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Oracles+
Publisher: Paizo
by Elmo K. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 05/28/2023 04:26:41

Having bought, read through and played some of these, I am afraid the quality of this one doesn’t feel to be on par with the witches + or something I could call a well thought out supplement. There are several issues here;

MYSTERIES

The new mysteries especially feel very separate from the original ones and not in a good way.

Most of them give permanent, massive and constant debuffs to the oracle that are applicable to almost every situation in combat and outside of it. Since the curse doesn’t go down below from the minor stage after a focus spell is cast, meaning someone with these mysteries would have to play with constantly deafened character, constantly frightened one, constantly sickened one which affects everything the oracles would want to do outside of combat for the day. Especially the deafened one just closes one person out of any social encounters even to the extent of observing them properly.

Compared to Paizo ones, the downsides (especially minor ones) could always be worked around. Battle oracle doesn’t suffer penalties when they play in a way their mystery encourages, and only affects combat. Tempest only affects situations with non-magical lights around you. Time makes you enfeebled which affects rolls you don’t want to do in the first place as Time oracle etc.

And unlike the universal downsides of the mysteries, the benefits rarely are so. Beast oracles gain imprecise scent which really doesn’t matter against good amount of enemies, nor do they get much support or incentive to using said unarmed attacks due to not getting any + to hit bonuses until major stage while being terribly behind in + to hit progression to everyone else. Fate oracles turn crit failures on fear effects into failures, which won’t happen every fight but even when they do, the curse already makes them frightened 2 (which wouldn’t stack) making the effect somewhat redundant in most scenarios. Reveries just receive a permanent penalty to perception checks which again discourages out of combat maneuvering constantly.

I have to call out beast oracle specifically in terms of balance; Bestial Howl is very much overtuned with some technical design errors. It has the incapacitation for one despite not including any kind of incapacitating effect. At a base level, its better than Fear spell at 4th level, except you get hands on it even faster and it doesn't use a spell slot. Barbarians meanwhile can get a level 10 feat to AoE demoralize everyone within same radius 4 levels later, and one level of fear lower.

Frost Oracle is the only one I wouldn’t have much design complaints (might be partly due to their mystery only affecting encounter mode). Their focus spells leaves quite a bit to be desired unfortunately.

FEATS

1) Trances (all); Using a trance disrupts all spellcasting without cursebound trait (something that Oracle can use in very limited amounts). This kind of brings the question what the oracle is meant to do once they enter a trance. The minor effects are hardly ever worth the downside (or even the opportunity cost of entering a trance), while the major effects replicate nigh gamebreaking effects. My players were actually really excited about the trances until they read the trait, and realized after going into a trance they pretty much became passive objects that buff others and get stuck there. I think the author has a bit different image of how often cursebound spells can be cast; Assuming you are already on minor level, you can only cast one spell during trance, and they usually are 1 action spells. A nice concept, that in practice ends up as one action to enter a trance into not participating in the game for the remainer of combat.

2) Inexplicable Knowledge (lvl 6). This one has to some extent the same design flaw as certain Paizo-made feats. Recall Knowledge is a secret check and you are not supposed to know the result of it, and there is a chance the information is false. This feat makes everyone practically immune to critical failures on recall knowledge checks since they will know that they crit failed by the virtue of not gaining a status bonus.

3) Intuitive Maneuver (lvl 8) might be the single strongest feat in the game on certain builds. Any oracle with a reach weapon with a trip or shove trait (like a whip for instance, since Battle Oracles can now use martial weapons baseline) can interrupt movement of any foe approaching from range, canceling their movement and dropping them prone. Any attempts to get up from the ground on future turns are immediately met with another trip since ‘Stand Up’ has the move trait. And due to the trance itself, the oracle has a very high likelihood in succeeding on said trip actions. Essentially, as a reaction you can take 2 actions away from an enemy that will extend to more if they cannot use those on their turn.

Gnomish Flickmace was considered a massive problem that had to be errata’d since it could do this on a crit. This feat does the same effect on a success, and with a status bonus on the roll.

ERRATA

Spell lists

Adding spells to expand the possibilities of expressing mystery thematics is a good idea. They do intrude on the sorcerer territory a little bit by the virtue of being straight added to repertoire to give them extremely large spell availability at all times when I think just making certain spells available to them could have done the trick. However they are not without their oversights, and most of theme seem to be oddly targeted at a certain mystery that was already having a bad time.

