In Pathfinder 2E, weapons play a crucial role in determining a character's combat prowess. The potency rune is a powerful enchantment that can be applied to weapons to enhance their abilities and overall damage output. The potency rune is one of three major types of runes that can be found in the game, with the others being striking and property runes. While striking runes primarily increase the weapon's attack bonus and property runes provide additional magical effects, potency runes directly increase the weapon's damage dice. This makes them an excellent choice for characters who prioritize dealing high amounts of damage in combat. When a weapon is enhanced with a potency rune, it gains an additional damage die based on its item level.
I've seen people complain before about how spellcasters lack in accuracy with attack spells since they don't get to have "pluses" to their spell attack rolls.
Then my DM was struggling to describe a +1 striking dagger in a roleplay fashion and it gave me an idea.
Since the "pluses" are actually just named "potency rune" how about we have 2 different type of potency runes ?
I ve seen people complain before about how spellcasters lack in accuracy with attack spells since they don t get to have pluses to their spell attack rolls. I didn t want to play battlefield control, the character I brought to session zero was very much not the sort to use spells outside of her school, besides and everyone loved her, so that s the path I took.
When a weapon is enhanced with a potency rune, it gains an additional damage die based on its item level. For example, a +1 potency rune adds a d4 damage die to the weapon, while a +2 potency rune adds a d6 damage die, and so on. These additional damage dice are rolled and added to the weapon's regular damage dice when determining the damage dealt to a target.
Martial / Magical Potency Runes
I've seen people complain before about how spellcasters lack in accuracy with attack spells since they don't get to have "pluses" to their spell attack rolls.
Then my DM was struggling to describe a +1 striking dagger in a roleplay fashion and it gave me an idea.
Since the "pluses" are actually just named "potency rune" how about we have 2 different type of potency runes ?
Martial Potency Rune: The one we already have, makes the weapon more resilient, self-adjusting in your hand to optimize your precision, guiding your arm as you strike.
Magical Potency Rune: Quite litteraly a magnifying glass for magical power. Makes your spell harder to resist and evade, kind of like a slight "auto-aim" effect (think Soul Arrow in Dark Souls but with a weaker tracking).
Both are exclusive, you can only get one or the other on your weapon. Both are "potency" runes for all the other rune rules so you need a +1 to get properties etc etc.
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Potency for Spells is tricky because Spellcasters ultimately scale up to legendary proficiency on their attack rolls.
If you give them potency, then that means that they will reach Fighter levels of Accuracy.
The issue is that this is not apparent instantly because while they reach the same proficiency as Fighters, they reach it later and don't advance at similar levels as the rest Martials.
On the other hand, you can't willy nilly make them scale faster because that will make the DC spells and the approximate increases in saving throws, both for monsters and players, all over the place.
An "easy" way to fix that would have been to decouple Spell attacks from Spell proficiency.
Give them a seperate "spell attack proficiency" that scales like a normal martial's one (trained at 1, expert at 5, master at 13) and then allow "spell potency runes". (the end result wouldn't be much different, +1 at level 20 overall, but they would have those increases at mid and early levels that the casters struggle the most instead of being backloaded like the spellcasting advances are now)
Then leave their Spellcasting DC be as it is (scaling later but up to Legendary) and unaffected by the runes.
That way you'll have spellcasters with Accuracy like a martial without altering the DCs themselves.
Similar to how martials have seperate Proficiencies and Class DCs in a way.
This makes me wonder why the Devs didn't just give all casters trained/expert/master like regular martials. Maybe give Wizards or hyper casters legendary (to mirror fighters). That way casters could get potency runes like martials get +1/2/3 weapons and it wouldn't break the game.
fanatic66 wrote:This makes me wonder why the Devs didn't just give all casters trained/expert/master like regular martials. Maybe give Wizards or hyper casters legendary (to mirror fighters). That way casters could get potency runes like martials get +1/2/3 weapons and it wouldn't break the game.
I assume the idea was to make them less reliant on items to be effective ? Or maybe it made more sense to have their whole "powerfulness" come from them without needing additional items, hence legendary stuff.
Or (lots of or) it's so there is room to make "diminished" casters by dropping 1 proficiency rank without making them unusable (MCD Casters for which spellcasting is a secondary ability still need their spells and such to actually work etc)
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This makes me wonder why the Devs didn't just give all casters trained/expert/master like regular martials. Maybe give Wizards or hyper casters legendary (to mirror fighters). That way casters could get potency runes like martials get +1/2/3 weapons and it wouldn't break the game.
as it's setup now, saves and AC don't advance on the same level.
