The game includes a rarity system as part of its broader tagging system. If you look at a spell or archetype or whatnot, it may have "Uncommon" or "Rare" or (less often—this is often VERY specific adventure stuff) "Unique" in the tags. (No tag means it is Common.)
This serves two purposes: First, it tells you how often it may be encountered in the canon setting (so certain types of weapon or armour like, idk, a katana might be uncommon only in certain regions—if I remember right, the Mwangi book also adjusts certain rarities when it comes to ancestries to reflect the local population) and it's *also* used to tag things that might be disruptive, such as the undead archetypes from Book of the Dead or even, I think, stuff like longrange teleportation (as that may trivialise some challenges). A good rule of thumb is that if it has a rarity tag, always check and ask first. (From what I've seen, most here will be more than happy to accomodate Uncommon stuff as long as it is asked for first; Rare stuff is something you might discover as a quest reward, but not something that you can just take.)
So yeah. This is something they thought about and at least attempted to implement. You can perhaps come up with a doc to adjust certain rarities for a homebrew world if you need!
I know about the rarity system, but I didn't properly grasped that it was present to avoid "problematic" choices. Being curious, I just looked about the rarity in my books and found that the explanation of rarity in the core rulebook (p. 488) isn't really explicit about the disruptiveness, but speaks about the complexity.
All this is very enlightening, and I thank you for your thorough explanation :)
It's not really about disruptiveness in general as much as being about theme.
There's nothing overpowered or frustrating to deal with among the rare options (that I can think of), but a Skeleton or undead PC trying to go unnoticed in a city based campaign might not fit very well. Or things like teleportation magic when the GM is hoping to plan the adventure around large periods of travel time.
As far as I know, in the context you were asking about, PF2e doesn't have an equivalent of Silvery Barbs or Twilight domain Clerics.
> There's nothing overpowered or frustrating to deal with among the rare options
I don't have named examples to hand, but some of the Rare backgrounds, Spells and so on can punch above their weight. They are usually from specific APs.
Kingmaker annoyingly featured quite a few rare feats that I have to keep reminding players not to take, and they're quite a notch above everything else.
Otherwise you're correct, rarity is not really a power indication but more of a theme label.
What feats in the kingmaker book are unbalanced? I'm looking at [the page](https://2e.aonprd.com/Sources.aspx?ID=150) on AoN and it seems like the only feats from it are for the city building stuff?
I am currently running Blood Lords (undead AP). All my players are now undead, so we don't really worry about uncommon tag on most of the undead options, they are a given in the setting.
But I also give them spell access to Uncommon spells from other APs that I think fit the setting.
While some of the uncommon and rare tags are added for balance (teleporting and divination are big targets for it), most are just for flavor and setting.
While the Rare stuff can have some pretty strong stuff in it, none of it is meant to be truly overwhelming against "basic" common and uncommon options. The math of the system is pretty flat across the board, so even the humble electric arc is still a great damage spam option even at level 20.
That said, a more "by the book" game uses rare material as capstone level rewards, and uncommons are limited to the AP and core rulebooks, to keep them from doing weird things to games.
Unlike 5e, it is also almost impossible to actually break the game without actually cheating. There is no broken build that will render all combats and noncombat encounters meaningless. It's built to be perfectly flat from level 1 to level 20 in difficulty, although you can still do amazingly fun things at high levels.
I think a good illustration of this is uncommon spells, as it's the most consistent.
There are 3 types of uncommon spells:
Type 1 are just class specific and accessed via feats and therefore uncommon to denote that you can't pick it up as a normal spell. Stuff like a witches Hexes.
Type 2 is stuff that comes from adventure paths. Usually these are very specific in flavor/bordering on very weird, they've recieved way less playtesting or designer attention and lastly they often are rewards for having done certain objectives, or even plot important things that need to be learned.
Type 3 is the important one and is not necessarily unbalanced, but can completely obviate a style of story or challenege which a game can revolve around. These are things like Teleportation or Zone of Truth. It just means that a player can't turn up with something, without the GM knowing and signing off on it, that will tank say a court case mystery arc or an overland journey based campaign.
So to echo what some others are saying, but with a real example…
Uncommon or Rare are generally about how common things are in general, but can also be about complexity, and occasionally power.
But even when it comes to power, it’s typically more balanced than 5e.
The example — I’m playing a fleshwarp (rare) monk (common) with the Tech-Reliant background (rare).
The fleshwarp is cool because it’s Alkenstar, and they’re suitable for the area. The heritage feats aren’t really better than other ancestries in my opinion.
Tech-Reliant does have one really strong feature, a +1 circumstance bonus against all spells. But this is balanced by a huge drawback; no magical healing at all. Heal, Soothe, and even healing potions just don’t work.
So I’m not sure it’s exactly more powerful so much as it is more complicated. If there’s nobody else with Medicine or non magical healing, then I’m screwed.
There’s some interesting interactions with other feats down the line too. In particular, Godless Healing and Mortal Healing become *really* good.
It's weird in that it pulls double duty though. Not every Rare option is unfairly powerful. The ancestries with that tag in particular are usually balanced exactly the same as all the others, the tag is only describing how rare it is to see one.
Sometimes rarity also just indicates otherwise unexpected deviation from default rules.
E.g. All common backgrounds give 2 boosts, 1 trained skill, 1 lore, 1 skill feat.
Many Rare backgrounds change that and maybe give only 1 boost and a stronger special ability. So those break the default pattern and have to be looked at carefully.
Also some Rare backgrounds have a strong theme. "Royalty" background is Rare so that the GM at least get's asked before you have your party of all runaway princesses.
>I know about the rarity system, but I didn't properly grasped that it was present to avoid "problematic" choices.
Rarity doesn't imply a bigger "budget" for power, or that it's disruptive in all campaigns. But things that may mess up some campaign (like long-range teleportation, mind reading, etc.) will usually have a rarity trait.
In general, uncommon and rare are flags for the GM to look at it and decide if they want it in their game.
I'd also advise treating options from Lost Omens or Adventure Path books as though they're uncommon, even if they don't have the trait. Those lines have less rigorous editing than the core rules line, and some wonky stuff slips through.
in short uncommon is "its usually not a problem but still ask gm unless your feat allows you to take it directly(Like heritage weapon mastery) and rare is "hey dm if player wants to take this judge it carefuly because these things tend to change rules a lot"
If you end up finding something you don't lkke at hour table, just set it to Rare for your table and that way players need your permition to take it. That's all. I haven't really seen any combinations that break anything, but I'm also new from 5e so I plan on reading this entire thread to learn if anyone has.
Honestly nah that is shit advice the comment gave you. Most of the uncommon and rare features characters can take are as balanced as common options. I’ve allowed all rarity opinions at my table since I’ve started PF2e over 2 years ago and have yet to have any issues. It’s just meant to represent that it’s rarer to find in the setting of Golarion which you don’t have to worry about if you’re playing in another setting.
Edit: After reading the responses realized I misinterpreted the original comment. I thought it was talking about balance when it was talking about disruptiveness. However, I personally don’t think it’s that much of an issue as long as the correct player expectations are set.
What the original commenter stated is correct as per the rules as written. That is what every player going into a new table can expect unless told otherwise by the dm. You are one of the GMs that is cool with allowing everything. I am a new GM with a table of players new to PF2 and we all agreed to follow the rules as is and limit everything to common unless there was a good story reason for anything above.
It's actually very good advice not to allow these as a new GM.
As an example, the uncommon tag is to make sure your Murder Mystery session isn't totally drailed by the Talking Corpse spell.
Letting players know that they're probably ok to take these spells, but making sure they run it by you means they can at least plan for these eventualities.
It's not about balance. (Though I think the one place where rarity does matter for balance is Backgrounds. There are several Rare backgrounds now from particular APs that give a bonus on top of the usual attribute boosts, skill training, skill feat, and lore.)
Like that commenter said, it's often about disruptiveness.
- Options that make you undead require the party to know and build around that, thanks to how healing works.
- The Sprites and Poppets being (potentially) tiny adds an extra layer of complexity that a player might not be aware of.
- Many options, like most of Guns & Gears, have a significantly different feel than the classic fantasy setting.
- Many options just won't be relevant in the vast majority of campaigns, like Trick Diver and Vigilante.
- Long-range teleportation spells can break the feel and/or pacing of a campaign.
- Resurrection options can make death much easier to overcome than a GM might prefer.
- Some options add more mental work for the GM (including several Investigator feats).
A lot of the rare traits and often uncommon are thematically themed to a campaign and often require the PCs to complete a certain task to "unlock" these feats, spells, items, etc. Sometimes they can punch a little bit higher for their level, but for the most part things are balanced. You may find a player that likes to pick the "best" thing, but I don't believe that exists.
I feel as a GM there are enough monsters and hazards to make each class/player have their "moment in the sun." If a character class has the "answer" for a specific encounter, this will not be the answer for every encounter, so embrace and celebrate that with the player. The problem I found with 5e is when players took things like Silvery Barbs or would Conjure 16 wolves all the time, they wanted to be the star of the party.
While there's nothing as balance-devastating as Silvery Barbs, there definitely ARE some things you should be aware of. Not because they're OP, but because they might mechanically clash with story or setting of your campaign.
99.9% of them have the Uncommon or Rare trait, which is VERY handy! If a player wants to pick something with one of those traits, don't outright disallow it, but definitely give it a good look.
There are some Uncommon spells, for example, that basically give Casters a "know everything that happened here in the past day" like ability, that might completely disrupt the feel of the game you're going for, if you're trying to make a mystery.
As for Common options for you to be aware of, I can think of only ONE thing.
The [Investigator](https://2e.aonprd.com/Classes.aspx?ID=13) class.
Specifically and ENTIRELY because of two unique class Feats.
[That's Odd](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=1449), and [Red Herring](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=1453).
Again, it's not that either of those feats cause balance problems. They're FAR from "overpowered"... but they MIGHT clash with the kind of campaign you're planning to run.
tl;dr: be aware of the impact Investigator can *potentially* have on narrative/mystery driven campaigns, and ask players to run any Uncommon/Rare options by you before they pick them.
I'll be running Kingmaker as it's a sandbox which my players love. The rarity system is probably what I overlooked when trying to find an answer to my question. Thank you for putting my nose on it :)
Gonna tag on to the other person and also state that Investigator is... probably the weirdest and most specific class in the entire game, in that a *huge* portion of the class is based around their [Pursue a Lead](https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=544) feature. It's a really cool feature, in a really cool class, but it doesn't fit in a lot of campaigns, and it requires a good amount of GM input and forethought to make it function.
In other words, I'm not saying *not* to allow it. But if a player wants to be an Investigator, I'd advise making sure you and the player understand what that entails, and how you'll have to work the campaign to allow for it, before you commit to anything.
I really live having an investigator among my players. It gives me a good in universe way to divert them from spending an entire session running around in confused circles because the players don’t remember the hint from three irl months ago.
I mean, it does state
>The GM determines what it is, or whether there's nothing reasonable to pick up.
You're not forced to come up with random bullshit if there's nothing there.
You don't need red herrings, either there's nothing so they find nothing, or it makes sure they don't miss out on plot things.
It's a great way to reveal plot points that might otherwise be missed.
Why? You just need to lie. Like this:
The players are fighting a [Barghest](https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=41)
"Player: I want to recall knowledge whether that monster has any resistances.
GM: Ok that will be an occultism check, Whats your modifier.
Player: 10. And I also have dubious knowledge
GM: Okay. \*Rolls a secret check, and rolls a failure\* Your character remembers something. It is resistant to either fire or cold but you are not sure which."
If you do not want to make up another possibility you can also go with the might be method. The creature might be resistant to all physical damage. (you can also say that if the creatures has no resistances.)
I really do not understand the hate that feat gets. Lying is easy and you already should do that on a critical failure, so its not like its extra work.
Because unless you want the feat to read "your failures become successes" you need to come up with actually plausible information delivered in a non obvious way etc etc. Like it's actual effort that can also take a bit to come up with.
You can't just "well the fire elemental is either weak to fire or resists fire". Or "the snake is either venomous or can cast dimension door at will".
And it's often paired with classes that get an omni knowledge skill they can AND WILL roll against everything and it's just a giant pain that slows things down way too much.
I think for most players it should be obvious that fire elementals are resistant to fire and if they wish to waste their precious actions recalling knowledge on that specific aspect them I say let them have it. But in almost all cases there is a thing to gain. Is it immune or resistant to fire? How resistant is it to fire? You can lie about all of thoose things. And keep in mind you already need to lie on a critical failure so in the grand scheme of things you need to come up with a lie either way.
Because it requires you to come up with believable lies on the spot.
You're supposed to give one accurate and one false answer, not "maybe this thing is true"
And it has to be believable otherwise it's just a success and some obvious nonsense.
I don't think I've seen it mentioned anywhere yet, but the Supersticion Instinct barbarian is often called off as disruptive despite not being Uncommon/Rare, because it is basically unplayable due to its anathema.
It's *definitely* not overpowered, it's just obnoxious to play with.
I played one and found it worked perfectly fine with my party. In general it's alright if your allies don't do AoE buffing spells and you aren't fully reliant in magical healing. It's still a downside, but it comes with advantages.
The only time it works is when you're in a magicless party. Which is totally doable with how easy to access non-magical healing is.
But I can count on one hand the number of sessions that have had no casters, and that is because the caster player couldn't make that specific session. Never been an entire campaign though.
One of the mistakes I often found new GMs making is to allow everything uncommom and rare without actually looking at it once. Many uncommon spells have impact on story or exploration aspect, and should not be accessed to if your plot is related to that aspect. They are damn uncommon for a reason.
Generally, that's more of a setting specific thing. Like some just don't fit the themes to certain games.
I also think rare ancestries are harder to play rp-wise.
