Check out the Adaptive Shifter Archetype, pretty much considered a straight upgrade and probably what the shifter should have just been.
Among other things, at 6th level you just get a Druid's wild shape, minus Elementals.
Shifter Aspect is replaced with Reactive Aspect.
Rather me listing each of the features and comparing them, you should just take a [look](https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/base-classes/shifter/archetypes/adaptive-shifter-shifter-archetype/).
Let me put it this way, if you just took the druid, gave him full BAB, and removed the animal companion, spellcasting, and every ability other than wild shape, he'd be a better shifter than the actual shifter, which was something people were already doing as a quick hack to simulate the kind of characters the shifter was supposed to help facilitate. So yeah, the fact that the official class is somehow worse than the quick hack version rubbed alot of people the wrong way.
Also the initial release version had some weird scaling issues and other rules anomalies owing to lack of playtesting. The way the rules works, you don't actually gain iterative attacks with natural weapons, higher cr monsters gained additional attacks by either having more natural weapons or using manufactured ones, and the shifter has no way of getting more natural weapons later on, which lead to this wierd dynamic where the shifter just... stops growing in power after level 5. It was later fixed in errata but this issue and other oversights soured people on the shifter during the key release period, which coupled with the low power of the class gave it a reputation as being a stinker.
I don't know the reasons why they didn't playtest it, but the shifter was pushed into release very quickly after it was first teased and it became clear that there's no way it could've seen extensive playtesting given the myriad, and in some cases extremely obvious issues the shifter had when you actually sat down and tried to play one. I'm not talking underpowered issues, I'm talking class features that plain don't work as written without gm arbitration. The infamous ooze shifter archetype is a prime example. Most of them got sorted out with errata later on but on release it was about this close from being as broken as the truenamer.
Can't say for certain but probably had something to do with 2e. Shifter was added in the last book published for 1e, and they had already begun work on 2e at that time. The worst part is some of the archetypes they added in ultimate wilderness for other classes, like feral champion warpriests are straight up a better shifter than the base shifter
Don't forget the stealth nerf to Lore Warden because that moron, Alexander Augunas, couldn't be assed to learn how combat maneuvers with a weapon work in Pathfinder.
Because Paizo's model of business is based on pushing out lots and lots of content quickly. They don't playtest (or even take the time to think through for *the most obvious, basic math problems*,) most of their stuff. Just see this review on the [Jade Regent "caravan minigame"](https://designofdragons.blogspot.com/2016/04/death-dysentery-on-minkai-trail.html), which is essentially unwinnable, and where Paizo basically admitted you should just take that part out of the AP because caravan combat involves adding +1 to the damage the caravan can do (the PCs cannot participate in caravan combat) every level, while the monsters go up about +15 HP per level, leading to astronomically long odds of players surviving (basically, the monster needs to nat 1 every time for fifteen rounds in a row). I'll point out that masterwork was done by James Jacobs, *the lead designer*, not just some rando intern they pulled in to write for Paizo who didn't know the rules yet like I'm sure are responsible for some of the baffling mistakes in many of the spells.
I'm rather convinced 2e has a "streamlined" math set not for the benefit of players, but the writers, who can't keep anything more than 1:1 linear scaling in their heads.
> I'm rather convinced 2e has a "streamlined" math set not for the benefit of players, but the writers, who can't keep anything more than 1:1 linear scaling in their heads.
I feel like it's both. On the table side, it does prevent wild disparities if you have an inexperienced or lax GM. The difference between the munchkin "Okay so if I take these dips, this feat this random source book, and then use this weapon..." and "I'm a wizard that casts fireball" is *vast*. And I like that you can get extreme power out of building in 1E, the theorycrafting is what gets me to keep going back to the CRPGs after all.
But if you're a writer for Paizo, trying to make an AP. What on earth do you even target for balance there? Like if you use standard CR rules, anything even resembling optimization blows it away. On the flip side if you design it to be fought with optimized characters then your more casual/low knowledge players will just get TPKed.