If you were to simply change Ability DC scaling (in this case spellcasting DC) you'd have to go and change every saving throw increase and every Class DC to mirror that change.
I guess the real reason why "spell attack" is the same progression as "spell DC" and not having it like martials where "weapon proficiency" and "class DC" are different is for clarity and consistency.
In general rules of PF2 every penalty or bonus on a check applies the same penalty or bonus on the relevant DC, and vice verse.
So, a -1 to Will saving throws is also a -1 to Will DC, and a +1 to Atheltics checks is also a +1 to Atheltics DC, and etc.
Given that, having "spell attack roll" and "spell DC" being different would actually be confusing to most people.
It would have to be named something drastically different (like "martial proficiency" doesn't bring into your mind "Barbarian Class DC")
At some point having so many small differences starts to actually harm the game with clutter.
For houserules, for small groups of people that can communicate the differances, it's much better compared to a general core book that's to be distributed to thousands of people, often without them being able to talk eye to eye for each rule.
From my experience, the overall power level of a caster, from midlevel and onwards, isn't bad. It's only on those early levels that they struggle, and that for casters without strong focus spells, because bard and druid don't really have any issues even at early levels.
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Apologies for the necro, but relevant.
I'm simultaneously very surprised and saddened that this wasn't introduced in Secrets of Magic.
I'm generally GM stuck (D/GM for about 16 years now), I love PF2, my players, martials, are having a blast; I wanted to break the cycle and be a player again (first time in almost three years), so I joined a friend's game as my favorite archetype other than necro, blaster caster.
3.5, 5e, and pf1, casters were WILDLY out of control, I will admit to that and it dearly needed addressing.
However, even with an optimal build and spamming EA + xbow, I hit maybe 2 times with actual attack spells on an evoker over the course of four months. I didn't want to play battlefield control, the character I brought to session zero was very much not the sort to use spells outside of her school, besides and everyone loved her, so that's the path I took.
I can't land hits with slotted spells, we're 12-13 now and I had to take a hiatus after the big fight at the end of our last arc and idk if I'll be returning, I felt so bad and unhelpful for the entire fight; I had most of my slots going in, used all of them, none hit.
It just feels unbearably bad, I love the character and being a player again, but I can't even remotely participate in combat effectively.
Going back to SoM, I was hoping at least Elementalist would add something and yet it's somehow worse :c.
I know support casters are good when you play strategic but I just want to play blaster that hits slightly more often.
My GM doesn't want me to leave, he's offering to give me potency runes as above here, I said the DC alterations made me uneasy but spell attack alone isn't as bad; that being said, I declined because I didn't know if it would unbalance the math or not and the last thing I want to do is break the mechanics.
One thing that made me think spell attack runes would be in SoM is the way Spellstrike is worded, it uses the weapon's attack roll, if the weapon has potency runes, then wouldn't a starlit span Magus effectively be a wizard with potency runes, sans a proficiency level?
Iirc, the math comes out to a +1 over wizards.
I apologise for the wall of text, this has just been a distressing problem for me as I dearly love PF2 and want to play it, but I spent the summer/fall learning my favorite archetype isn't really feasible, even when built minmaxed (not that you should have to) the martials weren't but still carried me.
This just felt so very bad and discouraging
NikkiGrimm wrote:Apologies for the necro, but relevant.
I'm simultaneously very surprised and saddened that this wasn't introduced in Secrets of Magic.
I'm generally GM stuck (D/GM for about 16 years now), I love PF2, my players, martials, are having a blast; I wanted to break the cycle and be a player again (first time in almost three years), so I joined a friend's game as my favorite archetype other than necro, blaster caster.
3.5, 5e, and pf1, casters were WILDLY out of control, I will admit to that and it dearly needed addressing.
However, even with an optimal build and spamming EA + xbow, I hit maybe 2 times with actual attack spells on an evoker over the course of four months. I didn't want to play battlefield control, the character I brought to session zero was very much not the sort to use spells outside of her school, besides and everyone loved her, so that's the path I took.