Ancestor’s Oracles gain Spiritual Guardian on 5th level. Casting Spiritual Guardian has a requirement of needing a deity, which oracles do not have. They can opt on level 4 to gain a deity, but giving a baseline feature that requires picking certain optional feats tends to not go without bitterness.

Domain changes

I shall leave it to individual opinions on whether soul fits better than death to ancestor oracle. The downside of this change though regardless of one’s opinion is that Ancestor’s Oracle has been quite widely considered to be the weakest of the oracle mysteries if not the weakest subclass in the game. Essentially, they suffer from a flaw where they are encouraged to make strikes without having anything that supports them being in melee or using strikes over spells even with penalties and bonuses calculated. Death Domain’s focus spell allowed them to gain a flow of temp hp that made being on close range manageable if suboptimal.

The rest, seems solid. Giving Lightning domain to Tempest seems especially fitting.

Focus Spells

I do like the change on Life Link. But if we are buffing the underpowered focus spells why was the list of buffs confined to just Life link?

This pops up a lot now in this but if one is making errata to oracle to an extent where existing focus spells are buffed one could consider not even addressing Ancestral Touch is a design error on its own. The spell is known to be a worse version of base demoralize action, with lower chance to succeed, touch range, focus point cost. The only real downside of base demoralize is once per target limitation and linguistic trait. Meanwhile most other mysteries gain access to immensely powerful effects on level 1 such as causing drained while almost all of them gain some value even if enemy succeeds on a save. On average, assuming the 50% chance to succeed, it deals 1.25 mental damage which is hardly a factor.

...and considering all this, the ancestor’s mostly took more hits without anything compensate. Any particular reason why?

Conclusions

Overall I like the base ideas and concepts presented. However, their execution does not really make this a viable product to be applied to a pf2e game without heavy scrutiny or modifications.

EDIT: After the most recent updates, most of the stuff here is fixed and updated to functional. Great job!



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
Oracles+
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Creator Reply:
Hi Elmo! I am sorry that you were disappointed by the book. We do and have made adjustments to supplements based on feedback, typically when people contact us via discord, so in future please feel free to come there so that we may have answer some of your points and address any valid concerns, and if we find problems, change them up with an update! That said I will do my best to respond: 1. In response to mysteries giving constant debuffs and that paizo offers work arounds, I'm not sure if you just mean Fate Oracle (which does have a harsh debuff, but an extremely strong benefit) but that one in particular I've had the experience of playing alongside and the avoid doom reaction and its comprehensive kit helps compensate for those things. Other mysteries don't have particularly harsh debuffs, we find. The deafened from song is brought up, but the fact that it doesn't apply to the cast a spell activity is omitted, which means the defeaned condition while still a notable downside doesn't inhibit their ability to do their main role. Most of the mysteries follow the same design paradigms of other oracles (beast in particular only affects linguistic abilities, so it falls into the "avoidable" category you mention). On the other hand, Paizo Mysteries such as Ancestral (devastating minor benefit), Flame (pseudo-blindness) and Ash (-1 to fort saves and -10 feet movement) are about the same level. 2. Beast Oracle gets refreshing temporary Hit Points if they make Strikes. I'd say that's a pretty strong incentive to be making them. With the ability to power themselves up, I think its sitting in a decent spot in that in a single encounter it can gain up to 40 Temp HP, which is nothing to sneeze at! 3. Bestial Howl - As you point out, the ability has Incapacitation, which means that it's a far cry weaker than Terrifying Howl in most instances (especially if they have Terrifying Resistance). In fact if we compare it to Terrifying Howl + Terrifying Retreat, it actually comes out a bit behind. The Fleeing condition is so strong, however, that not giving it incapacitation would be very dangerous. 4. Trances - I see there might be a disconnect on how Trances can be useful. Trances aren't meant to be "encounter long" things people enter as a default assumption, that's why they can afford the budget they have in the first place because you are by extension locking out your spellcasting. Exiting this trance is actually the same as Sleepwalker Dedication's trance, and its meant to be something you can do when you don't want to cast spells or when you want to rotate into or out of your spells (after all a trance is a special concentrative state). This is to give Oracles variation on how to approach combat, and in the case of Oracles that prefer attacking (Beast/Battle) or Sustaining (Flaming Sphere, Spiritual Weapon) they can serve as a good means to vary your approach to combat. 5. Inexplicable Knowledge - While I see your point on RK being a secret check and thus not knowing if your RK was successful, Known Weakness is another example of an ability that offers bonuses after a successful Recall Knowledge, and as such is consistent with the power level of similar feats. 6. Intuitive Maneuver - While strong, the feat has a lot of limits too. For one, it requires you be in a Trance, which as mentioned up thread is hard to do. For two, it's on an Oracle, which will probably struggle to keep their Athletics at high enough levels to make a meaningful use of this without a mystery that allows them to pump their STR accordingly outside of cases like Battle or Beast. Even with that, the "10 feet" would mean they are using a Reach weapon with Trip, which would mean a Martial weapon, which means that in order to pull this off you're spending 3 class feats, in a trance to use it, and putting yourself in the thick of the enemies to get a shot at a Trip which only triggers on a move. I won't say it's a bad feat by any stretch, but I think the assessment here on how valuable it actually is given the circumstances needed to pull it off is off. (As an aside, the Flail Crit Spec does not allow a save. A no-save prone condition that includes the damage of a Strike + reach was the reason it was downtuned on damage). 7. Spiritual Guardian - Fair point on this spell with not having a deity. We had discussed putting an asterisk on it and stating "a deity that matches one of your oracle domains", but I'll concede not having it may leave too much up to GM interpretation. I'll consider a change here, thank you! 8. Lifelink was actually targeted because of the weird scaling. You may have a point on Ancestral Touch, so I will consider giving that one a look. Ancestral wasn't targeted because the general sentiment around it was considered to be that it was in a good spot. I understand you feel the death domain swap may be a blow to its power, but given Oracles don't by default even have those spells, it doesn't seem to be a nerf to Ancestor over all. That said, we will give it another look. Overall, I am sorry that you felt we didn't hit the mark for you on this one. We're very happy with the praise you do drop in the review, and glad you liked the Tempest domain gaining lightning for example. It's the little things that make our day! We'll try to do better, and maybe get some touchups in the book. Thanks for your feedback!
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DDAL04-02 The Beast (5e)
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
by Elmo K. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 03/09/2022 13:50:07