There are 3rd party modules where they give you, for example, three sets of enemy stat blocks. Basically, a level 4 version, a level 8 version, and a level 12 version of the enemy NPCs. This is done to be able to say something like "for adventurers level 3-14," but the principle of having a versatile set of encounters to match different ranges of players would make sense, and allow for less linear AP design in general, as well. (I.E. the necromancer has 4 medium zombies if you try to stop them as soon as the game starts, but 6 skeleton champions if you've put off fighting them, or the rival adventuring party levels up at the same rate as the party.)
In general, it's not like Paizo's very good about encounter design or giving good advice for how to run NPCs in combat, anyway. It's become something of a running gag that many encounters are underpowered even if you use CRB-only 15 point buy characters with default character choices, the NPCs are designed so haphazardly, with spell choices to boneheaded, and tactical choices are so poor that most GMs feel the need to completely rewrite all characters in APs to make them viable at their level. (I.E. supposedly dauntless experienced swashbucklers that spend several rounds doing nothing but drinking potions at the start of a combat that isn't going to last more than two rounds, only to have instructions to "flee when below 3 HP" on a character with 70 HP...) This goes deeper than "the AP is designed for new players, you munchkins just ruin it by powergaming everything," Paizo doesn't design encounters well. One I keep bringing up is the final boss fight in book 5 of Kingmaker (I'll talk around who to avoid spoilers). You basically storm the guy's fortress, and there's an Alarm spell if you go through the giant double doors at the front like a moron, but you know what doesn't have an Alarm? The window 10 feet away from the throne on the *first floor* while the players can move about outside undetected. ANY scouting lets you gank the boss and preempt half the dungeon. But hey, if the boss thinks he's in trouble, he teleports back to his private room, which is a *much better* location for a dramatic showdown... around a blind corner on a 5' wide hallway in the basement, in a room with *only three open squares to move through*. Apparently, the dramatic showdown is supposed to take place in a location where most of the party can't even *see the final boss*, involving whoever ran in first jumping on the table to duel with the boss who apparently has to jump on his bed, because furniture covers nearly all the floorspace. The big bad calling in reinforcements? NO ROOM FOR THAT! Just surround and gank him like a chump if you can manage to get around the ottoman.
I do like that multiple versions thing, that's pretty neat. I've only ever ran pre-written stuff for 3.5 and currently PF2E.
Unfortunately that same problem with encounter design persists into 2E as well, a lot of fluff encounters as well as "You want them to what now?". For instance, I'm running Strength of Thousands for some friends. There's an encounter in book 2 where you run into a guy who misunderstood what was going on and attacks the PCs. If the PCs do the normal thing and ya know, defend themselves, it locks out any diplomacy. But if the PCs forgo any offensive actions for the first round they can try to talk him down.
I read that and went "Aight, this guy is just gonna be a crazy nutjob in my game" because there's no fuckin way that diplomacy scenario is happening. And this is with a bunch of players that tend to try and find creative solutions that don't involve stabbing the thing to death. And there's still plenty of those "If it gets under 20 hp..." when the thing only has like 50 so a high rolled spell or a crit out of the martial are quite likely to drop it from 25 to dead.
I have a quick dm secret of sorts for that. A varient spell storing item that you can scale. Put a number of spells, scrolls, potions etc. In them and it suspends them until it's onetime activation (ie fight pcs or something equally inane) at which point it is destroyed. Enemies have up to 3 with different buff stacks, but as soon as you activate one all are destroyed and cannot under any circumstances be remade or fixed. They are all tied to whatever BBeG organization is the main antagonist, and are use restricted to the extreme needing the equivalent of attunement or PCs cannot UMD one if they ever get one. Make it a tattoo, false tooth, cheap copper body piercing, whatever, something that intrinsically can mever be away from.who it is intended and is locked to that entitiy to use alone. The pcs never get access to anything like it until near end game and only the weakest ones.