I can't land hits with slotted spells, we're 12-13 now and I had to take a hiatus after the big fight at the end of our last arc and idk if I'll be returning, I felt so bad and unhelpful for the entire fight; I had most of my slots going in, used all of them, none hit.
It just feels unbearably bad, I love the character and being a player again, but I can't even remotely participate in combat effectively.
Going back to SoM, I was hoping at least Elementalist would add something and yet it's somehow worse :c.
I know support casters are good when you play strategic but I just want to play blaster that hits slightly more often.
My GM doesn't want me to leave, he's offering to give me potency runes as above here, I said the DC alterations made me uneasy but spell attack alone isn't as bad; that being said, I declined because I didn't know if it would unbalance the math or not and the last thing I want to do is break the mechanics.
One thing that made me think spell attack runes would be in SoM is the way Spellstrike is worded, it uses the weapon's attack roll, if the weapon has potency runes, then wouldn't a starlit span.
While there wasn't a "spell potency", there was "shadow signet". They serve more or less the same purpose.
Which is much more flavorful imo, and can lead to bigger accuracy increases if you choose correctly (which also ties it with Recall which is quite wizard-y)
NikkiGrimm wrote:However, even with an optimal build and spamming EA + xbow, I hit maybe 2 times with actual attack spells on an evoker over the course of four months. I didn't want to play battlefield control, the character I brought to session zero was very much not the sort to use spells outside of her school, besides and everyone loved her, so that's the path I took.
Out of curiosity were you using truestrike and were your allies knocking enemies down and intimidating them for you? It sounds like you played a lot so you probably did these things.
With truestrike+flat foot+demoralize you shouldn't be missing that much. If I didn't have these conditions I probably wouldn't even cast an attack roll spell. Mainly because save spells feel so much better.
Lets be honest even Pathfinder 2e Martials miss a lot except for Fighters/Gunslingers. The differences is in a session a caster makes maybe 4-6 attack rolls while Martials makes 20+. So they don't feel it as much.
Also did you have good experience with AOEs and save spells? From everything I read these spells feel quite good and align with the blaster caster persona. In my opinion casters in every system feel great in this department.
Really though there is very strange scaling between casters and martials for attack rolls. They are about equal at level 1 then fall behind quite a bit and somewhat catch up when they get legendary.
On the reverse end I find the 4 types of success feels AMAZING for a caster. Having enemies crit fail vs fireball / debuffs feels amazing.
Shroudb mentioned it already, but here it is linkified if you want to check it out.
Pathfinder PF Special Edition Subscriber RPGnoremac wrote:Out of curiosity were you using truestrike and were your allies knocking enemies down and intimidating them for you? It sounds like you played a lot so you probably did these things.
With truestrike+flat foot+demoralize you shouldn't be missing that much. If I didn't have these conditions I probably wouldn't even cast an attack roll spell. Mainly because save spells feel so much better.
Lets be honest even Pathfinder 2e Martials miss a lot except for Fighters/Gunslingers. The differences is in a session a caster makes maybe 4-6 attack rolls while Martials makes 20+. So they don't feel it as much.
Also did you have good experience with AOEs and save spells? From everything I read these spells feel quite good and align with the blaster caster persona. In my opinion casters in every system feel great in this department.
Really though there is very strange scaling between casters and martials for attack rolls. They are about equal at level 1 then fall behind quite a bit and somewhat catch up when they get legendary.
On the reverse end I find the 4 types of success feels AMAZING for a caster. Having enemies crit fail vs fireball / debuffs feels amazing.
Apologies! I didn't see that my post had a response!
Our sessions were mixed between Discord screen share/roll20, pbp, and a VTT with the discord checks being what I have a record of and I landed at least four attack spells according to the logs, to be precise while I said at least twice previously. I just forgot due to how hectic the encounters were.
Yes, it took some encouragement on my part for my peers to think about it, but after enough in character hinting they caught on lol. Oddly enough, even with stacking as much as we could onto mobs, I could rarely roll high enough to hit even then, even if I was rolling 10+ consistently. That being said, two of the recorded hits were from my party members assisting in the drop, so you are absolutely correct. It does help.
While I appreciate it's no longer save or die (as both a player and GM), the varied success tiers feel diminished at times (to be fair, I was a complete SP gremlin in pf1, so that may account for that. ); that being said, this is the best fireball has ever felt, I didn't slot it as often as I wanted to because I didn't want to hurt my martial peers or discourage their enthusiasm, maybe a bit meta and OOC, my inner GM may have made my character more thoughtful and conscientious than she should have been, honestly. Especially with her love of explosions. ^^;
The save spells were very reliable on trash packs and reliable when the party would help make stronger mobs easier targets.