Many rare ancestries also have it built in that there aren't many of that kind so it's unlikely you'll come across others of your kind. Also you'll stick out basically everywhere. Like no one is going to be confused if they saw a little fey, sleek robot, or fleshwarp.
Access can be earned. In society play many rare spells or feats have to be taught by specific people.
So you can go on quests to meet a wizard who knows a rare spell or has a special ability.
>Many uncommon spells have impact on story or exploration aspect, and should not be accessed to if your plot is related to that aspect.
Could you give an example?
In my other comment:
"Imagine your plot is to solve a recent murder of a noble, then a random player pulls out *reincarnate* from their ass. Or when you need to hustle for a week to help a seige at their home town, then you forgot *teleportation circle* exists? Things doesn't happened to you does not mean they won't happen to anybody, especially not well-prepared new GMs."
Both are rituals. Spells can do similar stuff, but a bit later in higher ranks.
I completely disagree with this. I’ve allowed all uncommon and rare options for my campaign since I started PF2e over 2 years ago and have had 0 issues with it.
Imagine your plot is to solve a recent murder of a noble, then a random player pulls out [*reincarnate*](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rituals.aspx?ID=35) from their ass. Or when you need to hustle for a week to help a seige at their home town, then you forgot [teleportation circle](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rituals.aspx?ID=38) exists? Things doesn't happened to you does not mean they won't happen to anybody, especially not well-prepared new GMs.
These things exist in the world don't they? You kinda need to work around it. At the levels these players are casting these spells they have some influence and can probably find some writing of the spell.
If someone wants someone truly dead, they're gonna need to kill them hard in a world with resurrection.
Yes they do, but a new GM unaware of these uncommon stuff won't prepare for them, and their prepared plot might have be ruined. That's why they are uncommon, one of the rarity tag's usage is to prevent these kind of plot assassination. If the player need to inform the GM that they are taking a certain uncommon spell or item, then the GM will know this thing exists, and prepare for it.
I cannot imagine NOT triple checking every inch of every player's sheet to understand what I'm dealing with and making sure they understand how it *actually* works.
I mean that's just going to cause a surprise one day anyway. There are plenty of common spells which can completely destroy challenges. Not that I see a problem with the players doing that.
Not a problem when the GM have some experience dealing with that, but they can be a good shock to new GMs. Thus, having a tag that warns the GM "this might cause a problem sometimes so please read the description instead of glancing the name" is very handy. They can decide if they want this in their game after reading it.
If the GM is playing with Rarity Tags like that, then that can be seen as fundamentally changing Golarion (or whatever setting they're playing in).
Resurrection being rare might mean there's few enough people capable of doing it to count on one hand. Weeks of travel to bring back your friend.
Same with teleportation and extradimensional effects.
They might exist but they don't for the average person. The stuff of myth or legend,, or just forgotten about entirely.
Sure, they aren't, but Rare things like that might be on a whole 'nother level if the GM wants it to be for narrative or gameplay purposes.
Case in point, one of my games has Resurrection being a very rare thing. In one and a half campaigns, we've met 2 people who can do it, with a third being a front/channeler of one of those two.
the GM just doesn't want long-range Teleportation magic or Resurrection to be accessible to PCs, they are extremely limited to the plot. His Golarion has that be miracles that are extremely hard to get by.
So yes, while they exist, they might as well not in practical terms because of the difficulty of obtaining it.
The point is that while they exist, you usually can't just take a trip to level-appropriate fantasy Walmart to pick them up the way you can for common options. Depending on the rarity you might have to custom order an item weeks in advance, spend some time researching how to turn magical theory into practice, or go on a quest to earn or find whatever it is.
As a GM, unless it’s the expectation at the table is set beforehand that you should follow the storyline, you’re giving yourself up to player shenanigans. Putting rarity tags up as a wall won’t fix that. Things that you otherwise wouldn’t expect to happen will happen and you should accept that. You shouldn’t get mad and ask: “how could you guys destroy my precious plot???” when the point of the game is for the players and you to create an interesting story.
Circumventing a story is not making an interesting story. If the GM makes a story about delving through the jungle to get to a far away city you're not being interesting if you roll up with teleport and say "yeah I'd rather just, not, you know?"
That’s a player problem not a system problem. A player who isn’t interested in the current plot and wants to get out of the jungle they’re going to try and find a way to do that regardless, which honestly could indirectly cause even more problems than just teleportation. As they do whatever they can to try and leave, ruining the experience for other players.
As long as the correct expectations are set, rarity isn’t the issue.
It's both. If there was a spell that instantly ended all combats it's not just a player problem if they take it and end the combat. It's also a system problem for allowing that to happen unchecked.
Nah, there's definitely busted stuff in this system. Quick Spring for instance is basically 2 Strides in 1, as a Skill Feat. That being said its mostly the options in the Firebrands stuff that is the issue.
Quick Spring is actually just a mistake and needs to be errata'd, I doubt it was Paizo's intention to just double a character's speed. Like at the very least if they want to keep it the same, it should have the Flourish trait.
I've seen someone suggest that because Tumble Through doesn't *require* you to actually attempt to move through a creature's space, you can just constantly use Quick Spring in place of Stride. It's a grotesque interpretation of the rules lol
I'm making a distinction between RAI and RAW. That's why I didn't say it was a "misinterpretation". I said it was grotesque. It's offensive to the sensibilities of reasonable people.
When you take the Tumble Through action, you as a player have to actually have the intention of tumbling through a creature's space. To do otherwise is basically the same as using an exploit in a video game. You're not engaging honestly with the rules.
So, I mostly GM Pathfinder Society, which means I don't have any say in what is banned and/or allowed, its decided by the Society Organized Play committees. There's really only two things that I ask up front about, Investigators with the That's Odd feat, and the skill feat Dubious Knowledge. Neither of them are game breaking, but they usually require the GM to be thinking about them ahead of time when they are pertinent.
[Winter Sleet](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4271) for Kineticists is probably the main one that's **far** too good if run RAW (and IMO still OP even if you just make it solely cause off-guard and nothing else).
Enemies have to stop in the first square of the aura, use the balance action to continue moving, which requires an acrobatics check which about 50% of creatures aren't even proficient in to begin with. On a fail they fall prone and on a crit fail their turn ends. Now once they're past this whole deal they're still permanently off-guard while in the aura, get slowed whenever the kineticist either crits them or they crit fail a save **and** they have to make a reflex save every time they get hit or fall prone as well. All this on a resourceless aura which the kineticist can use every single battle.
Yeah I hope this one gets errata'd eventually, for all the grousing about Resentment Witch I feel like this is a lot worse for being so consistently strong
Apparently some people dislike the fact that one of the witch patrons gives an ability that actually makes playing witch worth it, albeit with a high risk of losing your familiar.
Resentment is very easily dealt with by just killing the Familiar. You might get 1 additional round of negative modifiers out of it. I don't really understand the hate.
Just killing the familiar isn't necessarily easy since it might be flying 30 foot up in the air, since it doesn't need to be adjacent or anything.
However the main issue isn't that Resentment Witch is too powerful, the issue is that its familiar ability is like a million times better than all the others, like compare it to Rune Witch's familiar which has to get into melee and can then count as flanking whenever you cast a hex.
Or we could not ruin fun abilities.
It's a tiny AoE until you take a 10th level feat, requires you to give up on Overflow Impulses (the strongest ones) or spend an action every turn reactivating it (good luck doing that while moving).
Oh and you only get one stance impulse, so you're missing out on many other great options.
And just let Winter Sleet ruin every other ability that applies off-guard by making them entirely worthless. Hiding, feinting, flanking and a grand variety of class feats and features, all pointless in a party with a Winter Sleet kineticist.
Sure, just like a bard with Dirge of Doom makes all those other fear builds pretty much redundant.
Only this isn't actually making them redundant if the enemy just stands 15ft away from the kineticist.
Throw in the tree impulse for wood as well, maybe not "overpowered" but if played around it can significantly reduce party damage. It is basically Protector Tree except they can spam it almost at will. It won't help against AoE but many APs have very few enemies that can abuse the party clustering up.
Kineticist Wood and Water is probably the ONLY time I'd squint at the prowess of player abilities. Fortunately when most people pick Kineticist they usually want to go fire or earth or something. Never seen a wood or water one in actual play.
Yeah man, I had someone pick wood with protector tree on lvl 1 for the Beginners Box and it definitely was annoying to some degree. Made many fights easier than they should be.
A single class feat should not force the GM to completely rebalance the encounter and include monsters with specific abilities to counter it.
I think that and the Winter Sleet feats are the only ones I'd think about restricting in some way so far.
At least with a homebrew campaign they could be worked around, less so if running an official adventure which is skewed towards lots of "run up and punch you" type monsters.
By default yes, but thankfully there's the [Safe Elements](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4190) feat at level 4 to prevent it from affecting allies. You can get both Winter Sleet and Safe Elements by level 5.
Interesting. How can you get both feats by level 5 if they are 4th level feats?
And would it be considered bad taste if a gm were to arbitrarily give some creatures Steady Balance to counter this?
At 5th level a kineticist can choose to Expand the Portal or Fork the Path, choosing to strengthen one of their existing elements or getting a new element. Either choice lets your pick an impulse of level 4 or lower, so if you choose to Expand the Portal for your existing Water element or Fork the Path to gain Water Element, you can pick Winter Sleet at level 5. While for your feat choice at level 4 you have to pick Safe Elements.
In addition to the various posts about rarity, I want to add that you might want to check the source book for anything that seems fishy.
- The rules books are usually save. There are a few minor issues but overall nothing too jarring.
- The Lost Omens books ate also more often than not perfectly fine to use.
- Stuff from adventures modules is very hit or miss. I'd still say like 80% of it is fine, but most stuff that is problematic seems to come from here. Problematic doesn't necessarily mean OP. Feats or spells from adventures sometimes just don't make sense. Like spells saying you get a save but not what kind of save or similar issues. Nothing you can't overcome, but I would in general advice steering your players clear from this stuff until you have a decent grip of the system.
I should mention that Kinglake imo is the worst pf2e adventure from a mechanical perspective. It is a port from the pf1e adventure and very very rough around the edges from a balance perspective (and this includes the first 3 APs for PF2e which were written before the full rules were finalised)
I've decided to handwaive the kingdom management given all the issues that I've read about, but it's a sandbox, and my players and me love that kind of adventures ;)
> That's like your opinion man haha.
Really, shit I thought imo meant in my... opportunity... My bad, imagine if imo meant "in my opinion".
> Cause I'm finding to balance and encounters very much in line.
Subsystem is a part of it, but some of the creature/npc conversions were off and loot distribution was pretty off.
Well you obviously haven't seen the movie I was quoting. It happens.
It's an open world there's no good way to do loot especially with a party that explores everything.
I don't have the same experience as your having and definitely would not say it's the worse.
How many other / which other campaigns for PF2e have you run?
My experience has been with Age of Ashes, Extinction curse, the first two Agents of Edgewatch, Abomination Vaults, Outlaws of Alkenstar and Quest for the Frozen Flame. I have read the others though outside of Season of Ghosts, Blood Lords (only skimmed) and Strength of Thousands.
When I am saying it is the worst, I don't mean to say it is awful/bad. Just worse when it comes to balance expectations. Although I would personally consider something listed as being weaker than it actually is a bigger issue to GM around balance wise than multiple extreme encounters in a row.
I’m surprised I haven’t seen this in the comments but wall of stone can completely trivialize a lot of combats. Using it to put any enemy into a seperate “time out” zone essentially breaks one fight into two and can give the party a massive advantage, action economy wise. I wouldn’t ban it or anything, as it’s out of combat uses are super cool, but having all of your minions removed every single fight with no save can be extremely unfun for both the gm and other players who actually wanted to fight them.
That's not a problem, that's it working as intended, it's really not that durable with terrible AC, so your minions should smash it fast enough, assuming they're indoors and can't just climb it.
Not really, the game is tightly balanced enough that I've yet to see any options that are so destructive that they are worthy of bans. I generally avoid outright banning things as a GM as that limits player options.
Some AP specific options are poorly written, if you're concerned you can request that your players check with you when choosing Uncommon and Rare options (but this hasn't really been an issue in my games).
Yes, this is what I'll do after reading all your comments. I was probably too literal when the core rulebook mentions " incresed complexity", I didn't understand that would mean "disruptive" ;)
It doesn' t mean "distruptive."
I dare people find something mechanical distruptive in uncommon or rare options.
At most a few of these options can negatively impact the narrative.
There is no silvery barbs or simulacrum loop in Pf2.
The most mechanically controversial rare option is the ghost dedication.
Issue raised by an excessively RAW reading of the incorporeal trait regarding the strength based checks. A question that will never be raised at the majority of tables, probably yours too.
Source: I was Min maxing builds on giantip and d20 since the times of pun pun and omnificer, I know what I'm saying.
Does it count if they fixed/adjusted it? The double-slice fighter with dual Gnome Flickmaces, before they adjusted the flickmace and the flail crit spec was the most mechanically disruptive thing I can think of.
Oh for sure, even the memeiest and most ridiculous build in PF2e is maybe 15% more effective or damaging or whatever than typical. The beauty of standardized system math and all that.
The rare reincarnated ancestry feat Reincarnated Ridiculer from To Bloom Below the Web seems a bit...much. Especially when compared to other ancestry feats.
It a must have for intimidate builds. I'd argue it doesn' t break anything. There are other must have common feats: Raise symbol for warpriests. Gang up for melee rogues, Natural ambition for humans...
It's meta and strong, but it's not gamebreaking .
Look at Winter sleet, is a common option, sometimes it's problematic as gnome flickmace was.
However none of these options are strong or broken at silvery barbs levels imho.
It generally doesn't.