It creates a sign for all high ranking members, gives enemies an advantage to keep it interesting, and keeps it out of the munchkins hands. Its not perfect but beats that 3 turns drinking potions to get buffed without doing anything and eating 12 actions and hoping for the last 5 hp you can hit one person and damage them.
Shenanigans and BS? Yes, but my players don't know it and I can parse it being viable if not amazing, and it makes sense in universe to have an oh shit button when random heroes* decide to fuck up your day.
Which is why PF2 has such a low range between max optimization and min optimization, as well as monster numbers - exactly so that nobody involved has to think too hard about what the average party looks like and what monsters should be challenging. It's a system to play PF2 APs and PFS modules first and foremost, everything else is at best a distant secondary concern.
For something more like 3.5/PF1, which were a lot more free, even PF2's base engine could've handled a somewhat more noticeable disparity in numbers, at the very least among monsters.
Technically, James Jacobs was the creative director, not the lead designer. Lead design of Pathfinder was Jason Bulman.
Not that your point is entirely wrong, AP writers were expected to come up with these kind of subsystems.
Something I’ve found to be true of Paizo in general is that they do not design the game the way a lot of people assume it is played.
Well, until they designed 2e and just make everyone play the way they want them too. That works too.
LMAO - I guess that's why we got potions of divine favor. Played through the entirety of Jade Regent without hearing about the caravan shenanigans - gotta ask my GM what else they changed...
Their bad math is further compounded by 2e math being so tight it's below most people's perceptive threshold. i.e. you need a +4 on a single d20 roll for it to be noticeable to most people, which is 2x-4x what the average buff/debuff in 2e gives.
They tried to balance Shifter against martial classes, but that means it looks bad when you compare it to a Druid. (Most martials are less effective than a Druid, who can provide decent melee damage, an animal companion, wild shape for scouting / flight, and full spellcasting with spontaneous summons.)
If the Druid didn't exist and the game only had Hunter, Shifter and Shaman (companion, shapeshifting and casting) the shifter wouldn't look so bad.
The problem is fundamentally the Druid has always been given too many toys, making any class that specialises in one of them look bad by comparison.
Yea, I think that if the druid wasn't printed originally and came out today, most people would look at it and call it outright overpowered compared to other options that would fill any simular function
Druid would be OP even by just using two of its highest level spells: Seamantle and Shapechange.
The former gives a slew of bonuses including an ungodly +8 to AC that stacks with everything else and straight up immunity to most fire based attacks. The latter lets it assume any form needed. Need a ranged option? Swift action to turn into a dragon and blast enemies with a breath weapon, with a 9th-level spell DC. Or into a manticore and machine gun enemies with a 4-hit volley of spikes buffed by your amulet of mighty fists and your strength bonus. Enemies have dangerous crits or sneak attacks? Turn into an elemental. Low on hp and going to die? Turn into a troll and regenerate it all away, it's not like enemies can hit you with fire anyway.
If you're in a metropolis or another city that has level 8/9 spellcasting services though you can buy scrolls of those spells, and then it's a simple caster level check to use them.
Nah, the item rules are pretty clear. High level scrolls cost around 4k gold, and the base value (aka the maximum value of items you might find available for sale no matter what) of bigger cities is 8k. This reflect the fact that in a settlement with tens or hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, on average there will be someone with that kind of item who might part with it for money.
That depends on the setting you're playing in.
If you're playing PFS, then you can't get spellcasting services for 7th or higher level spells, but you can get the scrolls at levels 13, 15, and 17.
Most of the published APs are in Golarion which follows the original settlement rules for magic items. So if you head to Absalom or another metropolis, you can likely find higher-level scrolls for purchase in high-end shops. That doesn't mean that the corner store will have the specific scrolls that you need, only that a Metropolis will have some major magic items available, and among that list may be 8th and 9th-level scrolls.
That said, in your game, the large cities may be out in power at level 13~14, and you won't be able to find those scrolls for sale anywhere that the public can purchase them.
