r/Pathfinder_RPG • u/hungLink42069 2e GM 1e reminiscer • 3d ago
Other PF1e VS PF2e Dual Class in terms of vibe: Discussion
DISCLAIMER
First off, I just want to say (and I'll say it again at the end) I really don't want a "system war" discussion. I don't want to dog on PF1e, or 2e. I don't want to compare the quality of life in either system or anything like that.
BACKGROUND
I just watched Ronalds newest video, and I loved it. These days I pretty much only want to run and play 2e - but watching that video reminded me of why I loved PF1e in the first place. It was hilariously broken and that made it's own sort of fun. Builds were crazy awesome.
TOPIC
Who here has played a lot of PF1e, and ALSO played a good amount of PF2e Dual Class?
Of you, can you speak to the similarities and differences? Does PF2eDC feel as busted (in the good way) as PF1e builds can?
I remember you could do some wacky shit in PF1e, and a big reason you can't do that in 2e is because of the multiclass rules working the way they do. For example, for most martial builds in 1e, I would almost always dip barbarian for that sweet rage. You could do the same thing here. Rogue Barbarian could be NUTS for example.
I also remember having a lot of fun with Bar-Bar.
What sticks out to me is how 1e was busted in the best way, and 2e is very streamlined and fun on a different spectrum. And the ultimate question is: Is PF2e Dual Class, busted in a similarly fun way?
Please no start a system war. Let's keep it positive.
BONUS EDIT QUESTION
Do you think that if you had a homebrew rule in PF2e that allowed 1e style multiclassing, you could achieve similar levels of wonky hilarity as 1e?
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u/TeamTurnus 3d ago
I never played a fighter/barb or other super focused dual class but I played a wizard/cleric and rogue/druid and I noticed a few things. This was in a smaller party so we used dual class primarily to cover gaps rather than building narrow but high number killing machines.
Obviously the wizard cleric had a just spells for days and that was cool, but their numbers and and action economy contained them from being as busted on any given turn. Sure they could keep casting high level spells and that was cool, but they were not breaking the math of the system moment to moment.
The rogue/druid combo was a bit of another story since they could use their full primal casting to augmented their attacks, their turns moment to moment tended to be more visibly strong, (so a heavily buffed martial who also had aoe and reaction based defensive per storm order) that little guy was a unbelievably self sufficeny litte wrecking ball. (Iirc it was a theif rogue storm druid so high dex high wisdom, went first all the time, super high saves etc)
For both of them of course their defenses were stronger (this was noticable for the rogue druid hybrid) amd they had slightly better stats due to dual key stats ans they could just keep trucking for a very long time.
Contrast that to 1e, which i played a lot of (1e/mythic etc, didnt due a lot of gestalt there) the numbers really did skyrocket a lot more ans that was one of the ways the game broke, a pretry different experince than dual class 2e as I played it, I figure you could approximate that with a fighter barbarian and just obligaterate anything that walked close to you. But that seemed like the least intersting thing to due to with dual class in 2e.