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So we’re going through the Kingmaker 2.0 campaign and we’re a good way through at level 7. I am not sure if I am doing something wrong but I am having a lot of trouble with the system with my barbarian.

1 - Just not hitting. It tends to be a fifty fifty with the first attack and then a complete gamble on the second and third. Just not doing anywhere near the damage.

2 - Enemies seem to always be able to hit and often get critical success for double damage which really eats into HP. If a combat goes more than a few rounds it’s GG.Most the enemies are hitting us on 2s and 3s.

3 - Some enemies can dump 50 to 60 damage a turn but short of a crit I am usually doing 20-30. This is with a magic weapon. Plus, they’re hitting us all the time and we’re only hitting them once a turn usually.

4 - A lot of Barbarians abilities are based around attacking multiple enemies and so far in Kingmaker almost all of the combat has been big single entity things. This means, usually, I am not getting to use my class skills and when I have been able to do that it’s been against 80 hp things that aren’t going to go down to a single swing.

5 - There’s almost no here’s a bunch of goblins or warm up fights. We usually just go from boss encounter to boss encounter in which every fight is being hard carried by the spellcaster and cleric. So I’ve not really felt like I am doing much beyond being a wall. Like, is every combat meant to be a near TPK?

For example in Runelords or Kingmaker in 1.0 you had a lot more normal combats and unless it was a boss encounter.

Like I have asked the GM if there’s a minimum level or minimum number of players but we have been kept at the appropriate level and we have been given magical weapons. Because atm it feels like we are only scraping the spellcasters burning their entire spell arsenal in a single combat. Again Kingmaker is pre written so I am not sure if this is intentional but the campaign has been incredibly brutal so far.

There are ways to fix this in Pathfinder 1.0 Not so sure how that translates into 2.0

First, boost your AC. Get a shield, magic items, etc.

Second, the right feats make a big difference. If you've only got one attack that has a decent chance to hit, make it count with the Vital Strike feat tree. Don't stick around so the villain can make a full attack; use Dodge, Mobility, and Spring Attack. Bounce in, smack him one, bounce back out. Make the bad guy move instead of make full attacks. With your extra Barbarian speed you might even make him have to charge to get any attacks at all... with the corresponding penalty to their AC. And if he's already hitting on a 2+, the +2 to hit he gets for charging is pretty pointless.

 Vulcan wrote:
There are ways to fix this in Pathfinder 1.0 Not so sure how that translates into 2.0

First, boost your AC. Get a shield, magic items, etc.

Second, the right feats make a big difference. If you've only got one attack that has a decent chance to hit, make it count with the Vital Strike feat tree. Don't stick around so the villain can make a full attack; use Dodge, Mobility, and Spring Attack. Bounce in, smack him one, bounce back out. Make the bad guy move instead of make full attacks. With your extra Barbarian speed you might even make him have to charge to get any attacks at all... with the corresponding penalty to their AC. And if he's already hitting on a 2+, the +2 to hit he gets for charging is pretty pointless.

In Path 2 we’ve had enemies rolling 2 and hitting us. There isn’t armour in the campaign book we don’t already have and we don’t have anywhere near the gold magical items. Even then, a plus one or two isn’t resolving the issues of enemies with crazy high attack pluses.

Barbarian feats are very different in 2.0. The best distinction is the fighter gets things like power attack and disarm where they do more damage and debuff effects to single entity opponents. Whilst the barbarian gets cleave and such. Which is a problem because Kingmaker you have either single entity monsters or the enemies have so many hit points there’s no reason not to want to do more damage to them. You also get a lot less feats in general.

Plus they have things like if you get a crit success (ten over AC) then it becomes a sort of mini cleave. Well, one most enemies AC is so high that nearly never happens and secondly we don’t fight hordes in the Kingmaker campaign.

It’s just not been very fun at all and I think it’s only because we are doing everything to min max, have a heal cleric and a very good spellcaster that we have scraped through the combats. Very high chance of a TPK on this latest fight we’re in and it’s one of those combats where I couldn’t understand what the writers were thinking.