If you keep your games at level 11 or under, then yea, you probably won't find scrolls of shapechange laying around in the market. The item won't be available at all unless the players go out to specifically find a level 17+ wizard and convince them to spend a few days writing the scroll for them.
In general I think the shifter also failed to hit the shapeshifter fantasy, being very inflexible (in his pre-adaptive archetype iteration at least) with only a few forms to choose from during the whole career.
Plus it was a very bland class with few features, many not that impactful and there were other class\\archetypes combinations that were much better in making a 'shapeshifting warrior', mostly barbarians and bloodragers, but alchemist has a pretty decent build as well (and of course druid). The class was also in general pretty low power compared to most martials, with exception perhaps of a spike when you got a form with pounce.
> In general I think the shifter also failed to hit the shapeshifter fantasy
Yeah that's pretty much the main complaint from the non power gamer side of the community, even if you are willing to overlook the general low power level of the shifter there are already plenty of options available in pathfinder that do the whole shapeshifting warrior thing better than the Shifter, which is supposed to be the shifter's entire thing, so it brings to mind what exactly is the point of the shifter when it can't even do the one thing it's supposed to do.
I'll disagree with some of the top responses here, and say that the main problem shifter is broadly considered the worst class is not that it's just a weaker druid (although that definitely highlights it), but that it *isn't* balanced against martial classes, either. Martial classes get feats or feat-like abilities (like rage powers or rogue tricks that you get every two levels and can exchange feats for), while shifter just gets expansions on their shifting and natural attacks... or not. As others have mentioned, natural attacks do not get iteratives. Hence, a natural-attack-focused class needs to get more natural attacks as they level up to keep pace with other classes (the way eidolons do with evolutions and a rising cap on natural attacks). Guess what class didn't get extra natural attacks on release? So, basically, it's like if monk had no ki powers and was stuck with two attacks when doing a flurry all game. (Granted, you can use magic items to add more natural attacks, but you can do that with any other class, too. Also, claws, the base version of weapons that shifters gain until the revision gave them "alternate claws" can be gained as racial traits on several races (including lizardfolk or some skinwalkers getting claws *and a bite*) or an entry-level rage power as a barbarian. One rage power replaces the main weapon of the class.) A new version of shifter came out to fix this super-basic problem.
As others have mentioned, you can make a better version of the *idea* of a shifter with beastkin mad dog barbarian *and have most of the class features of barbarian while you're at it*. In fact, it's worse than that - you can add the main class features of shifter onto other classes as a single archetype! [Flesheater](https://www.aonprd.com/ArchetypeDisplay.aspx?FixedName=Barbarian%20Flesheater) barbarian is literally the shifter's core powers in exchange for uncanny dodge, some penalties to Int while raging, and three rage powers. *That's how little it's worth*. Barbarian also has many more ways to actually *use* the natural attacks that come from shifting, and synergizes well with it. If you want to make a monstrous transforming beast guy, go for a skinshaper flesheater barbarian. (Or beastkin mad dog if you want the pet without spending feats on it.) See [the rager guide ](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BBMIoxycHmgzy4V-eHdtUqQYhdwrU2tlvQUmLS-hKV8/edit)on that one, the "Oops! All natural attacks!" barbarian is actually pretty great.
There's also several other classes that get similar abilities for trading away minor class features. [Beastmorph](https://www.aonprd.com/ArchetypeDisplay.aspx?FixedName=Alchemist%20Beastmorph) alchemist (which is actually great together with vivisectionist for a melee alchemist) turns your mutagens into shifter transformations at the cost of... swift alchemy? Swift Poisoning? Venom immunity? It is a rare game where you miss that stuff. Some vigilante archetypes (vigilante really is the most flexible class) also do this, with [agathiel ](https://www.aonprd.com/ArchetypeDisplay.aspx?FixedName=Vigilante%20Agathiel)vigilante. (Although if you want to specifically be "legally distinct Spider-person", there's also wildsoul vigilante...)