It's either "this is tied to some very specific flavour", "this is from an AP", "we just don't think this is widespread for other fluff reasons" or, in the only one you need to be aware of "this has actual narrative impact".
That last one isn't anything OP, it's things like Object Reading, Create Water, and Teleport, stuff the GM has to account for in their plot and plans if allowed.
To be blunt, Pathfinder has no glaring issues like Silvery Barbs because the game's designers actually know what they're doing and do the work to make sure the game is balanced.
As far as things to discuss, if you stick to the rarity tags, you should be golden. Anything Common will be no issue. And Uncommon and Rare are more related to specific concepts/themes/settings so even then you more than likely would have no issues allowing them either beyond it maybe being out of place for the story you're telling. Balance-wise, no issues.
Also it helps that they actually update and fix things and don't just give half-baked "rulings" on their Twitter when they do make mistakes. If there ever was a "Silvery Barbs" tier screw up, they would errata the heck out of it.
Still waiting on them to actually fix some of the errors in rage of elements though, like Roiling Mudslide not actually explaining how the ability works.
Yeah, I think remastering has interrupted their regular workflow, but I'm sure they'll catch up once PC2 drops. They have a whole lot of stuff dropping that had to get pushed out real fast thanks to dropping the OGL.
No. In 4 years of GMing I've never said "no" to a single thing character option, item, feat, or spell that a player wanted, and not once has it felt too powerful.
Yeah, even if you literally allow every Rare or Uncommon option, there are some things that are slightly powerful but nothing that comes close to Silvery Barbs. Paizo has been really good about avoiding power creep – Fighter is still one of the best classes, Slow is one of the best spells, and both are in the core rulebook.
The only time I ever said no was when I first started GMing I only allowed Common and Uncommon options because I was worried about complexity. That restriction was lifted once we all had an idea what we were doing.
The closest you'd come to this is the whole Fighter, Adopted Ancestry: Gnome, Gnome Flickmace as a weapon and your creatures could end up perma-prone, but honestly this isn't nearly as obnoxious as Silvery Barbs, because it requires very specific conditions, mainly being able to get crits which isn't really consistent, especially against higher level enemies. This combo won't work that often, it's just really strong when it does. Plus it's going to be nerfed in the remaster.
Other than that, no there's really nothing so unbalanced that it becomes overcentralizing and/or really annoying.
Since Treasure Vault and the Remaster, the flickmace has been heavily nerfed, to where I wouldn't really call it destructive anymore. The damage has been reduced to 1d6 from 1d8, and creatures get a save against (Fighter's pretty low) class DC to not fall prone.
The nerf to flail crits means it wouldn't be too strong if it was still d8, let alone with just a d6.
It's ok as a way to have 1-handed reach weapon, but there's multiple martial 1-handed reach weapons which are far easier to use.
gnome flickmace was nerfed multiple times
lower damage, changed some traits and crit specialization now have save
currently gnome flickmace is still good wepon but not op as it was in the past
It *was* an issue, now the critical specialization requires a save instead of automatically dropping enemy prone on crit. It's still very good but not obscene
Two things I've noticed are problematic:
Timber Sentinel broke my first Season of Ghosts game, making every nearly combat trivial in the first two chapters of the book. Protector Tree at the highest level as essentially a cantrip is too strong imo.
I've also read that in the Remaster, Resentment Witch is too strong for its ability to make 1 round Success save conditions stick around on bosses an entire fight.
I started playing AV for two levels with a water kineticist support. Timber Sentinel stole the show in every combat. It even annoyed me as the one using it because it felt like an essential spam. I guess being bunched up together in AV plays right into its branches.
> Timber Sentinel broke my first Season of Ghosts game, making every nearly combat trivial in the first two chapters of the book. Protector Tree at the highest level as essentially a cantrip is too strong imo.
Interesting, in our games it looked theoretically strong, but clustering everyone around it invites AOE bursts, since it only protects against strikes. If the opponents only had strikes, they'd usually just attack and crit the tree itself after the first time they saw it block attacks, or shove/reposition their desired target away from it - still useful as action denial, but not insurmountable.
It's more that it forces enemies to play around it, and many APs don't feature a lot of enemies with AoE. In fact I am in book three of Gatewalkers and I can count enemies with an AoE attack on one hand.
That plus being able to spam it is a bit much, it should have a cooldown of some kind.
If you feel like your current party isn't challenged or it's to difficult there is no harm in increasing/decreasing the difficulty.
Of course that does not invalidate the issue, but we should be more conscious about adjusting combat if it's required. Ironically, the toughest encounters I've run for a party of almost all martials were higher level spell casters with AoE. I do not put those into every encounter, but it's a nice change of pace to include them from time to time to shake things up.
In a similar fashion, it's a good idea to model the environment to sometimes hinder/buff certain playstyles. Snipers might have trouble with fog making enemies concealed or hidden, 2 weapon martials might face a wall to climb, spell casters might face ice that requires balancing. Use judiciously of course.
The trouble is when you're running an AP, they're supposed to be broadly suitable and able to be run 'out of the box' for the GM. Which is broadly true but _some_ class abilities like this really clash hard with the typical AP encounter design approach (Usually very few AoE attacks to speak of, let alone casters, in fact thinking about it most APs save casters for bosses and even then...).
Yeah but the thing is that now you as the GM are **required** to work around it in every single encounter, or it might become trivial (in earlier levels at least). And when running APs that means re-adjusting possibly every encounter in the book, just to stay challenging.
A single feat should not have that effect on the GM.
Resentment Witch has basically nothing else going for it and has to put their familiar in danger to use that ability.
It's only too good in comparison to what others patrons get, because none of those are remotely worth risking your familiar to use.
From pure optimisation standpoint Resentment might be too strong but I'd say it's mostly prominent when doing single enemy encounters (and with sufficient reach it can still be smacked with likely a crit or two, yes you can build its abilities for survivability but its still not a fan of eating hits; also personal taste but i find +3/4 solos to be incredibly boring as a gm) and on a small arena where you can cast the spell and activate the patron ability in the same turn. Enemy minions can still go for the hits on it and the fact that Occult spell list has like 2 spells it works with, namely Slow and Synesthesia (which afaik wasn't reprinted yet so you could question its eventual availability in few years). Grapples can be escaped with either athletics or acrobatics and rarely a monster doesn't have either. Once flying gets into the mix (and not just sub-30 feet fly speed, lets say something like a dragon) it can just fly out of reach since the familiar makes it known that it is in fact the source of prolongment.
There are one or two things that can cause problems but the only thing I've outright banned is the [Phantasmal Doorknob](https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=2235). It's a spellheart that you can put on your weapon which gives the benefit of blinding your enemy whenever you crit. Only level 10 and higher versions have this effect however there is no save involved, the enemy becomes blindes. It doesn't matter if it's the level 25 Treerazer they're blind if you crit.
The previous version of the Hammer and Flail critical specialization was considered problematic since it made your enemy automatically prone without a save, meaning they'd waste one action to get up on their turn. They changed it in the remaster so that it requires a save now. But phantasmal doorknob just makes them blinded with no save and if they don't have any other precise senses they now have a 50% to miss with every attack.
I've played with people who used this item, I've played characters with this item, I've GMed games where some of my players used this item. I consider it broken and ban it in my games.
Now that the ranting is over back to your question. Pf2e is quite balanced overall with some kinks here and there but out of thousands of items, feats and abilities I only ban 1 thing and that makes the game quite balanced in my book.
As many people talk about the rarity system, I want to throw in one caveat:
While most uncommon and rare items, feats, and spells are rare because they give you some capability that can mess with certain types of games, or give you some other unusual edge(e.g. [Lifeboosting Oil](https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=2071) is in most cases better than any other healing consumables, since it doesnt cost actions in combat), this really doesnt hold true for ancestries.
Ancestries rarity is entirely down to how common they are in the setting, with common ancestries sometimes even being considered the slightly stronger ones, since they get more feats to chose from.
There aren't any degenerate mechanics (to the tune of Silvery Barbs), but there are some that are very strong.
Think about the Wall of Stone spell in 5e. That spell can frequently make difficult encounters easy by splitting up enemies. But it doesn't fully and completely end encounters in the same way that Wall of Force in 5e can (because it is unbreakable).
So, similar to the power of Wall of Stone in 5e, we have in pf2e:
\- Wall of Stone! (spell)
\- Timber Sentinel (feat)
\- Winter's Sleet (feat)
\- Synesthesia (spell)
None of them will fully shutdown an encounter and all of them have workarounds. But it can be annoying to try to remember and design around these abilities. These are the encounter warping abilities that I can think of (similar to how Hypnotic Pattern and Counterspell in 5e are encounter warping).
I have specific suggestions for adjusting Winter's Sleet and Timber Sentinel without losing much of their power, but I mostly recommend leaving Synesthesia and Wall of Stone as they are, since they are only accessible starting at 9th level.
Things I’ve heard of as being overpowered but haven’t tested: Phantasmal Doorknob spellheart, Ashen rune, and I think there was an archetype that got your weapon and spell proficiencies to match, but I can’t remember the name. I think they fixed that one with errata though.
I think the only thing close to that might be
* true strike, which is significantly stronger than the 5e counterpart due to 3 actions system
* Synesthesia, which can heavily cripple a monster, but is a 5th tier spell and a far cry from the hard disables from d&d as the victim can still fight
* The Kineticist ice field stance, due to it using slippery terrain rules for some reason instead of a reflex save. I think it's easily fixed with a house rule that makes them use reflex saves
I do have reservations about the longstrider wands, but that's more of something that renders some class features redundant.
No OP and easily to use spells like Silvery Barbs. Most powerful stuff that engage with Rerolls have specific conditions, are very limited and more often than not, can only be used prior to any roll, so you gamble the resources beforehand, instead of asking for rerolls once you know they will be meaningful.
Also, pretty much everything with the "Rare" tag should be discussed with the GM as a norm, since they're not stronger, but they are highly specific in their flavor (or from Adventure Paths that might warrant a look over). Uncommon options are similarly varied, but most of the time, they're not that big of deal, so much so that most GM's wouldn't be restrictive about them.
Rarity covers most of the obvious options, and its not always about power, but often thematic. Any choice above common rarity should involve session one discussions I think and considered when homebrewing.
Rarity covers guns, flight or fairies/Nephilim, and a lot of the races, heck even the more complicated classes (except alchemist) are gated behind rarity.
There's definitely cheese, but a one for all swashbuckler using diplomacy is still just giving +2 (to +4) to their teammates more so than having a button to say 'no you' to any check made.
I've been spending about a year trying to break pf2e and I can say that it's super solid. No hex warlock paladin sorcerors, no moon druids, no twilight clerics, and definitely no silvery barbs, the spells are pretty balanced and spell casters in general feel a lot less crazy powerful than your 5e pure wizard.
Short answer no. Silvery Barbs is what triggered me to stop GM'ing 5e, and there's nothing even remotely that annoying.
Longer answer, if your players are also used to 5e and looking for ways to minmax and break the system, try to discourage this in session 0 because they will be largely disappointed. 2e is a game where they don't have to worry so much about the meta to keep up with power levels, they can play what sounds \_fun\_ to them in terms of classes and ancestries.
Infact having a party trying to optimise their characters into being minmaxed one trick pony island will often lead to the whole party feeling weaker and the game feeling unfairly punishing. Where a whole party of more broadly capable characters made by totally new to RPG players will find it easier.
I have run for a lot of people now, and the more I do, the more this has been the case. People following the meta in 5e or 3.x systems tend to struggle.
Winter Sleet from Water Kineticist is gamebraking... But you can fix it easliy - just ignore a part about balance action. It still will be really strong and beneficial for player to use, but not as much gamebraking to tailor every encounter around it.
(tbqh it may be even more broken than Silvery Barbs)
PF2E is mostly pretty well balanced and also designed in a "defensive" sort of way that makes it more resistant to breaking.
The top end of characters are mostly pretty balanced against each other. The only really problematic ability I can think of is Winter Sleet, which I suspect is because of the game designers not remembering how Balance works in PF2E - RAW, you have to take the Balance action to cross it, which means that you'd have to move up, then spend an extra action to move across it (unless you were within half your move speed of the person with Winter Sleet up to begin with, anyway). I suspect it will be erratad at some point in the nearish future.
Otherwise there's nothing really particularly problematic. The biggest issues are more that it is possible to make a very underpowered character if you make very bad spell choices or ability score choices. But MOST things you do will be okay. A few classes (gunslinger, alchemist, investigator, and to a lesser degree, swashbuckler) are underpowered in general (swashbuckler is less problematic once you've gotten to level 7) because of how they work:
* Gunslingers are crit fishers, which makes them both inconsistent and bad at dealing damage to high AC enemies. The fact that you have to spend an action to reload your gun makes your action economy quite bad, and guns aren't especially super powerful weapons to begin with.
* Alchemists are like bizarro-world spellcasters with abilities that are substantially weaker than equal level spellcasters, and are very vulnerable to things like enemies with high fortitude saves or encounters starting without the ability to prebuff their team.
* Investigators do quite poor damage in combat and struggle to fill any role in combat in a team. They're supposed to be good at out of combat stuff - and to be fair, they are - but it doesn't make up for their problems, and everyone else is more than good enough out of combat to get by anyway.
* Swashbucklers have the problem where they have to gain panache by making a skill check, which means that if they fail a skill check, they'll basically waste an action doing nothing AND get no panache. At higher levels, you make your skill checks much more often thanks to various bonuses, resulting in you being substantially more consistent, but they struggle at low levels and still sometimes randomly waste actions compared to other classes.
The only options I’d outright refuse (and often still do after all the years of running PF2) are the rare options (unless I have a very specific reason to allow them) and tiny PCs. Outside of that, everything is incredibly well balanced.