Basically AC feels like a meaningless stat for the players and you always feel weaker than what you are fighting. None of the enemies are presented as being a big deal in the narrative they’re just inexplicably putting out more damage, have more hit points and AC than you. Getting crit success every other attack but when you do it you’re lucky to get a single hit. It’s been pretty bad and I haven’t enjoyed getting torn apart in two turns whilst chipping away at the enemy.

Then perhaps it's time to tell the DM you're not having fun anymore, and just bow out of the game.

It's not ideal, but... this is supposed to be FUN. If it's not fun, then why bother?

In Path 2 we’ve had enemies rolling 2 and hitting us.

This just shouldn't be happening. Maybe its an out of the box problem with the adventure path (ie, they screwed up the math), but pathfinder2's numbers are massaged into an inch of their lives. This disparity straight up shouldn't exist.

For example, trolls show up in kingmaker.
A troll is a level 5 critter, with +14 to hit and either 2d10+5 or 2d8+5 if its using jaws of claws

At level 5, your AC should be 10 (base) +2 (trained)+5 (level) + 3 (medium armor) +2 (dex) (or +4 armor and +1 dex for breastplate or chainmail). Optional +2 for shield if you raise it.
Then maybe +1 for magic armor.

So baseline, at 5th level your AC should be 22. Potentially 25 if you're going defensive with a shield and have magic armor. There really isn't any give in the system for it to be another number unless you decided to voluntarily tank your dex or decided not to wear armor [All armor types are AC+dex =5, unless you can wear heavy armor, which is 6].

So a troll, as a level appropriate enemy, should need an 8+ (or 11+) to hit with its first attack. 12+ on the second (claws are agile).
If you're at 10th level, your AC should be 27 [maybe 29 with +2 magic armor], and your foes at around +21 to hit. (most things hit expert with their attacks around 7th level, so they're getting a +4 in their calculations rather than +2 from trained attacks. Expert defenses don't come online until 13th) Overly regimented math is just how PF2 works.

This math stays pretty consistent throughout the system (with a couple of break points where you move from trained to expert with armor and things like that, but that isn't until 13th for most classes) Hitting on 2+ would require the creatures you're fighting to be 6+ levels above you, because level is the main thing that increments both attack and defense.

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I'm also a little puzzled by the idea of Kingmaker being mostly boss fights. That sounds... wrong. Or some really heavy changes on the DM's part.

My character joined in after the Staglord. But it’s mostly been either solo boss encounters or a boss with some very high level guys. I’d struggle to say we’ve ever had a particularly easy fight. The GM thinks it’s easy because we have a cleric who can restore to me full health before I lose it one turn. But that’s, again, the cleric hard carrying the party. There certainly hasn’t been any here is a big dungeon, fight way through ten mini encounters until you reach boss. It’s been kick front door down and boss right in front of you.

Encounters off top of my head

- Werewolf - Solo monster
- Fay creatures in the castle - Series of bosses
- Corrupted tree - Solo monster
- Giant drake - Solo monster
- Troll fortress - Now this one came close but each troll was a better character stat wise IMO. But it turned in a parley with the Trolls and we ended up running from the fight. Problem then took care of itself. The main troll boss effortlessly wrecked my character and I didn’t land a single hit.
- Giant Owlbear - Solo monster with some mini bosses
- Plant monster - Solo monster
- Crypt with an Undead Champion who took me out in two turns and three mid level skeleton champions.
- We went to the monster hunt where we fought a Wyvern and a Hydra in succession as solo monster fights
- At the hunt party we fought a salamander as a solo boss fight
- We went to the Goblin cult camp of Lahmastu and fought a Doppleganger and two plants. Mini boss and goons. The goblins ended up on our side in the encounter.
- We got to the fey realm where there is a Lahmastu priest and his heal ball of 9 level 5 clerics who each have 2/3 my HP and, yeah that was fun. So again boss and bunch of high level enemies.

I think it’s was the drake but it has something like plus 18 to hit and I had AC20 which went down because of rage and clumsy weapon. So even with the minus 10 it stood a reasonable chance of hitting me with its last attack. Whereas it had an AC of 30 so I only had a 50/50 with my main attack. But in general most enemies have higher attacks and defence than us. So they’re getting those crits and usually able to carve into those HP. Plus there’s AoE, Spells and effects that can just dump damage effects onto players.