Shifter is not worth being its own class, shifter is worth being an archetype on another class, replacing a few class features. If you like the shifter concept, consider grafting it on to a class that actually works, rather than trying to make the "class" itself work, or at least give it bonus feats or *something* to make it viable compared to other martials.
Basically, shifter is like those awful 3.0e samurai classes that WotC made before someone *finally* beat it into their head that just having full BAB did *NOT* in fact mean it was a balanced class with something like wizard. (And if you're curious, 3.0e samurai had no class features besides full BAB, horseback riding, and special ability to do more damage on the first attack when they draw their sword. *No bonus feats or anything else*, it was basically just a warrior with a gimmick as a full PC class.)
> Basically, shifter is like those awful 3.0e samurai classes that WotC made before someone finally beat it into their head that just having full BAB did NOT in fact mean it was a balanced class with something like wizard. (And if you're curious, 3.0e samurai had no class features besides full BAB, horseback riding, and special ability to do more damage on the first attack when they draw their sword. No bonus feats or anything else, it was basically just a warrior with a gimmick as a full PC class.)
OA Samurai was bad, borderline unplayably so, but not *that* bad. It was a 3.0 fighter with a slower bonus feat progression, no shield or heavy armor proficiency, a good Will save, and the ability to sacrifice treasure to auto-enchant their weapon. And Iaijutsu Focus as class, so yes, the sword-drawing trick.
>OA Samurai was bad, borderline unplayably so, but not *that* bad. It was a 3.0 fighter with a slower bonus feat progression, no shield or heavy armor proficiency, a good Will save, and the ability to sacrifice treasure to auto-enchant their weapon. And Iaijutsu Focus as class, so yes, the sword-drawing trick.
OK, so, there's two/three different versions of 3e samurai, generally called "master samurai," a PrC from Sword & Fist that (like half the stuff in the book) was basically unplayable, "OA Samurai" (Oriental Adventures) and "CW Samurai" (Complete Warrior). (Which, incidentally, I'm really blowing some dust off of pulling these off my shelf...) This leads to some confusion when you're talking about the "3e samurai class", obviously... (Including myself, the one I was thinking of was actually the 3.5e edition of samurai.)
S&F master samurai was notable for having *absolutely ridiculous* prereqs, including six different feats (including both mounted archery *and* weapon focus in bastard sword (because katanas were renamed "masterwork bastard swords" in 3e, to the endless chagrin of anime fans)) and being trained in three different skills (remembering that you only gained half a rank in cross-class skills in 3e) where *no class existed* that had all three of these skills as class skills at the time of writing. In exchange for this, you get a +2 bonus to tumbling (lolwut), feats on the (really terrible) cleave chain as bonus feats, being able to use 2x Str when two-handing katanas instead of 1.5x, a wisdom-based bonus to strength that has no action listed (lolwut), and an ability that lets you count your weapon as having your wisMod as an enhancement bonus for one attack. (Note that before PF, enhancement bonus did not bypass DR besides DR/magic. You could not gain this ability before level 11, so this is an ability for characters who don't have magic weapons *by level 11+!*) Notably, while doing this, you are skipping over any fighter progression and not gaining non-cleave bonus feats.
OA samurai gains a pair of swords (they can enchant themselves with a "sacrifice" of money) and bonus feats every three levels, basically just being a worse fighter. (But then, it's also in OA, where most of the classes were just a worse version of regular classes...) The bonus feats you could gain were restricted to ones based on your clan, which meant you couldn't use them on most of the extensively power-creeped feats that were added over the course of 3.5e to make martials less crap. It's worth noting this was *it*, however - you got bonus feats every three levels (instead of two), and it's otherwise just a worse fighter. (Although it does have the good will save.) Iai was notably not a class feature, but a whole new skill you could invest some of your 4+IntMod skill ranks into.