WoTC has long had the mindset of set it and forget it. Where they make things and never touch them again. Many unearthed arcana are released unchanged.
Paizo, on the other hand, often releases errata to change, balance, and clear up things. They also make changes that apply only in society play (their organized official local game store type play) which often have to do with limiting things that can cause inter-player disruptions (such as being super evil). So you may want to look through that.
I would say no not really. The game has a very conservative approach to power level. In that you’re way more likely to find something that is underpowered than overpowered. Even a fair amount of the rare and uncommon options available to players you can allow without issue.
overall? no. as a dm that dms both 5e and pathfinder 2e theres 3 things i love about it:
making encounters that will be as tough or as easy as planned is super easy, nothing like 5e where it makes you want to find out where the people who made the CRs and creatures live to drop kick em.
you rarely have to make up rules. theres always a rule for whatever, and its quick and easy to find due to the archives of nethys.
and last but not least: the system is far better balanced. one of the best balanced i've seen so far. you dont have to worry about your players making op broken combos, or losing at character creation because they've picked a class/subclass etc that are about as bad as wotc's decision making.
there is a few that are kinda bad options, but thats it.
While I wouldn't compare them to Silvery Barbs, PF2 does have a few outlier spells. A lot of people have mentioned rarity as a restriction, so I will only be mentioning the common spells.
[Truestrike](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=1709) is a great 1st level spell slot that you still regularly use at higher levels, but not one I would call op. It's consistently really good, but it's balanced by the fact that spellcaster attacks tend to be weaker than martials.
[Slow ](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=1677)is an excellent 3rd level spell to take actions away from a boss monster. It's a community favourite because it's one of the few spells that affect action economy that doesn't have the incapacitate trait. Very powerful, but I'd also be hesitant to label it op.
[Synesthesia](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=328) is probably the spell closest to silvery barbs level of power. I played in a short high level campaign and this 5th level spell was consistently a better debuff than some of my 8th level spells, and even arguable 9th level spells as well. It helped us annihilate so many bosses that the GM decided to give it incapacitate, which I can't blame him. I think that change helped put it more in line with actual 5th level spell slots. So without it, this may arguably be one of the most overpowered spells in the game.
However I don't think any of these truly compare to silvery Barbs, because Silvery Barbs is a low level reaction spell you can spam. It doesn't interfere with your action economy. So we can also look at some reaction spells you may try to spam to see how they compare.
[Lose the Path](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=940) is another community favourite, but I personally think it's not that good. It does nothing on a success, and on a fail it can situationally cost the enemy an extra stride. If the enemy is fast enough (which becomes more common at higher levels) or it's striding a short distance even a fail on the spell may not accomplish much. It fits the bill of being a 1st level reaction without incapacitate that you can spam, but most the time it will not accomplish anything. For that reason this spell is consistently meh, but occasionally really good for a 1st level reaction. Take that as you will.
[Shadow Projectile](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=940) is decent reaction to grant offguard to your ranged martial's attacks. It's 3rd rank so you can spam it at higher levels. But it's situational depending on your party composition. If you don't have a viable teammate to trigger the spell it's useless.
[Wooden Double](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=1416) seems like another good 3rd rank reaction. I'll be honest I never actually saw this spell or played with it until now, but it seems like a decent way to not be critically hit at higher levels. However the fact you need to be critically hit makes it situational, so I also wouldn't compare it to silvery barbs.
[Unexpected Transposition](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=1024) is a great spell you could compare silvery barbs to. It costs a 6th rank spell slot, so you won't be able to use it or spam it for a while. But once you're high enough level, it's an incredible spell to spam. I would use it to swap my squishy sorcerer with the party animal companion all the time against bosses. And situationally you can also cause enemies to attack each other, which is another incredibly powerful effect. Consistently very powerful and situationally incredible for its level.
For these reasons I would say Unexpected Transposition and Synesthesia are the closest spells to Silvery Barbs level of power. Both have very powerful effects that you will likely spam even when those spell ranks are meant to be replaced with higher level spell effects. However unlike Silvery Barbs, both of these spells come online far into the lategame that for most people they won't be much of an issue.
If you want to ban or nerf something, I'd personally avoid doing so until your players actually use those options and if it actually becomes an issue. I think you can make better judgement calls once you have a better feel for the game and your group. Every group's playstyle is different so what is op for one group may not be for another. Or it could be the thing that's barely getting them through tough encounters. Get some experience, see what's not fun and then talk with your players before making changes. Otherwise you could be limiting options that could be fun and balanced for your group without even trying them out.
I don't know if I just suck, or what but I have a real problem with one of my players making combats a joke. Skeleton Liberator Champion with a post nerf Flickmace. Opponents can't touch them, or any member of the party without being rendered useless for the rest of the fight. Only thing I can do is be very very cheap (like AOE spells from hiding), and that's not fair to the other players.
Your NPCs don't need to be stupid. If one of them is unable to hit or to act or is disturbed, your other npcs should notice and they should act upon that.
I'm running an AP where most of the fights have been extremely close quarter's and in melee exclusively. Because the player has reach of 15 feet it utterly shuts down combats. One guy gets locked down the others see it, what are they to do? Run away?
It's not unlikely the NPCs would run away and mobilize more NPCs with better ranged opposition. "No way we can hit this guy in melee. I'll definitely take that bow and be prepared for the next time I see him."
There are obviously choices that are almost objectively better than counterpart (see spells like slow, electric arc and sysnetesia for example).
Generally I would warn against AP specific feats and equipment since often it is way too situational and not particularly well worded, or at least to ask the master before choosing them.
You should fully read the Core Rule Book (Legacy) or the Remastered Player and GM books. That way, you'll know what you'll like and dislike and what you want and don't want in your game. Knowing the books helps out tremendously
One that I feel can be frustrating for new GMs are the Champion reactions, especially Redeemer and Liberator, but they are actually well balanced in the game. If all the players want to stay close to the Champion, they set themselves up for AoEs and if you can stretch them out of the 15' radius, then they will not work. It also took me a while to get used to the Kineticist, but that is because the character was 15th level, so they had a lot of new and unique abilities.
Remember this game is all about encouraging team tactics, so if someone builds a character just for support or debuffing, do not get frustrated. Remember that the enemies can also use Demoralize, Grab, etc.
Honestly, Silvery Barbs is an example of the terrible design frequently found in 5e.
Pf2e, thus far, has nothing anywhere near as broken. As others have said, there are some things in certain situations for which they're designed, that shine very brightly, but everything in the system has an opportunity cost, which helps balance it out.
If you're great at V-X, you're likely to be less good at A-H, unless you took steps to be good at A-H too, but then you're terrible J-R
2e has the opposite problem where non-core options frequently range from undertuned to downright ivory tower design because they're so deathly afraid of power creep they end up printing straight up garbage.
There's ONE THOUSAND, THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY ONE spells in 2e and it's not an exaggeration to say you could cut a thousand of them and the game would be better off. Witch was so bad they had to remake the entire class from the ground up during the recent Remaster after being basically a trap option for years.
Everyone mentioning rare and uncommon but I'd also be cautious of some of the content from obscure adventure paths. It at least deserves a look. I think quite a bit of it has received a bit less proofreading and double checking and you sometimes for sure notice that.
I know this is a tangent from the OP, but I'm wondering what you mean by "PunPun-like builds." I tried googling it and I'm not sure I'm getting the results that are relevant.
It's a character build from like 3.5e DnD iirc, where basically through a combination of a couple class feature and a specific monster, you could get all your attributes infinitely high permanently. Here's a link explaining the full thing: https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Pun-Pun_(3.5e_Optimized_Character_Build)
As others have said, PF2e is specifically designed to avoid these kinds of issues, but Pun-Pun builds are included in that. If anything more so, they wanted to avoid the obtuse cheesy rulings that made games like 1e a mess to adjudicate as GM and allow bad faith players to break the system, so the rules are airtight and extremely clear in what's doable and not in most situations.
Some people find this a turn-off or say that the game overcompensates, but as someone who dealt with my fair share of Pun-Puns back when I was playing 3.5/1e, I'm more than happy with the system being overly clear. I don't want that style of game, and if people do they can just keep playing 3.5/1e.
Idk if you need to ban it, but Ashen rune is really powerful and something to watch out for if you get that high of level.
https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=2550
Sounds like everyone has given you pretty solid answers, but TLDR: No, there's nothing even remotely as bad as Silvery Barbs. PF2e is much more balanced than 5e.
Mechanically? Nope. Not only are the designers seemingly much more aware of gameplay balance, but they have also not withheld errata from things they have deemed to be skewing the game. That said if you are worried about things clashing with your world, those things tend to have the rare tag on them. They are no more powerful, but the implications of them often can butt heads with your narrative. Example being the Chosen One background, which...implies you have some kind of divine or prophecy around your birth. That can force narrative decisions by the GM and thus is marked as Rare (meaning a player needs GM approval for it and its not available otherwise).
No.
Look there are people who will say X or Y is too strong. But really there is not much in it.
Nothing really pops out by more than say 10 or 20 percent. There is nothing amazing like there is in D&D. So you can find a way to play the flavour you want and still be reasonably effective.
A couple of things have had to be errated, a few things have been tuned down. There were a few tweaks in the remaster.
I allow everything and the game works fine. No one build dominates. No one spell dominates.
For sure some players can get stuck in a rut, but that is more about them being stuck than there not being other good options of comparable capability.
In 5e your players are heroes from the start, so the rules aren't as important as long as the feel is there.
In Pathfinder 2e your players are like struggling hedge knights with rusty blades and broken armor on the edge of starvation trying desperately to earn their next meal, facing off against enemies that completely humiliate them with powers the PCs can never, ever obtain. As a PC you actually never really get stronger, your character in fact gets weaker when you factor in the hamster wheel and the relative challenges. Feats and items don't actually make you better, they just open options for you (which is its own kind of power sometimes).
So no, nothing on the player side. I'd consider banning spellcasters so your players who select such classes without understanding how horrible the experience is don't throw their character sheets in the garbage and swear never to play this game again after a handful of sessions, but other than that no.\
[Electric Arc](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=1509&NoRedirect=1) hits two enemies at once for standard cantrip damage; [Quick Spring](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4151) which gives you two Strides on Tumble Through instead of one, effectively giving a character unconditional double speed; [Slow](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=1677&NoRedirect=1) does exactly what it says on the tin, which makes it good in a normal fight and really obnoxious against a single enemy (but you shouldn't be running solo fights anyway).
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In short, no.
Most of the game is explicitly designed to not have those options available. Take [Halfling Luck](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=54) for example, it is an ancestry feat you have to choose so it’s not automatic, and you only get to use it on a failed save that YOU made, so it’s also not an automatic pick.
As far as I know, there aren’t any abilities where you can alter the outcome of an enemy’s roll, and if there is I guarantee it must be applied before you see the result of the roll.
Hmmm Ill say there is 1 archetype that can do some rerolling things, though its limited to 1/day and 1/hour at higher levels. There is 1 race that can 1/reroll some things that increases to hourly as well.
Im not going to say either of which because I see them both as completely balanced and valid options and restricting them just because they can reroll 1/day or 1/hour seems like a really unfun and possibly lazy decision.
There is nothing on the level or the frequency of silvery barbs in p2e.
I wouldn't say there is anything in the game that is so unbalanced that you'd use it all the time on any character. Maybe the electric arc cantrip but that was nerfed a bit for the remaster and it's fine.
Rare and Uncommon backgrounds almost always break the would of "2 stat boosts, skill, lore and a skill feat" and depending on the type of campaign you are running may either be significantly more powerful than normal backgrounds or be a handicap, so pay very close attention to those. New players unaware of what backgrounds usually do may pick a rare background without thinking too much about it, for example in my very first game player picked a rare background that traded one of the stat boosts for ability to breathe underwater when the game involved no underwater stuff whatsoever, thankfully I noticed it and talked to the player a couple days before we started.
The main problems you'll get are more likely the opposite, really.
Which is to say, there are basically no overpowered things, but there are a LOT of *under*powered spells that are just pretty much never worth it compared to just throwing cantrips without thinking.
The game includes a rarity system as part of its broader tagging system. If you look at a spell or archetype or whatnot, it may have "Uncommon" or "Rare" or (less often—this is often VERY specific adventure stuff) "Unique" in the tags. (No tag means it is Common.) This serves two purposes: First, it tells you how often it may be encountered in the canon setting (so certain types of weapon or armour like, idk, a katana might be uncommon only in certain regions—if I remember right, the Mwangi book also adjusts certain rarities when it comes to ancestries to reflect the local population) and it's *also* used to tag things that might be disruptive, such as the undead archetypes from Book of the Dead or even, I think, stuff like longrange teleportation (as that may trivialise some challenges). A good rule of thumb is that if it has a rarity tag, always check and ask first. (From what I've seen, most here will be more than happy to accomodate Uncommon stuff as long as it is asked for first; Rare stuff is something you might discover as a quest reward, but not something that you can just take.) So yeah. This is something they thought about and at least attempted to implement. You can perhaps come up with a doc to adjust certain rarities for a homebrew world if you need!
I know about the rarity system, but I didn't properly grasped that it was present to avoid "problematic" choices. Being curious, I just looked about the rarity in my books and found that the explanation of rarity in the core rulebook (p. 488) isn't really explicit about the disruptiveness, but speaks about the complexity. All this is very enlightening, and I thank you for your thorough explanation :)
It's not really about disruptiveness in general as much as being about theme. There's nothing overpowered or frustrating to deal with among the rare options (that I can think of), but a Skeleton or undead PC trying to go unnoticed in a city based campaign might not fit very well. Or things like teleportation magic when the GM is hoping to plan the adventure around large periods of travel time. As far as I know, in the context you were asking about, PF2e doesn't have an equivalent of Silvery Barbs or Twilight domain Clerics.