Oh absolutely! If you're not a fighter or GS you miss a lot lol. The issue arises with how limited my slots are. Hypothetically speaking, if a slot wouldn't be expended until it hit, that would diminish a lot of the feel bad; that or a mage's striking rune.
My GM's homebrew "caster rune" we came up with and partially borrowed from Avatar, you had to perform an elaborate somatic component to channel your magic—aka, you couldn't stack this with a striking rune or use it to empower something already empowered via rune— this would add a +1 to hit based upon skill level ( 1 at trained or expert, +2 at Master, +3 at legendary).
1000 test rolls using my C# dice app with some linear regression makes the hits a bit more common to an average encounter AC and slightly more likely against an APL +1 encounter but not enough to make something like Disintegrate remotely viable.
I found it interesting that even with the +3 at legendary, it still isn't high enough to make your hits common on a stronger encounter. I still wasn't sure if running it would break the mechs so I decided against it because I was worried about messing with the balance/ruining the game.
To use one of the NPCs in this section to represent an NPC of a different ancestry, apply the adjustments below for the desired ancestry. These provide the basic features from that ancestry, like darkvision, altered Speed, and unique abilities like a halfling’s keen eyes. For other ancestries, you can create similar templates following the same format. In addition to these base changes, you can add the effects of a specific heritage: you might apply the snow goblin heritage if your NPC is a Frostfur goblin and you want them to have cold resistance. You can also give them an ancestry feat, or even adjust their ability scores and skills to reflect the new ancestry’s strengths and weaknesses. For a half-elf, half-orc, or any other heritage essential to the character, you should always apply the heritage effect.
The potency rune also has the unique ability to increase the character's attack bonus with the weapon. For each potency rune applied to a weapon, the character gains a +1 item bonus to attack rolls using that weapon. This bonus is added to the character's normal attack bonus and can make a significant difference in landing a successful hit against tough opponents. It is important to note that potency runes are typically applied to weapons with a high item level, meaning that they are more suitable for higher-level characters. Additionally, potency runes can be upgraded as the character progresses, allowing them to continue increasing the weapon's damage potential. In conclusion, the potency rune in Pathfinder 2E is a valuable enchantment that improves a weapon's damage output and attack bonus. By adding additional damage dice and increasing the character's attack bonus, potency runes are a great choice for characters looking to deal heavy damage in combat..
Reviews for "Making the Most of Your Weapon: How to Use the Potency Rune in Pathfinder 2E"
1) Maria - 2 stars - I was really disappointed with the weapon potency runr in Pathfinder 2e. I found it to be underwhelming and not worth the investment. The pathfinder system is all about customization and making unique characters, but this runr felt generic and didn't offer anything new or interesting. It didn't add any flavor or depth to the gameplay, which was a real letdown. I wish there were more exciting options available for weapon upgrades.
2) John - 1 star - The weapon potency runr in Pathfinder 2e is a complete waste of time and resources. It is ridiculously overpriced for what it offers and doesn't provide any significant benefits. I expected it to enhance my character's combat abilities, but it fell short in every aspect. The runr didn't add any meaningful mechanics or tactical advantages to my weapons, making it feel like a pointless addition to the game. I would not recommend wasting your time or money on this underwhelming feature.
3) Sarah - 2 stars - I was really looking forward to the weapon potency runr in Pathfinder 2e, but unfortunately, it left me feeling unimpressed. The options and enhancements it provided were lackluster, and it didn't feel like a worthwhile investment. I was hoping for more creative and unique abilities to enhance my weapons, but all I got were basic stat boosts that didn't significantly impact my gameplay. It's a shame because the potential for exciting customization was there, but the execution fell flat.
4) Alex - 3 stars - While I didn't hate the weapon potency runr in Pathfinder 2e, I do think it could have been much better. The enhancement options it provided felt limited and didn't offer much versatility. It would have been great to see more interesting and unique effects that could truly make weapons stand out. Additionally, the pricing for the runr seemed a bit steep for the underwhelming benefits it provided. Overall, it was an okay addition to the game, but it didn't meet my expectations or add much excitement to the gameplay.