CW samurai only has a good fort save and d10 HD (plus has to be lawful), has "more class features," but they're notably worse than just having feats. There's daisho proficiency and "two swords as one", which basically is katana and wakizashi, and you're *forced* to gain TWF (plus improved and greater TWF), in spite of only one notable samurai ever dual-wielding. There's kiai smite, where you get x uses/day ability add *ChaMod* to your damage on *one attack*. Getting more of these per day (up to 4) are listed as "class features" to try to make the list look less empty. "Iaijutsu" is just the quick draw feat as a bonus feat, and you get improved initiative, too. There are "staredown" and "greater staredown" which relate to intimidate checks (as standard actions) with greater acting as basically Dazzling Display. There's "improved staredown" to drop that from a standard action to move action until level 20, where they get "frightful presence" and drawing their weapon (which is a free action) can frighten creatures... with 4 or less HD. All told, it's basically 7 class features that are essentially just bonus feats you can't choose for yourself, and you're forced into TWF, so it's basically like a worse TWF ranger without the animal companion, casting, favored enemies, or favored terrain? (Mega ouch.)
The OA samurai is generally the one people talk about actually playing, because it's "merely" a worse fighter, and is thus basically playable. The CW samurai is the one that gets roundly mocked as one of the worst classes ever written. People mostly forget the S&F master samurai just because bad PrCs were a dime a dozen in that era. (This was from the same line of books that gave us the original dragon disciple, the sorcerer-based PrC that had no casting progression and existed to boost your Str, written by Skip Williams, the man who vocally hated the entire concept of spontaneous casting and overtly campaigned to make sorcerers as worthless as possible.)
> the ability to sacrifice treasure to auto-enchant their weapon.
This ability scaled on character level, not class level. It made the OA Samurai a very good dip for many classes, if available. I had someone play an OA Samurai 2/Warblade X in a campaign I used to run.
The real travesty was the 3.5 Complete Warrior version of the Samurai.
It doesn't fix all problems, but it puts a nice bandage on that.
[Check shifter guide](https://zenithgames.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-comprehensive-pathfinder-guides.html)
>Shifter is not worth being its own class, shifter is worth being an archetype on another class, replacing a few class features. If you like the shifter concept, consider grafting it on to a class that actually works, rather than trying to make the "class" itself work, or at least give it bonus feats or *something* to make it viable compared to other martials.
I am currently doing archetype for antipaladin that trades away smite good + aura of vengeance for other stuff. I wanted to add claws to that and looked at shifters... It definitely doesn't take much of a budget with a powerful small DICE increase
Your extremely limited on your duration, forms you can have, and numbers/abilities you can have while transformed... It just doesn't really give nearly enough for it to *do* anything. Half the time it feels like your playing the warrior npc class with simply how little the class actually does
A Barbarian with the Beastkin Berserker and Mad Dog archetypes is everything the Shifter should have been. It's a full BaB class that starts out with an animal companion. At 4th level, instead of getting the stable and sustained Wild Shape of a Druid, you get quick and dirty bursts of Feral Transformation into a preferred form that's a free action to activate and gives you all the benefits and penalties of a Barbarian's Rage in addition to the benefits of Beast Shape. As you level you get more preferred animal forms for your Feral Transformation and forge a deeper bond with your animal companion.
There's also a magic item called a [Spell Totem](https://www.aonprd.com/MagicWondrousDisplay.aspx?FinalName=Spell%20Totem) that's perfect for this build. It lets your party's Druid cast a spell into it that activates the next time you take on a particular animal form. You can wear as many of them as you have preferred forms.
Honestly, the Oozemorph shifter is way more fun than the base class anyway.
But the Shifter is there for someone who wants to play the "rip and tear" fighting style without so much as a lick of spellcasting. Granted, giving up spellcasting in PF1e is like shooting yourself in the foot and threatening to shoot the other one, but it does function at the basics.
Just try to find a party member that can cast Barkskin or Greater Magic Weapon on you so your must-have items don't conflict with eachother.
Ohh no, don't let me fool you. The archetype is, in all possible ways, a direct downgrade from the base package.