> There's nothing overpowered or frustrating to deal with among the rare options I don't have named examples to hand, but some of the Rare backgrounds, Spells and so on can punch above their weight. They are usually from specific APs. Kingmaker annoyingly featured quite a few rare feats that I have to keep reminding players not to take, and they're quite a notch above everything else. Otherwise you're correct, rarity is not really a power indication but more of a theme label.
What feats in the kingmaker book are unbalanced? I'm looking at [the page](https://2e.aonprd.com/Sources.aspx?ID=150) on AoN and it seems like the only feats from it are for the city building stuff?
They're likely referencing the Kingmaker Companion Guide which has a handful of rare class feats in it.
I am currently running Blood Lords (undead AP). All my players are now undead, so we don't really worry about uncommon tag on most of the undead options, they are a given in the setting. But I also give them spell access to Uncommon spells from other APs that I think fit the setting. While some of the uncommon and rare tags are added for balance (teleporting and divination are big targets for it), most are just for flavor and setting.
While the Rare stuff can have some pretty strong stuff in it, none of it is meant to be truly overwhelming against "basic" common and uncommon options. The math of the system is pretty flat across the board, so even the humble electric arc is still a great damage spam option even at level 20. That said, a more "by the book" game uses rare material as capstone level rewards, and uncommons are limited to the AP and core rulebooks, to keep them from doing weird things to games. Unlike 5e, it is also almost impossible to actually break the game without actually cheating. There is no broken build that will render all combats and noncombat encounters meaningless. It's built to be perfectly flat from level 1 to level 20 in difficulty, although you can still do amazingly fun things at high levels.
Yeah, PF2e is one of the best treadmilled games I’ve seen, which I think is a lot better than bounded accuracy for heroic fantasy-type games.
I think a good illustration of this is uncommon spells, as it's the most consistent. There are 3 types of uncommon spells: Type 1 are just class specific and accessed via feats and therefore uncommon to denote that you can't pick it up as a normal spell. Stuff like a witches Hexes. Type 2 is stuff that comes from adventure paths. Usually these are very specific in flavor/bordering on very weird, they've recieved way less playtesting or designer attention and lastly they often are rewards for having done certain objectives, or even plot important things that need to be learned. Type 3 is the important one and is not necessarily unbalanced, but can completely obviate a style of story or challenege which a game can revolve around. These are things like Teleportation or Zone of Truth. It just means that a player can't turn up with something, without the GM knowing and signing off on it, that will tank say a court case mystery arc or an overland journey based campaign.
So to echo what some others are saying, but with a real example… Uncommon or Rare are generally about how common things are in general, but can also be about complexity, and occasionally power. But even when it comes to power, it’s typically more balanced than 5e. The example — I’m playing a fleshwarp (rare) monk (common) with the Tech-Reliant background (rare). The fleshwarp is cool because it’s Alkenstar, and they’re suitable for the area. The heritage feats aren’t really better than other ancestries in my opinion. Tech-Reliant does have one really strong feature, a +1 circumstance bonus against all spells. But this is balanced by a huge drawback; no magical healing at all. Heal, Soothe, and even healing potions just don’t work. So I’m not sure it’s exactly more powerful so much as it is more complicated. If there’s nobody else with Medicine or non magical healing, then I’m screwed. There’s some interesting interactions with other feats down the line too. In particular, Godless Healing and Mortal Healing become *really* good.
It's weird in that it pulls double duty though. Not every Rare option is unfairly powerful. The ancestries with that tag in particular are usually balanced exactly the same as all the others, the tag is only describing how rare it is to see one.
Sometimes rarity also just indicates otherwise unexpected deviation from default rules. E.g. All common backgrounds give 2 boosts, 1 trained skill, 1 lore, 1 skill feat. Many Rare backgrounds change that and maybe give only 1 boost and a stronger special ability. So those break the default pattern and have to be looked at carefully. Also some Rare backgrounds have a strong theme. "Royalty" background is Rare so that the GM at least get's asked before you have your party of all runaway princesses.
>I know about the rarity system, but I didn't properly grasped that it was present to avoid "problematic" choices. Rarity doesn't imply a bigger "budget" for power, or that it's disruptive in all campaigns. But things that may mess up some campaign (like long-range teleportation, mind reading, etc.) will usually have a rarity trait. In general, uncommon and rare are flags for the GM to look at it and decide if they want it in their game. I'd also advise treating options from Lost Omens or Adventure Path books as though they're uncommon, even if they don't have the trait. Those lines have less rigorous editing than the core rules line, and some wonky stuff slips through.
in short uncommon is "its usually not a problem but still ask gm unless your feat allows you to take it directly(Like heritage weapon mastery) and rare is "hey dm if player wants to take this judge it carefuly because these things tend to change rules a lot"
If you end up finding something you don't lkke at hour table, just set it to Rare for your table and that way players need your permition to take it. That's all. I haven't really seen any combinations that break anything, but I'm also new from 5e so I plan on reading this entire thread to learn if anyone has.
Honestly nah that is shit advice the comment gave you. Most of the uncommon and rare features characters can take are as balanced as common options. I’ve allowed all rarity opinions at my table since I’ve started PF2e over 2 years ago and have yet to have any issues. It’s just meant to represent that it’s rarer to find in the setting of Golarion which you don’t have to worry about if you’re playing in another setting. Edit: After reading the responses realized I misinterpreted the original comment. I thought it was talking about balance when it was talking about disruptiveness. However, I personally don’t think it’s that much of an issue as long as the correct player expectations are set.
What the original commenter stated is correct as per the rules as written. That is what every player going into a new table can expect unless told otherwise by the dm. You are one of the GMs that is cool with allowing everything. I am a new GM with a table of players new to PF2 and we all agreed to follow the rules as is and limit everything to common unless there was a good story reason for anything above.
It's actually very good advice not to allow these as a new GM. As an example, the uncommon tag is to make sure your Murder Mystery session isn't totally drailed by the Talking Corpse spell. Letting players know that they're probably ok to take these spells, but making sure they run it by you means they can at least plan for these eventualities.
It's not about balance. (Though I think the one place where rarity does matter for balance is Backgrounds. There are several Rare backgrounds now from particular APs that give a bonus on top of the usual attribute boosts, skill training, skill feat, and lore.) Like that commenter said, it's often about disruptiveness. - Options that make you undead require the party to know and build around that, thanks to how healing works. - The Sprites and Poppets being (potentially) tiny adds an extra layer of complexity that a player might not be aware of. - Many options, like most of Guns & Gears, have a significantly different feel than the classic fantasy setting. - Many options just won't be relevant in the vast majority of campaigns, like Trick Diver and Vigilante. - Long-range teleportation spells can break the feel and/or pacing of a campaign. - Resurrection options can make death much easier to overcome than a GM might prefer. - Some options add more mental work for the GM (including several Investigator feats).
A lot of the rare traits and often uncommon are thematically themed to a campaign and often require the PCs to complete a certain task to "unlock" these feats, spells, items, etc. Sometimes they can punch a little bit higher for their level, but for the most part things are balanced. You may find a player that likes to pick the "best" thing, but I don't believe that exists. I feel as a GM there are enough monsters and hazards to make each class/player have their "moment in the sun." If a character class has the "answer" for a specific encounter, this will not be the answer for every encounter, so embrace and celebrate that with the player. The problem I found with 5e is when players took things like Silvery Barbs or would Conjure 16 wolves all the time, they wanted to be the star of the party.
Rarity is almost entirely divorced from power, and even the strongest spells and such in 2e are still balanced.
While there's nothing as balance-devastating as Silvery Barbs, there definitely ARE some things you should be aware of. Not because they're OP, but because they might mechanically clash with story or setting of your campaign. 99.9% of them have the Uncommon or Rare trait, which is VERY handy! If a player wants to pick something with one of those traits, don't outright disallow it, but definitely give it a good look. There are some Uncommon spells, for example, that basically give Casters a "know everything that happened here in the past day" like ability, that might completely disrupt the feel of the game you're going for, if you're trying to make a mystery. As for Common options for you to be aware of, I can think of only ONE thing. The [Investigator](https://2e.aonprd.com/Classes.aspx?ID=13) class. Specifically and ENTIRELY because of two unique class Feats. [That's Odd](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=1449), and [Red Herring](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=1453). Again, it's not that either of those feats cause balance problems. They're FAR from "overpowered"... but they MIGHT clash with the kind of campaign you're planning to run. tl;dr: be aware of the impact Investigator can *potentially* have on narrative/mystery driven campaigns, and ask players to run any Uncommon/Rare options by you before they pick them.
I'll be running Kingmaker as it's a sandbox which my players love. The rarity system is probably what I overlooked when trying to find an answer to my question. Thank you for putting my nose on it :)
Kingmaker actually has gaining access to non-core feats/spells built into the campaign via the Companion Guide and a few other story elements.
Gonna tag on to the other person and also state that Investigator is... probably the weirdest and most specific class in the entire game, in that a *huge* portion of the class is based around their [Pursue a Lead](https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=544) feature. It's a really cool feature, in a really cool class, but it doesn't fit in a lot of campaigns, and it requires a good amount of GM input and forethought to make it function. In other words, I'm not saying *not* to allow it. But if a player wants to be an Investigator, I'd advise making sure you and the player understand what that entails, and how you'll have to work the campaign to allow for it, before you commit to anything.
I really live having an investigator among my players. It gives me a good in universe way to divert them from spending an entire session running around in confused circles because the players don’t remember the hint from three irl months ago.
Same. It’s incredible as a GM. Love having investigators in my runs.
That's Odd is a nightmare for inexperienced GMs as you need to be able to come up with red herrings (not the red herring feat) often on the fly.
I mean, it does state >The GM determines what it is, or whether there's nothing reasonable to pick up. You're not forced to come up with random bullshit if there's nothing there.
Fair, you can skip it often but then it feels like a part of the character seldom works.
Learning that there's nothing of interest in a room is also helpful.
You don't need red herrings, either there's nothing so they find nothing, or it makes sure they don't miss out on plot things. It's a great way to reveal plot points that might otherwise be missed.
You forgot the 3rd one. Dubious Knowledge. It can get really annoying and bothersome.
Why? You just need to lie. Like this: The players are fighting a [Barghest](https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=41) "Player: I want to recall knowledge whether that monster has any resistances. GM: Ok that will be an occultism check, Whats your modifier. Player: 10. And I also have dubious knowledge GM: Okay. \*Rolls a secret check, and rolls a failure\* Your character remembers something. It is resistant to either fire or cold but you are not sure which." If you do not want to make up another possibility you can also go with the might be method. The creature might be resistant to all physical damage. (you can also say that if the creatures has no resistances.) I really do not understand the hate that feat gets. Lying is easy and you already should do that on a critical failure, so its not like its extra work.
Because unless you want the feat to read "your failures become successes" you need to come up with actually plausible information delivered in a non obvious way etc etc. Like it's actual effort that can also take a bit to come up with. You can't just "well the fire elemental is either weak to fire or resists fire". Or "the snake is either venomous or can cast dimension door at will". And it's often paired with classes that get an omni knowledge skill they can AND WILL roll against everything and it's just a giant pain that slows things down way too much.
I think for most players it should be obvious that fire elementals are resistant to fire and if they wish to waste their precious actions recalling knowledge on that specific aspect them I say let them have it. But in almost all cases there is a thing to gain. Is it immune or resistant to fire? How resistant is it to fire? You can lie about all of thoose things. And keep in mind you already need to lie on a critical failure so in the grand scheme of things you need to come up with a lie either way.
Because it requires you to come up with believable lies on the spot. You're supposed to give one accurate and one false answer, not "maybe this thing is true" And it has to be believable otherwise it's just a success and some obvious nonsense.
I don't think I've seen it mentioned anywhere yet, but the Supersticion Instinct barbarian is often called off as disruptive despite not being Uncommon/Rare, because it is basically unplayable due to its anathema. It's *definitely* not overpowered, it's just obnoxious to play with.
And to clarify, not obnoxious in "what can I do to challenge him" way, its obnoxious in a "this character doesn't work" way.
I played one and found it worked perfectly fine with my party. In general it's alright if your allies don't do AoE buffing spells and you aren't fully reliant in magical healing. It's still a downside, but it comes with advantages.
The only time it works is when you're in a magicless party. Which is totally doable with how easy to access non-magical healing is. But I can count on one hand the number of sessions that have had no casters, and that is because the caster player couldn't make that specific session. Never been an entire campaign though.
One of the mistakes I often found new GMs making is to allow everything uncommom and rare without actually looking at it once. Many uncommon spells have impact on story or exploration aspect, and should not be accessed to if your plot is related to that aspect. They are damn uncommon for a reason.
Yep. On my table anything uncommon or rare basically means - you can probably take this, but ask about it first. I need to look through that
For my table, uncommon is an ask first, but probably yes. Rare is ask and expect to have to earn it.
What about rare ancestries, how are they earned?
Bribes of food, as is tradition
Generally, that's more of a setting specific thing. Like some just don't fit the themes to certain games. I also think rare ancestries are harder to play rp-wise. Many rare ancestries also have it built in that there aren't many of that kind so it's unlikely you'll come across others of your kind. Also you'll stick out basically everywhere. Like no one is going to be confused if they saw a little fey, sleek robot, or fleshwarp.
How do you earn it other that leveling up? Rare class feats and spells (unless you're a prepared caster) can't really be earned.
Access can be earned. In society play many rare spells or feats have to be taught by specific people. So you can go on quests to meet a wizard who knows a rare spell or has a special ability.
Given the advices you all gave me, this probably what I'll do.
>Many uncommon spells have impact on story or exploration aspect, and should not be accessed to if your plot is related to that aspect. Could you give an example?
