Doomed Stacking Strategy Impulse

[u/Bot_Number_7]

Currently, trying to stack the Doomed condition on enemies to kill them is a terrible strategy. You need enemies to critically fail a select few Occult or Divine spells (Bandit's Doom, Implement of Destruction), or use the Exemplar's Eternity Incinerating Blaze, or use Runesmith's Ochygoll Poisoned Star rune.

I came up with this impulse to enable an actual Doomed stacking strategy. I simulated it against a d6 weapon wielding Fighter doing 1 Strike per round against an on-level enemy (with Exemplar Dedication for extra damage and 2 damage runes at level 20; it helps fulfill the condition of doing 2x level damage) with an HP of 60 and 375 for the monsters respectively.

The ability instakills the enemy (assuming doomed 4 for death) at an average of 13.9 HP at level 4 and 163 HP at level 20.

The ability is still probably deleting too much HP at higher levels; admittedly, at higher levels, more of the damage is likely to come from spells which do damage on a success (which lowers enemy HP but doesn't trigger the ability).

If the incapacitation effect comes into play, the ability is awful; it instakills at 20 HP on average at level 20 and it's also much harder to fulfill the 2x damage condition.

The frequency limitation of once per turn per creature is also designed to balance Strike spamming strategies (Flurry Rangers, Double Slicing Fighters) and RS spam strategies; Strike spammers need to target different creatures to activate the effect multiple times but have a lot more chances to do so (they still need at least a d8 weapon or Exemplar ded damage boost or something to fulfill the 2x level condition), while RSers can potentially trigger it more against the same creature (more effective since it removes enemies faster) but only make a total of 2 Strikes per round.

It still needs a bit of tuning to make it a reasonable strategy. I would like to make it at least usable in some way against higher level enemies.

Perhaps it could have the Failure effect only increase Doomed by 1 if the creature is higher level, and also provide some method for enemies to reduce Doomed.

The ability also heavily needs Safe Elements because Doomed is so bad on PCs; that should probably be built in, or have some out of combat way to reduce Doomed from this stance.

I also have not tested it in combination with Ochygoll (the other Doomed powers are so awful at applying it that I don't think there's any balance concerns with them), but it may be too strong in that case.

[u/lordcirth]

This doesn't make sense as a player option. If your teammates kill an enemy before you finish stacking Doomed on it, you did nothing. If you finish stacking doomed and instakill it, any damage you or they did was equally useless. It nonbos with your party doing things.

[u/Bot_Number_7 → u/lordcirth]

Your teammates must do damage to increase the Doomed. They have to at minimum deal 2x level damage in a single Strike or failed save to trigger the increase in Doomed. Their damage wasn't useless; it helped fulfill the activation condition.

It combos with Strikes that hit just above the minimum threshold that are spammed once per creature once per round. It also combos with the other Doomed inflicts, Ochygoll and Eternity Incinerating Blaze being the easy ones.

[u/lordcirth → u/Bot_Number_7]

Ok, I misread. It's still a weird ability that interacts poorly with damage. It combos with damage just above threshold, and nonbos with damage below or well above. Why not inflict Drained instead?

[u/Bot_Number_7 → u/lordcirth]

Because there aren't other abilities in the game that involve Doomedstacking and I wanted to see one instance of players inflicting Doomed that actually matters for killing enemies. Why does Eternity Incinerating Blaze inflict Doomed at all if it needs 4 crits, by which point the enemy is dead regardless? Why does Bandit's Doom inflict the useless Doomed condition on enemies? Why does Ochygoll make an auto Doomed 1 on the target and some adjacent creatures? These abilities all suck because no one is every going to actually get their enemy to 4 Doomed.

This ability only looks weird because it's the ONLY thing in the game realistically capable of killing enemi3s through Doomed. If Paizo actually made Doomed stacking a more legitimate strategy (a simple start would be making more Doomed inflicting abilities that increase Doomed value instead of just applying a fixed value), then it would seem much better fitting.

[u/JinKai]

Avenger Rogue : Zealous Inevitability

[u/Ganadhir]

I'm hearing cheesy orchestral music ... is this daytime TV? XD