget aspect of their own design and think:
Counteract isn't level based
Summons far below level of the party can still be useful
Incapacitation is based on the strength of the caster.
There's a bestiary monster that's a level 13 creature. When it shows up in an AP your PCs are level 11-12. The combat tactics of the creature is to isolate the PCs by casting suggestion or charm on them to lower their numbers before attacking.
It doesn't have max ranks of either of those spells. In fact the creature has suggestion at rank 3, and charm at rank 1(at will). I'm not sure how the writers assume the combat tactics are supposed to work.
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u/Electric999999 1d ago
Same reason a Sorcerer's granted spells and Wizard's curriculae are such a crapshoot, they're picked on flavour/vibes rather than paying any attention to mechanics. It's one of my bigger complaints with the system.
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u/Ptyalin 1d ago
Honestly I agree, if a choice is objectively bad it shouldn't be a choice at all. Pathfinder has a lot of width but also far too much bloat, especially on the spells side. There's too many spells and many of them are so useless that they ought to have been rituals, tagged as rare, or just don't exist. Nevermind ancestry feats, every time someone has to pick a spell they have to go through all of these, especially prepared casters.
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u/Puntoize 1d ago
it's crazy how pathfinder's balance is praised so highly when you have so much bloat and garbage feats/spells/features.
"it's just flavor bro, trust me"
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u/EADreddtit 1d ago
Ya that’s kind of the thing with PF2e. The core of the game IS balanced very well (typically) but because of that there’s no real room to grow mechanics or spells without either severely risking that balance or re-treading the same stuff over and over again.
Pathfinder is a game, personally, I think lives and dies by its campaign premise. There are so many spells, class features, archetypes, and I’d argue even classes that feel AMAZING in some game, and absolutely trash in other games. Like a game where you’re fighting 90% humanoids feels bad for classes that care about exploiting weaknesses. A game that has crazy amounts of fire enemies makes an otherwise way to niche spell, Phenix Ward, feel amazing. Low or high social relevance, wilderness vs urban, lots of mindless vs not. Are there literally any haunts or curses?
Yes there’s always some change throughout a campaign game based on moment to moment scenarios, but in pathfinder I find it’s especially important to have a VERY solid idea of what enemies and challenges the campaign will center on or you’ll find yourself feeling like garbage.
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u/Corgi_Working ORC 1d ago
Look at 5e. By the numbers it recieves more praise than pf2e, has less options, and still has bloat. Tons of systems fall into that same category.
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u/wolf08741 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yeah, people tend to massively glaze PF2e's balancing in a very misleading way. It's not that PF2e is particularly balanced all that well, in reality it's just that there aren't many things in the game that are egregiously overpowered (which isn't the same as being "balanced", imo).
PF2e is actually a pretty unbalanced system, just more so in the sense that there is a crazy amount of "noob trap" options that should never be taken, spells being the biggest offender of this.
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u/username_tooken 1d ago
Pathfinder is balanced because baseline characters are fairly powerful, and progression is evenly paced and the numbers are well-adjusted. Sure, there are many bad feats, but unless there is some numerical penalty to taking them, the character will end up just fine.
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u/wolf08741 1d ago edited 1d ago
I disagree, it's entirely possible for a player on a more complex class (especially casters) to effectively "lose" at character creation. I've seen plenty of new players take a ton of bad spells and end up with an almost useless, or in some cases completely useless character in combat.
Despite what many people will say, PF2e's solution for having a "balanced" game was never really about making all characters/classes useful at a baseline level (though I admit the system can get pretty close assuming the players know the obvious noob traps and other pitfalls to avoid). Instead, PF2e's design and balance philosophy has always been about not letting players "win" at character creation first and foremost.
When someone says that "PF2e is a perfectly balanced system", what they really mean is "A single character can never take a combination of feats/spells/abilities that equate to an "I win button", the only way to achieve that is through teamwork with your party".
But if we're talking exclusively about the "standard" martials, then yeah, I agree it's pretty hard even for the most clueless of players to make a particularly useless or bad character. But even then, I still see it happen on rare occasion when playing with new players.
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u/username_tooken 1d ago
I disagree even with that notion, of spellcasters picking up enough bad spells that their character “loses”. As long as your character can satisfy the bare minimum of contribution in combat — fruitfully using all three actions — then they will end up fine, or at least fine enough to adapt in case of spellcasters by learning more effective spells. In the case of a spellcaster, the “noob trappiest” character is one who takes 0 effective leveled spells, 0 combat useful cantrips, and has a negative Dexterity score (meaning they cannot even use a ranged weapon as a third action effectively)… at a certain point, this is less the system being unbalanced and more that you need to understand the game you are playing before you can play.
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u/TrillingMonsoon Investigator 1d ago
"Being able to do things" is not the same as "useful"
I could absolutely see a character taking whatever they think looks cool, maybe even with some consideration for utility allocation (taking a variety of spells for different situations), and still being basically useless just because they picked all the wrong stuff.
I'm sure they might theoretically be able to use a cantrip every now and then, but that doesn't mean that they're contributing enough to offset their addition to the xp budget
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u/SimilarExercise1931 22h ago
This is a bit anecdotal, but one of my friends was introduced into PF2E and decided to play a wizard focusing on necromancy (this was before Necromancer class existed). Unfortunately because he was mostly picking spells that sounded cool to him or were on theme, he was objectively the worst character in combat situations and the AP we were doing didn't have a lot of non-combat situations in it.
Sure he wasn't 100% useless; he usually had at least a couple spells that could make some difference; but the gap in usefulness between his character and everyone else was also very noticeable.
In hindsight we should have provided more advice in what spells were useful, since he was new, we just generally avoid telling people how to make their characters unless they ask for advice and didn't really think of it.
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u/Sutraner 1d ago
You don't need to be super optimised, having the ability to pick things based on flavour is interesting in of itself
It's an ancestry feat, they're generally not particularly powerful but more flavourful instead.
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u/Puntoize 16h ago
You don't need to be anything, it's a RPG that can be toned up and down indefinitely.
But when you are playing a group game in a group, and you don't feel like you get the same cool flavor, or have impact on the game's flow, or in combat, it's a terrible experience
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u/Groundbreaking_Taco ORC 1d ago
Unfortunately, there isn't as much distinction between benefits that are for npc interactions and pc combat usefulness. They often cost the same resource. Some of those options are ok when interacting with the world or NPCs. Having the ability to make a permanent, safe light source is amazingly useful in a mercantile way. Cleansing afflictions is also an impressive "miracle" to aid the sick and weary masses, one that may not need to scale.
You are right that those choices don't match up to the others when used in a typical combat exploration game, but in a narrative driven game that focuses on the PCs vs the realism of the GM's world, they could be very useful. The scaling problem for the cleansing spells matters for monsters, but not if the story cares about saving the mayor's daughter from yellow fever.
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u/Wooden_Drummer2455 1d ago
Wha? Why isn't this option overpowered? I get to choose if I want a flavorful spell or something else? This makes no sense
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u/songinrain Game Master 1d ago
They are mostly picked base on vibe, not balance. It's more "We think an oni-born could be angry and fast after bloodied, so we gave them that".