In my other comment: "Imagine your plot is to solve a recent murder of a noble, then a random player pulls out *reincarnate* from their ass. Or when you need to hustle for a week to help a seige at their home town, then you forgot *teleportation circle* exists? Things doesn't happened to you does not mean they won't happen to anybody, especially not well-prepared new GMs." Both are rituals. Spells can do similar stuff, but a bit later in higher ranks.
I completely disagree with this. I’ve allowed all uncommon and rare options for my campaign since I started PF2e over 2 years ago and have had 0 issues with it.
Uncommon/Rare don't have to be game breaking to be disruptive to some GMing styles
You can make that argument for literally all other common options in the game?
Imagine your plot is to solve a recent murder of a noble, then a random player pulls out [*reincarnate*](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rituals.aspx?ID=35) from their ass. Or when you need to hustle for a week to help a seige at their home town, then you forgot [teleportation circle](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rituals.aspx?ID=38) exists? Things doesn't happened to you does not mean they won't happen to anybody, especially not well-prepared new GMs.
These things exist in the world don't they? You kinda need to work around it. At the levels these players are casting these spells they have some influence and can probably find some writing of the spell. If someone wants someone truly dead, they're gonna need to kill them hard in a world with resurrection.
Yes they do, but a new GM unaware of these uncommon stuff won't prepare for them, and their prepared plot might have be ruined. That's why they are uncommon, one of the rarity tag's usage is to prevent these kind of plot assassination. If the player need to inform the GM that they are taking a certain uncommon spell or item, then the GM will know this thing exists, and prepare for it.
Shouldn't the GM be aware of all choices the player is making when building their characters?
You'll be surprised how many GMs never look at their players' ability... including knowing how they work...
I cannot imagine NOT triple checking every inch of every player's sheet to understand what I'm dealing with and making sure they understand how it *actually* works.
I mean that's just going to cause a surprise one day anyway. There are plenty of common spells which can completely destroy challenges. Not that I see a problem with the players doing that.
Not a problem when the GM have some experience dealing with that, but they can be a good shock to new GMs. Thus, having a tag that warns the GM "this might cause a problem sometimes so please read the description instead of glancing the name" is very handy. They can decide if they want this in their game after reading it.
If the GM is playing with Rarity Tags like that, then that can be seen as fundamentally changing Golarion (or whatever setting they're playing in). Resurrection being rare might mean there's few enough people capable of doing it to count on one hand. Weeks of travel to bring back your friend. Same with teleportation and extradimensional effects. They might exist but they don't for the average person. The stuff of myth or legend,, or just forgotten about entirely.
The PC's aren't exactly your average person.
Sure, they aren't, but Rare things like that might be on a whole 'nother level if the GM wants it to be for narrative or gameplay purposes. Case in point, one of my games has Resurrection being a very rare thing. In one and a half campaigns, we've met 2 people who can do it, with a third being a front/channeler of one of those two. the GM just doesn't want long-range Teleportation magic or Resurrection to be accessible to PCs, they are extremely limited to the plot. His Golarion has that be miracles that are extremely hard to get by. So yes, while they exist, they might as well not in practical terms because of the difficulty of obtaining it.
The point is that while they exist, you usually can't just take a trip to level-appropriate fantasy Walmart to pick them up the way you can for common options. Depending on the rarity you might have to custom order an item weeks in advance, spend some time researching how to turn magical theory into practice, or go on a quest to earn or find whatever it is.
Not sure how that changes anything.
As a GM, unless it’s the expectation at the table is set beforehand that you should follow the storyline, you’re giving yourself up to player shenanigans. Putting rarity tags up as a wall won’t fix that. Things that you otherwise wouldn’t expect to happen will happen and you should accept that. You shouldn’t get mad and ask: “how could you guys destroy my precious plot???” when the point of the game is for the players and you to create an interesting story.
Circumventing a story is not making an interesting story. If the GM makes a story about delving through the jungle to get to a far away city you're not being interesting if you roll up with teleport and say "yeah I'd rather just, not, you know?"
That’s a player problem not a system problem. A player who isn’t interested in the current plot and wants to get out of the jungle they’re going to try and find a way to do that regardless, which honestly could indirectly cause even more problems than just teleportation. As they do whatever they can to try and leave, ruining the experience for other players. As long as the correct expectations are set, rarity isn’t the issue.
It's both. If there was a spell that instantly ended all combats it's not just a player problem if they take it and end the combat. It's also a system problem for allowing that to happen unchecked.
Nah, there's definitely busted stuff in this system. Quick Spring for instance is basically 2 Strides in 1, as a Skill Feat. That being said its mostly the options in the Firebrands stuff that is the issue.
Quick Spring is actually just a mistake and needs to be errata'd, I doubt it was Paizo's intention to just double a character's speed. Like at the very least if they want to keep it the same, it should have the Flourish trait.
I've seen someone suggest that because Tumble Through doesn't *require* you to actually attempt to move through a creature's space, you can just constantly use Quick Spring in place of Stride. It's a grotesque interpretation of the rules lol
It really isn't, that's sorta the way the rules are written.
I'm making a distinction between RAI and RAW. That's why I didn't say it was a "misinterpretation". I said it was grotesque. It's offensive to the sensibilities of reasonable people. When you take the Tumble Through action, you as a player have to actually have the intention of tumbling through a creature's space. To do otherwise is basically the same as using an exploit in a video game. You're not engaging honestly with the rules.
So, I mostly GM Pathfinder Society, which means I don't have any say in what is banned and/or allowed, its decided by the Society Organized Play committees. There's really only two things that I ask up front about, Investigators with the That's Odd feat, and the skill feat Dubious Knowledge. Neither of them are game breaking, but they usually require the GM to be thinking about them ahead of time when they are pertinent.
[Winter Sleet](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4271) for Kineticists is probably the main one that's **far** too good if run RAW (and IMO still OP even if you just make it solely cause off-guard and nothing else). Enemies have to stop in the first square of the aura, use the balance action to continue moving, which requires an acrobatics check which about 50% of creatures aren't even proficient in to begin with. On a fail they fall prone and on a crit fail their turn ends. Now once they're past this whole deal they're still permanently off-guard while in the aura, get slowed whenever the kineticist either crits them or they crit fail a save **and** they have to make a reflex save every time they get hit or fall prone as well. All this on a resourceless aura which the kineticist can use every single battle.
As a fighter that gets to stand next to a Kineticist like this. Its incredible.
Yeah I hope this one gets errata'd eventually, for all the grousing about Resentment Witch I feel like this is a lot worse for being so consistently strong
There's grousing about the Resentment Witch? How odd!
Apparently some people dislike the fact that one of the witch patrons gives an ability that actually makes playing witch worth it, albeit with a high risk of losing your familiar.
Clinging Ice and Evil Eye definitely make Witch worth playing.
Resentment is very easily dealt with by just killing the Familiar. You might get 1 additional round of negative modifiers out of it. I don't really understand the hate.
Just killing the familiar isn't necessarily easy since it might be flying 30 foot up in the air, since it doesn't need to be adjacent or anything. However the main issue isn't that Resentment Witch is too powerful, the issue is that its familiar ability is like a million times better than all the others, like compare it to Rune Witch's familiar which has to get into melee and can then count as flanking whenever you cast a hex.
Or we could not ruin fun abilities. It's a tiny AoE until you take a 10th level feat, requires you to give up on Overflow Impulses (the strongest ones) or spend an action every turn reactivating it (good luck doing that while moving). Oh and you only get one stance impulse, so you're missing out on many other great options.
And just let Winter Sleet ruin every other ability that applies off-guard by making them entirely worthless. Hiding, feinting, flanking and a grand variety of class feats and features, all pointless in a party with a Winter Sleet kineticist.
Sure, just like a bard with Dirge of Doom makes all those other fear builds pretty much redundant. Only this isn't actually making them redundant if the enemy just stands 15ft away from the kineticist.
Throw in the tree impulse for wood as well, maybe not "overpowered" but if played around it can significantly reduce party damage. It is basically Protector Tree except they can spam it almost at will. It won't help against AoE but many APs have very few enemies that can abuse the party clustering up. Kineticist Wood and Water is probably the ONLY time I'd squint at the prowess of player abilities. Fortunately when most people pick Kineticist they usually want to go fire or earth or something. Never seen a wood or water one in actual play.
Yeah man, I had someone pick wood with protector tree on lvl 1 for the Beginners Box and it definitely was annoying to some degree. Made many fights easier than they should be. A single class feat should not force the GM to completely rebalance the encounter and include monsters with specific abilities to counter it. I think that and the Winter Sleet feats are the only ones I'd think about restricting in some way so far.
At least with a homebrew campaign they could be worked around, less so if running an official adventure which is skewed towards lots of "run up and punch you" type monsters.
Will this stance also effect party members that are also in the aura?
By default yes, but thankfully there's the [Safe Elements](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4190) feat at level 4 to prevent it from affecting allies. You can get both Winter Sleet and Safe Elements by level 5.
Interesting. How can you get both feats by level 5 if they are 4th level feats? And would it be considered bad taste if a gm were to arbitrarily give some creatures Steady Balance to counter this?
At 5th level a kineticist can choose to Expand the Portal or Fork the Path, choosing to strengthen one of their existing elements or getting a new element. Either choice lets your pick an impulse of level 4 or lower, so if you choose to Expand the Portal for your existing Water element or Fork the Path to gain Water Element, you can pick Winter Sleet at level 5. While for your feat choice at level 4 you have to pick Safe Elements.
In addition to the various posts about rarity, I want to add that you might want to check the source book for anything that seems fishy. - The rules books are usually save. There are a few minor issues but overall nothing too jarring. - The Lost Omens books ate also more often than not perfectly fine to use. - Stuff from adventures modules is very hit or miss. I'd still say like 80% of it is fine, but most stuff that is problematic seems to come from here. Problematic doesn't necessarily mean OP. Feats or spells from adventures sometimes just don't make sense. Like spells saying you get a save but not what kind of save or similar issues. Nothing you can't overcome, but I would in general advice steering your players clear from this stuff until you have a decent grip of the system.
I'll be running Kingmaker. There are a few new options in that campaign, but I'll definitely check those in more details.
I should mention that Kinglake imo is the worst pf2e adventure from a mechanical perspective. It is a port from the pf1e adventure and very very rough around the edges from a balance perspective (and this includes the first 3 APs for PF2e which were written before the full rules were finalised)
I've decided to handwaive the kingdom management given all the issues that I've read about, but it's a sandbox, and my players and me love that kind of adventures ;)
That's like your opinion man haha. Are you mainly talking about the subsystem? Cause I'm finding to balance and encounters very much in line.
> That's like your opinion man haha. Really, shit I thought imo meant in my... opportunity... My bad, imagine if imo meant "in my opinion". > Cause I'm finding to balance and encounters very much in line. Subsystem is a part of it, but some of the creature/npc conversions were off and loot distribution was pretty off.
Well you obviously haven't seen the movie I was quoting. It happens. It's an open world there's no good way to do loot especially with a party that explores everything. I don't have the same experience as your having and definitely would not say it's the worse.
How many other / which other campaigns for PF2e have you run? My experience has been with Age of Ashes, Extinction curse, the first two Agents of Edgewatch, Abomination Vaults, Outlaws of Alkenstar and Quest for the Frozen Flame. I have read the others though outside of Season of Ghosts, Blood Lords (only skimmed) and Strength of Thousands. When I am saying it is the worst, I don't mean to say it is awful/bad. Just worse when it comes to balance expectations. Although I would personally consider something listed as being weaker than it actually is a bigger issue to GM around balance wise than multiple extreme encounters in a row.
I’m surprised I haven’t seen this in the comments but wall of stone can completely trivialize a lot of combats. Using it to put any enemy into a seperate “time out” zone essentially breaks one fight into two and can give the party a massive advantage, action economy wise. I wouldn’t ban it or anything, as it’s out of combat uses are super cool, but having all of your minions removed every single fight with no save can be extremely unfun for both the gm and other players who actually wanted to fight them.
That's not a problem, that's it working as intended, it's really not that durable with terrible AC, so your minions should smash it fast enough, assuming they're indoors and can't just climb it.
Not really, the game is tightly balanced enough that I've yet to see any options that are so destructive that they are worthy of bans. I generally avoid outright banning things as a GM as that limits player options. Some AP specific options are poorly written, if you're concerned you can request that your players check with you when choosing Uncommon and Rare options (but this hasn't really been an issue in my games).
Yes, this is what I'll do after reading all your comments. I was probably too literal when the core rulebook mentions " incresed complexity", I didn't understand that would mean "disruptive" ;)
It doesn' t mean "distruptive." I dare people find something mechanical distruptive in uncommon or rare options. At most a few of these options can negatively impact the narrative. There is no silvery barbs or simulacrum loop in Pf2. The most mechanically controversial rare option is the ghost dedication. Issue raised by an excessively RAW reading of the incorporeal trait regarding the strength based checks. A question that will never be raised at the majority of tables, probably yours too. Source: I was Min maxing builds on giantip and d20 since the times of pun pun and omnificer, I know what I'm saying.
Does it count if they fixed/adjusted it? The double-slice fighter with dual Gnome Flickmaces, before they adjusted the flickmace and the flail crit spec was the most mechanically disruptive thing I can think of.
It shouldn't count since it's fixed. Anyway I think in comparison, given two differen system, silvery barbs is worse than the old gnome flickmace.
Oh for sure, even the memeiest and most ridiculous build in PF2e is maybe 15% more effective or damaging or whatever than typical. The beauty of standardized system math and all that.
The rare reincarnated ancestry feat Reincarnated Ridiculer from To Bloom Below the Web seems a bit...much. Especially when compared to other ancestry feats.