I mean, every combat has been a near TPK and entirely dependent on the GM not just sniping the cleric immediately as the damage of these monsters could knock them out in a single attack.

It definitely hasn’t felt like a relaxing game where you can play what you want and don’t need to min max. For example our cleric is on a mission to not do healing even though characters can be killed in two rounds of combat and that’s without deliberately focusing down players.

I was very heavily involved as a DM in the PF2 playtest, and sent them ton of feedback. While I mostly agree with Voss I can very much see where you are coming from regarding the difficulty.

Regarding "level appropriate", the PF2 encounter budgets range from 1-5. A single same level monster is considered a trivial (1) encounter. A moderate (3) encounter would be three of those monsters or one party level +2 monster. And from what I've seen from the PF2 adventures (I don't have that specific one) that is the typical "boss" encounter, with the rest of the adventure being a mix of level 1-3. These are keyed for a party of 4 players and then modified up or down accordingly. If you are facing a solo monster, it will often be a +2 level "boss".

A Voss said, the math is very strict, and it is set up so that if everyone has the expected numbers, you can slaughter lower level monsters without expending many resources, you can "just play" against even level monsters and do ok, but then be forced to use tactics in order to beat the +2 level monsters, primarily because they have a much higher chance to critical hit and very high defenses, especially vs spells. Only a tank with a shield will be able to stand up against them for long. And in a general sense, "how to PF2" is very much about breaking out of those "expected" numbers by using a shield, flanking, buff spells, and inherent advantages like the Fighters much higher hit chance.

The barbarian raging with a giant weapon has -2 AC and is breaking out of the expected numbers in the wrong direction. You've got a lot of HP but are extremely susceptible to taking critical hits even against even level enemies. With a 20 AC at lv 5, in the Troll example you are taking a normal hit on a 6 (50%) and crit on a 16 (25%), and a miss 25% of the time on the first attack. So even level enemies perform much like boss monsters against you, and the +2 level bosses are performing like encounter level 4 and 5 (likely and almost certain TPKs, IMO). If you fought the Salamander at lv 5 as a +2 lv solo boss, yes it would hit AC 20 on a 2. Your barb is really more of a glass cannon melee DPS than a front line fighter, and you'll have better luck playing it as such.


Stuff you can try to perform better in these "boss" encounters:

-Always, always try to establish flanking and prevent yourself from being flanked.

-Weapons that can be used for Athletics moves can be very effective when you would otherwise have low hit chances (such as a second attack), especially if they have Reach. Using your skill ups for Athletics is a good idea. If an enemy chooses to stand up after being knocked prone it provokes an AoO. If the enemy has to spend an action to get up, then another to get move inside your reach weapon to attack, they only have one action left to attack with. Similarly the critical weapon effects that knock down enemies are quite powerful and can be built around, although again a fighter will be able to make the most of those.

-Reach weapons in general can keep you from taking hits if your tank has AoO.

-Ask about switching things up. A savage themed fighter would be a better fit playing the way I'm guessing you want to with your character (front line heavy damage dealer). The animal barbarian has a feat that gives them much better armor. You probably don't want to be that flavor of barb but you might talk the DM into letting you take that feat.

-Your cloth caster(s) also have an unintuitive role in those fights. They can try to force offensive spells through super high defenses but are much better off using Magic Missile, buffing the melee, and using utility spells. You can try to get them on board with that, but it can be a tough sell as if they wanted to be a support character they probably would have picked something else, and once they understand the math they might get discouraged and want to reroll or quit.

Yeah he died latest encounter along with our fighter. So that’s that.

There’s a few problems:

- We had four players. A sorcerer, cleric, fighter and barbarian. So that’s a lot of spell casting to protect and you can’t just be DPS. There’s nothing preventing the GM directly targeting you and a perception they have to chew through you to get at the spellcasters. There is some random targeting but in practice it’s seen as unfair to snipe the spellcasters which means the frontline characters get focused down and injured. I think we are short another front line character to soak damage.