This was without a doubt the worst experience I had in D&D, and it was with a party and DM I have played for a long time. Here is where everything went to garbage bin.

Our party is at the campsite with Laslov's corpse. An elf approaches us (as in the module). Our party has been warned of the blizzard, and things will get nasty. The elf implies that she might have seen something, and we get a nat 20 persuasion roll. The elf tells what she witnessed, and our party gets verification to their suspicions that the kill was made by a werewolf. And that the man had attacked the woman, who turned at in self defense killed it.

Now we are a level 2 party (as suggested by module) and we have 0 silvered weapons. DM threw us a dagger from the bonfire when we figured this out. For our party, we share one dagger that is the only way we can deal damage to the werewolf (this would not have been the case anymore at level 3, or had we been encourage to silver weapons. Alas, not enough gold, nor indications given we should use all our gold to seek a blacksmith and pool it for silvered weapon to one person. Assuming there even is a blacksmith who can silver weapons.)

Now a party with more anti-werewolf built composition might have found a way to deal with this. But now the party possesses information; A woman was attacked and she killed her attacker in self-defense. Also, she is going to be extremely difficult. Even if we did kill her, it is hinted we'd be stuck in blizzard which might or might not be lethal. Why on earth would the party go out to seek near unkillable foe, especially when the case is closed, and the party is given no indication the werewolf might even be of danger to anyone else since she only killed in self defence. We even got the furs here so the innkeep can be saved from the Vistani problem. Like all our party just emphatized with her. Maybe we could talk to her to return peacefully, but if we wanted to side with her there would be no reason to encourage her to go to back to the village. But if she wanted to kill us, we'd die for certain since we had no ways of fighting back. Unless DM removed her silver immunity. Which would break all the laws of how werewolfs work.

Since there was neither motivation nor means to go after the werewolf, our party returned to the village and spent rest of the session twindling thumbs, and called the adventure there. The session laster for a bit over an hour. Unfortunately I bought out this thing in the bundle since it was hinted the adventures are connected, but this turn of events basically got our characters stuck at 2 and without whatever imaginary plot hook there would have been to stay in the village.



Rating:
[1 of 5 Stars!]
DDAL04-02 The Beast (5e)
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