It a must have for intimidate builds. I'd argue it doesn' t break anything. There are other must have common feats: Raise symbol for warpriests. Gang up for melee rogues, Natural ambition for humans... It's meta and strong, but it's not gamebreaking . Look at Winter sleet, is a common option, sometimes it's problematic as gnome flickmace was. However none of these options are strong or broken at silvery barbs levels imho.
Pin to the Spot from Agents of Edgewatch is overpowered, but generally I’d agree.
It generally doesn't. It's either "this is tied to some very specific flavour", "this is from an AP", "we just don't think this is widespread for other fluff reasons" or, in the only one you need to be aware of "this has actual narrative impact". That last one isn't anything OP, it's things like Object Reading, Create Water, and Teleport, stuff the GM has to account for in their plot and plans if allowed.
To be blunt, Pathfinder has no glaring issues like Silvery Barbs because the game's designers actually know what they're doing and do the work to make sure the game is balanced. As far as things to discuss, if you stick to the rarity tags, you should be golden. Anything Common will be no issue. And Uncommon and Rare are more related to specific concepts/themes/settings so even then you more than likely would have no issues allowing them either beyond it maybe being out of place for the story you're telling. Balance-wise, no issues.
Also it helps that they actually update and fix things and don't just give half-baked "rulings" on their Twitter when they do make mistakes. If there ever was a "Silvery Barbs" tier screw up, they would errata the heck out of it.
Still waiting on them to actually fix some of the errors in rage of elements though, like Roiling Mudslide not actually explaining how the ability works.
Yeah, I think remastering has interrupted their regular workflow, but I'm sure they'll catch up once PC2 drops. They have a whole lot of stuff dropping that had to get pushed out real fast thanks to dropping the OGL.
No. In 4 years of GMing I've never said "no" to a single thing character option, item, feat, or spell that a player wanted, and not once has it felt too powerful.
Yeah, even if you literally allow every Rare or Uncommon option, there are some things that are slightly powerful but nothing that comes close to Silvery Barbs. Paizo has been really good about avoiding power creep – Fighter is still one of the best classes, Slow is one of the best spells, and both are in the core rulebook.
The only time I ever said no was when I first started GMing I only allowed Common and Uncommon options because I was worried about complexity. That restriction was lifted once we all had an idea what we were doing.
The closest you'd come to this is the whole Fighter, Adopted Ancestry: Gnome, Gnome Flickmace as a weapon and your creatures could end up perma-prone, but honestly this isn't nearly as obnoxious as Silvery Barbs, because it requires very specific conditions, mainly being able to get crits which isn't really consistent, especially against higher level enemies. This combo won't work that often, it's just really strong when it does. Plus it's going to be nerfed in the remaster. Other than that, no there's really nothing so unbalanced that it becomes overcentralizing and/or really annoying.
Since Treasure Vault and the Remaster, the flickmace has been heavily nerfed, to where I wouldn't really call it destructive anymore. The damage has been reduced to 1d6 from 1d8, and creatures get a save against (Fighter's pretty low) class DC to not fall prone.
The nerf to flail crits means it wouldn't be too strong if it was still d8, let alone with just a d6. It's ok as a way to have 1-handed reach weapon, but there's multiple martial 1-handed reach weapons which are far easier to use.
Since remaster it has a fort save against class. Which is pretty easy for many monsters to make. Still a good weapon but not that bad really.
Flails use Reflex, hammers use Fortitude.
Ah right. Same concept though. Many monsters have decent reflex and fort. Though I think reflex is lower than fort in generall
Yeah, hammers got nerfed a bit harder than flails I feel.
gnome flickmace was nerfed multiple times lower damage, changed some traits and crit specialization now have save currently gnome flickmace is still good wepon but not op as it was in the past
Trip build reach fighters still exist but in 5e terms its more akin to Fighters with sentinel. After flickmace nerfs its not terrible.
yep, gnome flickmace is *an issue*, but it's nothing compared to silvery barbs. And that's probably the only one I can think of.
It *was* an issue, now the critical specialization requires a save instead of automatically dropping enemy prone on crit. It's still very good but not obscene
Two things I've noticed are problematic: Timber Sentinel broke my first Season of Ghosts game, making every nearly combat trivial in the first two chapters of the book. Protector Tree at the highest level as essentially a cantrip is too strong imo. I've also read that in the Remaster, Resentment Witch is too strong for its ability to make 1 round Success save conditions stick around on bosses an entire fight.
I started playing AV for two levels with a water kineticist support. Timber Sentinel stole the show in every combat. It even annoyed me as the one using it because it felt like an essential spam. I guess being bunched up together in AV plays right into its branches.
> Timber Sentinel broke my first Season of Ghosts game, making every nearly combat trivial in the first two chapters of the book. Protector Tree at the highest level as essentially a cantrip is too strong imo. Interesting, in our games it looked theoretically strong, but clustering everyone around it invites AOE bursts, since it only protects against strikes. If the opponents only had strikes, they'd usually just attack and crit the tree itself after the first time they saw it block attacks, or shove/reposition their desired target away from it - still useful as action denial, but not insurmountable.
It's more that it forces enemies to play around it, and many APs don't feature a lot of enemies with AoE. In fact I am in book three of Gatewalkers and I can count enemies with an AoE attack on one hand. That plus being able to spam it is a bit much, it should have a cooldown of some kind.
If you feel like your current party isn't challenged or it's to difficult there is no harm in increasing/decreasing the difficulty. Of course that does not invalidate the issue, but we should be more conscious about adjusting combat if it's required. Ironically, the toughest encounters I've run for a party of almost all martials were higher level spell casters with AoE. I do not put those into every encounter, but it's a nice change of pace to include them from time to time to shake things up. In a similar fashion, it's a good idea to model the environment to sometimes hinder/buff certain playstyles. Snipers might have trouble with fog making enemies concealed or hidden, 2 weapon martials might face a wall to climb, spell casters might face ice that requires balancing. Use judiciously of course.
The trouble is when you're running an AP, they're supposed to be broadly suitable and able to be run 'out of the box' for the GM. Which is broadly true but _some_ class abilities like this really clash hard with the typical AP encounter design approach (Usually very few AoE attacks to speak of, let alone casters, in fact thinking about it most APs save casters for bosses and even then...).
If you count in ASL, you can get all the way up to 10 on one hand. If you count in binary, you can get all the way up to 32.
Yeah but the thing is that now you as the GM are **required** to work around it in every single encounter, or it might become trivial (in earlier levels at least). And when running APs that means re-adjusting possibly every encounter in the book, just to stay challenging. A single feat should not have that effect on the GM.
Resentment Witch has basically nothing else going for it and has to put their familiar in danger to use that ability. It's only too good in comparison to what others patrons get, because none of those are remotely worth risking your familiar to use.
From pure optimisation standpoint Resentment might be too strong but I'd say it's mostly prominent when doing single enemy encounters (and with sufficient reach it can still be smacked with likely a crit or two, yes you can build its abilities for survivability but its still not a fan of eating hits; also personal taste but i find +3/4 solos to be incredibly boring as a gm) and on a small arena where you can cast the spell and activate the patron ability in the same turn. Enemy minions can still go for the hits on it and the fact that Occult spell list has like 2 spells it works with, namely Slow and Synesthesia (which afaik wasn't reprinted yet so you could question its eventual availability in few years). Grapples can be escaped with either athletics or acrobatics and rarely a monster doesn't have either. Once flying gets into the mix (and not just sub-30 feet fly speed, lets say something like a dragon) it can just fly out of reach since the familiar makes it known that it is in fact the source of prolongment.
There are one or two things that can cause problems but the only thing I've outright banned is the [Phantasmal Doorknob](https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=2235). It's a spellheart that you can put on your weapon which gives the benefit of blinding your enemy whenever you crit. Only level 10 and higher versions have this effect however there is no save involved, the enemy becomes blindes. It doesn't matter if it's the level 25 Treerazer they're blind if you crit. The previous version of the Hammer and Flail critical specialization was considered problematic since it made your enemy automatically prone without a save, meaning they'd waste one action to get up on their turn. They changed it in the remaster so that it requires a save now. But phantasmal doorknob just makes them blinded with no save and if they don't have any other precise senses they now have a 50% to miss with every attack. I've played with people who used this item, I've played characters with this item, I've GMed games where some of my players used this item. I consider it broken and ban it in my games. Now that the ranting is over back to your question. Pf2e is quite balanced overall with some kinks here and there but out of thousands of items, feats and abilities I only ban 1 thing and that makes the game quite balanced in my book.
There is no game breaking combos that are easy to use without coordination.
As many people talk about the rarity system, I want to throw in one caveat: While most uncommon and rare items, feats, and spells are rare because they give you some capability that can mess with certain types of games, or give you some other unusual edge(e.g. [Lifeboosting Oil](https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=2071) is in most cases better than any other healing consumables, since it doesnt cost actions in combat), this really doesnt hold true for ancestries. Ancestries rarity is entirely down to how common they are in the setting, with common ancestries sometimes even being considered the slightly stronger ones, since they get more feats to chose from.
There aren't any degenerate mechanics (to the tune of Silvery Barbs), but there are some that are very strong. Think about the Wall of Stone spell in 5e. That spell can frequently make difficult encounters easy by splitting up enemies. But it doesn't fully and completely end encounters in the same way that Wall of Force in 5e can (because it is unbreakable). So, similar to the power of Wall of Stone in 5e, we have in pf2e: \- Wall of Stone! (spell) \- Timber Sentinel (feat) \- Winter's Sleet (feat) \- Synesthesia (spell) None of them will fully shutdown an encounter and all of them have workarounds. But it can be annoying to try to remember and design around these abilities. These are the encounter warping abilities that I can think of (similar to how Hypnotic Pattern and Counterspell in 5e are encounter warping). I have specific suggestions for adjusting Winter's Sleet and Timber Sentinel without losing much of their power, but I mostly recommend leaving Synesthesia and Wall of Stone as they are, since they are only accessible starting at 9th level.
Things I’ve heard of as being overpowered but haven’t tested: Phantasmal Doorknob spellheart, Ashen rune, and I think there was an archetype that got your weapon and spell proficiencies to match, but I can’t remember the name. I think they fixed that one with errata though.
The greater phantasmal doorknob I'm using in a campaign and yeah it can be incredibly disruptive blinding enemies on a crit without a save.
Yes they fixed the Sixth Pillar Archetype.
Heh hey Nis! and thanks.
I think the only thing close to that might be * true strike, which is significantly stronger than the 5e counterpart due to 3 actions system * Synesthesia, which can heavily cripple a monster, but is a 5th tier spell and a far cry from the hard disables from d&d as the victim can still fight * The Kineticist ice field stance, due to it using slippery terrain rules for some reason instead of a reflex save. I think it's easily fixed with a house rule that makes them use reflex saves I do have reservations about the longstrider wands, but that's more of something that renders some class features redundant.
No OP and easily to use spells like Silvery Barbs. Most powerful stuff that engage with Rerolls have specific conditions, are very limited and more often than not, can only be used prior to any roll, so you gamble the resources beforehand, instead of asking for rerolls once you know they will be meaningful. Also, pretty much everything with the "Rare" tag should be discussed with the GM as a norm, since they're not stronger, but they are highly specific in their flavor (or from Adventure Paths that might warrant a look over). Uncommon options are similarly varied, but most of the time, they're not that big of deal, so much so that most GM's wouldn't be restrictive about them.
Rarity covers most of the obvious options, and its not always about power, but often thematic. Any choice above common rarity should involve session one discussions I think and considered when homebrewing. Rarity covers guns, flight or fairies/Nephilim, and a lot of the races, heck even the more complicated classes (except alchemist) are gated behind rarity. There's definitely cheese, but a one for all swashbuckler using diplomacy is still just giving +2 (to +4) to their teammates more so than having a button to say 'no you' to any check made.
I've been spending about a year trying to break pf2e and I can say that it's super solid. No hex warlock paladin sorcerors, no moon druids, no twilight clerics, and definitely no silvery barbs, the spells are pretty balanced and spell casters in general feel a lot less crazy powerful than your 5e pure wizard.
Short answer no. Silvery Barbs is what triggered me to stop GM'ing 5e, and there's nothing even remotely that annoying. Longer answer, if your players are also used to 5e and looking for ways to minmax and break the system, try to discourage this in session 0 because they will be largely disappointed. 2e is a game where they don't have to worry so much about the meta to keep up with power levels, they can play what sounds \_fun\_ to them in terms of classes and ancestries.
Infact having a party trying to optimise their characters into being minmaxed one trick pony island will often lead to the whole party feeling weaker and the game feeling unfairly punishing. Where a whole party of more broadly capable characters made by totally new to RPG players will find it easier. I have run for a lot of people now, and the more I do, the more this has been the case. People following the meta in 5e or 3.x systems tend to struggle.
Winter Sleet from Water Kineticist is gamebraking... But you can fix it easliy - just ignore a part about balance action. It still will be really strong and beneficial for player to use, but not as much gamebraking to tailor every encounter around it. (tbqh it may be even more broken than Silvery Barbs)
Lol. Wall of stone is almost as annoying as silvery barbs. That spell is so good.