- Yeah, they do not like doing buff spells. They really want to play as the DPS and utility characters. Even the cleric has pushed back on the healing because that’s not as interesting for them.

- I still think the encounters are far too hard. So in Kingmaker we got these 9 Lahmastu cultists and their leader trapped in a corridor with two walls of fire. But they had dumb levels of hit points and magic. The boss was consistently putting out 12D6 AoE attacks. Like I went down, got healed and then immediately got knocked down before I could attack and crits mean double wounded condition so die hard isn’t a problem. Health potions, just isn’t enough when there is that much damage coming at you.

- Well he was a level 10 character so three levels above us at that point along with 9 Lahmastu cultists. The only reason there was not a TPK was because the GM had the boss kill his own men with AoE. Like by the time the boss was on his own it was just the cleric and sorcerer blasting him as I bled to death and the fighter was already gone. Like I was having whole turns where I was missing him even with spending hero points and again we only won because we went into the combat with all the spells and got to use basically all of them.


My plan now is to go fully into being a duellist fighter and getting as high an AC as possible. But even with AC28 I still don’t think that’s going to mitigate the kind of hits that are coming at you. Like if enemies are getting plus 20 to 30 on attacks what’s the point investing in AC. Like we really are not fighting normal things in this campaign, every single encounter has been a boss encounter and a brutal fight.

I am not sure I get the Attack of Opportunity one. We have a fighter who has this but, you aren’t one hitting the enemies, you’re quite likely to miss and the GM can quite happily lose 20 HP to get into close combat. Like it doesn’t seriously impact the fight because we’re that outclassed. Like they have a wall of hit points and AC so it’s barely relevant. In the trade they’ll do more damage. We even at one point had this spellcaster surrounded by myself and two summoned creatures but he just tanked the whole thing. Flanking isn’t going to translate into hitting every attack.


Also, our fighter intended to be the tank and use a shield to max out his AC. But what we found was that attacks were so high it wasn’t doing much and often the shield would get destroyed immediately by the sort of damage coming our way. In the combat above he just got wiped out by all the magic coming at the party. Basically the enemies are consistently getting that double damage on their 2D8 plus 20 attacks and we’re getting a couple D6 through every now and then.

-Yeah, the value of AoO is going to depend on the individual DM to an extent, and "role playing"/suspension of disbelief is a big part of that. Even though everyone at the table understands that the enemy has enough hit points to easily take one clean hit, the enemies themselves don't. I, Slowroll, don't have any hit points and could die in a fight to any dagger thrust or arrow. If the average NPC is a "rational actor" or operates on animal instincts they will try to avoid taking "free" hits.

The way I run it most opponents will not willingly take an AoO unless the circumstances really dictate it (stand back up after getting knocked down, or get into a much better position if outnumbered), so in a general sense, AoO is a useful tool for controlling the battlefield. Cowardly monsters might turn tail and run when hit, automatons and undead might focus one one player regardless of position or attack the last person that hit them, and big stuff like giants and dragons really might not be afraid of human swords, so against those enemies AoO might just be extra damage.

If your DM is completely ignoring AoOs to focus on one player they really want to kill, you can probably "teach" the DM not to do that by setting up AoO gauntlets and having the targeted player kite. Likely no one at the table wants to play that game and you may be able to adjust the social contract in that way. Paladin and Monk have some nice pseudo AoOs to help with tanking as well.

-For shields, the +2 AC is more important than the ability to block, so try not to break it unless the situation is dire. Block one regular boss hit, or one crit/2 regular hits if you are a paladin, then stop blocking until you can repair the shield out of combat. That equation might change with better shields (I only have the first wave of PF2 books and assume the magic shields got errata as shields were reworked after the playtest and many of the magic shields as printed are weaker than the regular steel shield, so there is a mistake somewhere). Against bosses, a raised shield is taking two critical hits off of the possible results of the d20 roll as well as adding two misses, so they are significantly more powerful than they are in D&D even without shield block.

