The Pathfinder Playtest, Part Three

Well, we’ve completed the third adventure of the Pathfinder 2e Playtest. I did my best to run Affair at Sombrefell Hall as close to Halloween as I could, as the theme of the adventure fit perfectly. Old haunted mansion, assaulted at night by ghouls and vampires? Perfect.

It has become painfully evident that we will not complete the playtest before the surveys close at the end of the year. In fact, we won’t even start playing the fourth adventure until after the first of the year. Everyone in my group has a ton of things going on for the holidays and it just isn’t possible to squeeze any pathfinder in during November and December.

Shorter Entry

There is not as much to write about this time. This was a shorter adventure than the first two, and the scope of what they were testing was also more limited. Additionally, my opinions really haven’t changed since the last two entries of my blog.

Clerics and Healing

The main goal of this portion of the playtest was to test the potency of healers. They wanted to see of a group of healers could hold up against wave after wave of undead without resting. The answer is YES. Unequivocally and without hesitation yes.

The playtest asked the players to make a party of all healers, at least two of them being clerics. My party made three clerics and a paladin.

The bottom line is this: in the version of the playtest that we played, Clerics are enormously powerful. Heal is an incredibly powerful and versatile spell, and clerics can cast the spell an enormous number of times.

My players had no trouble with this adventure in the playtest whatsoever. Their offensive uses of Heal were devastating to the undead they were fighting, and none of the monsters could do enough damage that wasn’t healed back up within two rounds.

I do think that the power of clerics needs to be brought down a smidge. Clerics are amazingly powerful healers. However, any reduction in their healing ability should be balanced by an increase in their domain powers. Right now domain powers are incredibly weak and circumstantial.

Spellsword Potential

One other thing that I noticed while playing the monsters of this adventure is the potency of creatures that are capable of both spellcasting and physical attacks. The three action economy combined with the dearth of attacks of opportunity lends itself to a devastating full-round tactic with this type of character: namely casting a spell with two actions and then attacking with the third.

The boss of this adventure was a spellcaster which also had powerful melee attacks. The boss was able to cast a powerful spell on any character it wanted, and then it could unleash a melee attack on any character that was close to it with no multiple attack penalty. This was by far the biggest danger that the players faced during Affair at Sombrefell Hall.

Fortunately for the players, their excellent tactics combined with my terrible rolling which allowed them to defeat the boss without too much trouble. But as I was playing the boss my mind was racing with potential builds to exploit this spell and attack combo. I haven’t read into multiclassing too much, but I imagine that builds which focus on exploiting this tactic are going to be very effective.

GCP

And here is the link to the GCP boys playing the third Doomsday Dawn adventure. These guys are genuinely fantastic and I recommend them to anyone with ears.