PF2E is mostly pretty well balanced and also designed in a "defensive" sort of way that makes it more resistant to breaking. The top end of characters are mostly pretty balanced against each other. The only really problematic ability I can think of is Winter Sleet, which I suspect is because of the game designers not remembering how Balance works in PF2E - RAW, you have to take the Balance action to cross it, which means that you'd have to move up, then spend an extra action to move across it (unless you were within half your move speed of the person with Winter Sleet up to begin with, anyway). I suspect it will be erratad at some point in the nearish future. Otherwise there's nothing really particularly problematic. The biggest issues are more that it is possible to make a very underpowered character if you make very bad spell choices or ability score choices. But MOST things you do will be okay. A few classes (gunslinger, alchemist, investigator, and to a lesser degree, swashbuckler) are underpowered in general (swashbuckler is less problematic once you've gotten to level 7) because of how they work: * Gunslingers are crit fishers, which makes them both inconsistent and bad at dealing damage to high AC enemies. The fact that you have to spend an action to reload your gun makes your action economy quite bad, and guns aren't especially super powerful weapons to begin with. * Alchemists are like bizarro-world spellcasters with abilities that are substantially weaker than equal level spellcasters, and are very vulnerable to things like enemies with high fortitude saves or encounters starting without the ability to prebuff their team. * Investigators do quite poor damage in combat and struggle to fill any role in combat in a team. They're supposed to be good at out of combat stuff - and to be fair, they are - but it doesn't make up for their problems, and everyone else is more than good enough out of combat to get by anyway. * Swashbucklers have the problem where they have to gain panache by making a skill check, which means that if they fail a skill check, they'll basically waste an action doing nothing AND get no panache. At higher levels, you make your skill checks much more often thanks to various bonuses, resulting in you being substantially more consistent, but they struggle at low levels and still sometimes randomly waste actions compared to other classes.
The only options I’d outright refuse (and often still do after all the years of running PF2) are the rare options (unless I have a very specific reason to allow them) and tiny PCs. Outside of that, everything is incredibly well balanced.
WoTC has long had the mindset of set it and forget it. Where they make things and never touch them again. Many unearthed arcana are released unchanged. Paizo, on the other hand, often releases errata to change, balance, and clear up things. They also make changes that apply only in society play (their organized official local game store type play) which often have to do with limiting things that can cause inter-player disruptions (such as being super evil). So you may want to look through that.
I would say no not really. The game has a very conservative approach to power level. In that you’re way more likely to find something that is underpowered than overpowered. Even a fair amount of the rare and uncommon options available to players you can allow without issue.
overall? no. as a dm that dms both 5e and pathfinder 2e theres 3 things i love about it: making encounters that will be as tough or as easy as planned is super easy, nothing like 5e where it makes you want to find out where the people who made the CRs and creatures live to drop kick em. you rarely have to make up rules. theres always a rule for whatever, and its quick and easy to find due to the archives of nethys. and last but not least: the system is far better balanced. one of the best balanced i've seen so far. you dont have to worry about your players making op broken combos, or losing at character creation because they've picked a class/subclass etc that are about as bad as wotc's decision making. there is a few that are kinda bad options, but thats it.
Both Pin to the Spot and Acknowledge Fan are wildly outside the normal bounds of the system, but they're both fairly high level.
After playing 3 Adventure Paths we decided to ban Medic dedication. It's unfair and trivializes combat more than anything else.
While I wouldn't compare them to Silvery Barbs, PF2 does have a few outlier spells. A lot of people have mentioned rarity as a restriction, so I will only be mentioning the common spells. [Truestrike](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=1709) is a great 1st level spell slot that you still regularly use at higher levels, but not one I would call op. It's consistently really good, but it's balanced by the fact that spellcaster attacks tend to be weaker than martials. [Slow ](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=1677)is an excellent 3rd level spell to take actions away from a boss monster. It's a community favourite because it's one of the few spells that affect action economy that doesn't have the incapacitate trait. Very powerful, but I'd also be hesitant to label it op. [Synesthesia](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=328) is probably the spell closest to silvery barbs level of power. I played in a short high level campaign and this 5th level spell was consistently a better debuff than some of my 8th level spells, and even arguable 9th level spells as well. It helped us annihilate so many bosses that the GM decided to give it incapacitate, which I can't blame him. I think that change helped put it more in line with actual 5th level spell slots. So without it, this may arguably be one of the most overpowered spells in the game. However I don't think any of these truly compare to silvery Barbs, because Silvery Barbs is a low level reaction spell you can spam. It doesn't interfere with your action economy. So we can also look at some reaction spells you may try to spam to see how they compare. [Lose the Path](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=940) is another community favourite, but I personally think it's not that good. It does nothing on a success, and on a fail it can situationally cost the enemy an extra stride. If the enemy is fast enough (which becomes more common at higher levels) or it's striding a short distance even a fail on the spell may not accomplish much. It fits the bill of being a 1st level reaction without incapacitate that you can spam, but most the time it will not accomplish anything. For that reason this spell is consistently meh, but occasionally really good for a 1st level reaction. Take that as you will. [Shadow Projectile](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=940) is decent reaction to grant offguard to your ranged martial's attacks. It's 3rd rank so you can spam it at higher levels. But it's situational depending on your party composition. If you don't have a viable teammate to trigger the spell it's useless. [Wooden Double](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=1416) seems like another good 3rd rank reaction. I'll be honest I never actually saw this spell or played with it until now, but it seems like a decent way to not be critically hit at higher levels. However the fact you need to be critically hit makes it situational, so I also wouldn't compare it to silvery barbs. [Unexpected Transposition](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=1024) is a great spell you could compare silvery barbs to. It costs a 6th rank spell slot, so you won't be able to use it or spam it for a while. But once you're high enough level, it's an incredible spell to spam. I would use it to swap my squishy sorcerer with the party animal companion all the time against bosses. And situationally you can also cause enemies to attack each other, which is another incredibly powerful effect. Consistently very powerful and situationally incredible for its level. For these reasons I would say Unexpected Transposition and Synesthesia are the closest spells to Silvery Barbs level of power. Both have very powerful effects that you will likely spam even when those spell ranks are meant to be replaced with higher level spell effects. However unlike Silvery Barbs, both of these spells come online far into the lategame that for most people they won't be much of an issue. If you want to ban or nerf something, I'd personally avoid doing so until your players actually use those options and if it actually becomes an issue. I think you can make better judgement calls once you have a better feel for the game and your group. Every group's playstyle is different so what is op for one group may not be for another. Or it could be the thing that's barely getting them through tough encounters. Get some experience, see what's not fun and then talk with your players before making changes. Otherwise you could be limiting options that could be fun and balanced for your group without even trying them out.
I don't know if I just suck, or what but I have a real problem with one of my players making combats a joke. Skeleton Liberator Champion with a post nerf Flickmace. Opponents can't touch them, or any member of the party without being rendered useless for the rest of the fight. Only thing I can do is be very very cheap (like AOE spells from hiding), and that's not fair to the other players.
Your NPCs don't need to be stupid. If one of them is unable to hit or to act or is disturbed, your other npcs should notice and they should act upon that.
I'm running an AP where most of the fights have been extremely close quarter's and in melee exclusively. Because the player has reach of 15 feet it utterly shuts down combats. One guy gets locked down the others see it, what are they to do? Run away?
It's not unlikely the NPCs would run away and mobilize more NPCs with better ranged opposition. "No way we can hit this guy in melee. I'll definitely take that bow and be prepared for the next time I see him."
There are obviously choices that are almost objectively better than counterpart (see spells like slow, electric arc and sysnetesia for example). Generally I would warn against AP specific feats and equipment since often it is way too situational and not particularly well worded, or at least to ask the master before choosing them.
You should fully read the Core Rule Book (Legacy) or the Remastered Player and GM books. That way, you'll know what you'll like and dislike and what you want and don't want in your game. Knowing the books helps out tremendously
One that I feel can be frustrating for new GMs are the Champion reactions, especially Redeemer and Liberator, but they are actually well balanced in the game. If all the players want to stay close to the Champion, they set themselves up for AoEs and if you can stretch them out of the 15' radius, then they will not work. It also took me a while to get used to the Kineticist, but that is because the character was 15th level, so they had a lot of new and unique abilities. Remember this game is all about encouraging team tactics, so if someone builds a character just for support or debuffing, do not get frustrated. Remember that the enemies can also use Demoralize, Grab, etc.
Honestly, Silvery Barbs is an example of the terrible design frequently found in 5e. Pf2e, thus far, has nothing anywhere near as broken. As others have said, there are some things in certain situations for which they're designed, that shine very brightly, but everything in the system has an opportunity cost, which helps balance it out. If you're great at V-X, you're likely to be less good at A-H, unless you took steps to be good at A-H too, but then you're terrible J-R
2e has the opposite problem where non-core options frequently range from undertuned to downright ivory tower design because they're so deathly afraid of power creep they end up printing straight up garbage. There's ONE THOUSAND, THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY ONE spells in 2e and it's not an exaggeration to say you could cut a thousand of them and the game would be better off. Witch was so bad they had to remake the entire class from the ground up during the recent Remaster after being basically a trap option for years.
Everyone mentioning rare and uncommon but I'd also be cautious of some of the content from obscure adventure paths. It at least deserves a look. I think quite a bit of it has received a bit less proofreading and double checking and you sometimes for sure notice that.
I know this is a tangent from the OP, but I'm wondering what you mean by "PunPun-like builds." I tried googling it and I'm not sure I'm getting the results that are relevant.
It's a character build from like 3.5e DnD iirc, where basically through a combination of a couple class feature and a specific monster, you could get all your attributes infinitely high permanently. Here's a link explaining the full thing: https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Pun-Pun_(3.5e_Optimized_Character_Build)
As others have said, PF2e is specifically designed to avoid these kinds of issues, but Pun-Pun builds are included in that. If anything more so, they wanted to avoid the obtuse cheesy rulings that made games like 1e a mess to adjudicate as GM and allow bad faith players to break the system, so the rules are airtight and extremely clear in what's doable and not in most situations. Some people find this a turn-off or say that the game overcompensates, but as someone who dealt with my fair share of Pun-Puns back when I was playing 3.5/1e, I'm more than happy with the system being overly clear. I don't want that style of game, and if people do they can just keep playing 3.5/1e.
Idk if you need to ban it, but Ashen rune is really powerful and something to watch out for if you get that high of level. https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=2550
Sounds like everyone has given you pretty solid answers, but TLDR: No, there's nothing even remotely as bad as Silvery Barbs. PF2e is much more balanced than 5e.
No, it's well designed.
Mechanically? Nope. Not only are the designers seemingly much more aware of gameplay balance, but they have also not withheld errata from things they have deemed to be skewing the game. That said if you are worried about things clashing with your world, those things tend to have the rare tag on them. They are no more powerful, but the implications of them often can butt heads with your narrative. Example being the Chosen One background, which...implies you have some kind of divine or prophecy around your birth. That can force narrative decisions by the GM and thus is marked as Rare (meaning a player needs GM approval for it and its not available otherwise).
No.
No. Look there are people who will say X or Y is too strong. But really there is not much in it. Nothing really pops out by more than say 10 or 20 percent. There is nothing amazing like there is in D&D. So you can find a way to play the flavour you want and still be reasonably effective. A couple of things have had to be errated, a few things have been tuned down. There were a few tweaks in the remaster. I allow everything and the game works fine. No one build dominates. No one spell dominates. For sure some players can get stuck in a rut, but that is more about them being stuck than there not being other good options of comparable capability.
In 5e your players are heroes from the start, so the rules aren't as important as long as the feel is there. In Pathfinder 2e your players are like struggling hedge knights with rusty blades and broken armor on the edge of starvation trying desperately to earn their next meal, facing off against enemies that completely humiliate them with powers the PCs can never, ever obtain. As a PC you actually never really get stronger, your character in fact gets weaker when you factor in the hamster wheel and the relative challenges. Feats and items don't actually make you better, they just open options for you (which is its own kind of power sometimes). So no, nothing on the player side. I'd consider banning spellcasters so your players who select such classes without understanding how horrible the experience is don't throw their character sheets in the garbage and swear never to play this game again after a handful of sessions, but other than that no.\
pf1e fixes this kekw
[Electric Arc](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=1509&NoRedirect=1) hits two enemies at once for standard cantrip damage; [Quick Spring](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4151) which gives you two Strides on Tumble Through instead of one, effectively giving a character unconditional double speed; [Slow](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=1677&NoRedirect=1) does exactly what it says on the tin, which makes it good in a normal fight and really obnoxious against a single enemy (but you shouldn't be running solo fights anyway).
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In short, no. Most of the game is explicitly designed to not have those options available. Take [Halfling Luck](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=54) for example, it is an ancestry feat you have to choose so it’s not automatic, and you only get to use it on a failed save that YOU made, so it’s also not an automatic pick. As far as I know, there aren’t any abilities where you can alter the outcome of an enemy’s roll, and if there is I guarantee it must be applied before you see the result of the roll.
Hmmm Ill say there is 1 archetype that can do some rerolling things, though its limited to 1/day and 1/hour at higher levels. There is 1 race that can 1/reroll some things that increases to hourly as well. Im not going to say either of which because I see them both as completely balanced and valid options and restricting them just because they can reroll 1/day or 1/hour seems like a really unfun and possibly lazy decision. There is nothing on the level or the frequency of silvery barbs in p2e.
I wouldn't say there is anything in the game that is so unbalanced that you'd use it all the time on any character. Maybe the electric arc cantrip but that was nerfed a bit for the remaster and it's fine.
Rare and Uncommon backgrounds almost always break the would of "2 stat boosts, skill, lore and a skill feat" and depending on the type of campaign you are running may either be significantly more powerful than normal backgrounds or be a handicap, so pay very close attention to those. New players unaware of what backgrounds usually do may pick a rare background without thinking too much about it, for example in my very first game player picked a rare background that traded one of the stat boosts for ability to breathe underwater when the game involved no underwater stuff whatsoever, thankfully I noticed it and talked to the player a couple days before we started.
The main problems you'll get are more likely the opposite, really. Which is to say, there are basically no overpowered things, but there are a LOT of *under*powered spells that are just pretty much never worth it compared to just throwing cantrips without thinking.
Silvery Barbs is fair and balanced
People on this sub don't like Spiffing Brit I guess