-It doesn't surprise me that you are having trouble with encounters against +3 lv bosses with minions. For the playtest I just ran a regular campaign and converted the encounters to the PF2 budgets. The level 3 encounters seemed to be about right for a hard but doable fight and I mostly stuck with those for the key fights. There was one really cool battle against waves of demons in the playtest packet with a +4 boss at the end and we tried that one a few times. They barely scratched the last guy even with heavily munchkinized PCs optimized for this one battle and with complete knowledge of the fight.

Maybe something is off in your game, and the party should be 1-2 higher levels than you are for the chapter you are on. The one official PF2 adventure I own (Hellknight Hill) only has lv 1-3 encounters and at a glance the individual chapters don't seem to give enough XP to hit the suggested levels for subsequent chapters.

We got told that this specific encounter that it really matters when you attack the base. In the day they’re all spread through the caves and then try to ring the alarm. But at night they’re all in one place.

The GM did mention there is supposed to be some way of giving the players an advantage. Not sure what that is exactly but we really never had a chance to do that.

We did try to sneak in and our sorcerer went invisible, got the traps sorted out and we got the drop on the guards. But, the GM stated that because I had a sonic weapon this alerted the main mob further in the dungeon so we had to fight that big combat from the outset and didn’t have any option to search the compound or do much prep.

Well the GM keeps saying he thinks the combat is too easy and not challenging enough. Which I cannot understand. All the enemies put out far more damage, have high AC, they’re always critting us and the healing is probably that way for a reason. Yes a cleric can heal the group 50 HP but the boss is doing 70ish and with crits you can wipe a character out. This is not helped by the Cleric insisting they don’t think they should be healing constantly and that they want to be the cleric that doesn’t do that. In particular the GM doesn’t like the wounded condition because he thinks that makes it too difficult to kill the character and there isn’t a sense of danger. My experience is that once you’re wounded, sure you can be healed back but you’re very likely to take a double crit and die even with die hard. a I totally disagree because the moment me and the fighter go down the spellcasters would normally die and they didn’t in this encounter because the GM didn’t just have him pick up his sword and kill them; plus had two cultists conveniently run off. Like I ll keep saying, I did not feel like a hero playing this character, it was more like you were scraping through every fight and constantly being close to death. Like I constantly got wounded in encounters after one or two rounds.

Plus he steered the story in a direction where he was encouraging the cleric not to heal my character. Which I was not amused with at all. Like it was framed as a glory seeking thing and I was like “well I could just retire as an adventurer you know and let the Kingdon get attacked by monsters”. It’s me putting myself in danger to stop the monster instantly killing the cleric. The GM choosing to treat that as a tank move when there’s literally nothing to prevent him focusing the two spellcasters down. It was just bizarre that there was this story beat about me taking the healing when I am not the one choosing to get attacked. Just did not get it at all and it did nothing for me. Worse it encouraged the cleric not to do healing, which given the cleric has taken spells and specialisations for, again, really isn’t on me. If the Cleric doesn’t want to do healing why bother taking all the healing spells and buffs on them?

It was annoying because I got a lot of flak for power gaming by going all in on the damage and wanting to get magic weapons to boost that as high as possible. Again, not sure why because every enemy does more damage than me and if I was doing D8 plus 2 we would never kill a 200 HP boss who can put out 12D6 AoE attacks. At least if I hit once I can do 25 damage reliably. Like from my perspective I was a hit point sponge and every enemy took a ton of hitting to kill usually for some body else to get them.

I can't comment on Pathfinder 2e specifically but I played Starfinder (which was spiritually/effectively PF1.5e) and I was absolutely not happy with the "math" at low levels as a player character. It felt particularly unheroic to have our supposedly competent characters have a +3 or at most +4 bonus to attack whereas cr 1/2 mooks attacking us were +6 to +8 for the cr1 boss at first level in the official adventure path introducing characters to the game. When I did the math with my particular melee focused character, I figured out that if I completely minmaxed my character specifically for melee then I would equal the attack value of the supposedly level 2 boss at 5th or 6th level (can't recall years later exactly which it was). When I asked about it on their forums, they said that's how it was and that the math works to make the game balanced. The difference got less pronounced as we leveled up (we played until 8th level) though but it was very obvious at those low levels. I'm guessing the same "tight math" pervades PF2e as well based on some of the posts above.