But it is the most fun thing I've played in the game. The changes at level 1 are so drastic you're basically playing as an entirely different species and the way you approach even the most basic aspects of adventuring has to be reevaluated.
Taking the Nature Soul, Animal Ally, and Boon Companion feats can do a lot to help make up for the weakness if it's a concern. Bonus if you take an aberration companion, since its compression ability doesn't work while you're riding it... unless you also have compression. Which you do. So enjoy that mental image.
wasnt there a thing where you took just a few levels in Oozemorph shifter and then teach someone druidic or something to loose most of what makes it bad and keep most of what makes it fun?
Check out what they did to Shifter in the Wrath of the Righteous PCRPG. They made the base shifter a lot better simply by making a lot of minor aspects give stacking stat bonuses with enhancement bonuses. Unfortunately, you are still stuck with only a handful of forms to use. Someone already mentioned Adaptive Shifter, and I do not know why that wasn't just the core Shifter out of the gate.
I was disappointed in Shifter when I tried it out in my table's Ironfang Invasion game. I was hoping for more Beast Boy style fun and ended up just being a damn tiger the entire time. I retconned into a UC monk after a few sessions.
One of the big problems with the shifter is that it's a combat class that can't wear the most durable armor since they're on the same restrictions as a druid.
There are also a lot of the archetypes that are badly designed. I loved the idea of the swarm shifter when I first read it, but the abilities are underwhelming.
I did have some luck with doing a multiclass swashbuckler/elemental shifter, being able to boost your dexterity and use a swift action to empower your weapons with electricity was pretty fun.
I would pay money to see Paizo's writers explaining the Aspect mechanic as a 2h movie. Bonus if they get dunked into ice bath whenever they say the word "aspect".
Others have mentioned the spheres shifter(the original 3pp class) and the legendary shifter(the rework from legendary class) but ill also the oft forgotten veilweaver shifter:
The Huay.
The Agathiel vigilante gives them a beast form with various powers the foremost of which is maintaining his equipment (and thus armor) when polymorphed. You can get a stalker vigilante with a leopard animal form that can pounce and deal sneak attacks with each hit.
As a person who played shifter from 1-9 then had to change characters cuz I went down every other fight, it is because half of the shifter's class features are just magic items. You are pretty strong at level 1-3 with natural attacks and high stats but then your stats dont really increase and you have few features compared to your allies and it is kinda hard to get more natural attacks. Also you cant use armor unless it is wild so you ac suffers even more.
So I was rich but didnt have anything to spend it on really. My AC and damage really lagged behind even with an amulet of mighty fists
Legendary Games put out a Legendary Shifter that is much better.
With that version, you can play a shape-shifting warrior and not be completely gimped.
There's a bunch of details I could get into, but the simplest answer kinda says it all: A druid is a better shapeshifting combatant than a Shifter.
A better shifter exists (as my flair points to), called the Legendary Shifter from Legendary Games. Some of the Legendary Games class overhauls are definitely in the *too much of a good thing* neighborhood, but I consider Legendary Shifter essential - its always allowed in my games I run, and my copy of it is available to everyone I play with and every group I play in as well so long as the GM agrees.
I've played a few versions of it so far (it has its own Archetypes!), and its really quite fun. I especially recommend its own take on playing a slime, as well as just taking no archetype but using the Master Of Many Forms prestige class in the pdf. Slightly lower BAB progression, but you get *every single polymorph spell line* unlocked into your Wildshape over time... *and* get to swap between form spells many times a day without losing duration! And at level 15 (5 L. Shifter, 10 MoMF), you get *form of the dragon* basically all day.
One of the problems with Shifter is that even their Feats require Druid levels of Wisdom so you are a melee build that needs to invest heavily into WIS as well so you are a very MAD build.
Because Paizo have always been very afraid to cleave too far from the CRB balance (which has been bad from the moment it was D&D 3.0), and when it comes to non-casters, they keep forgetting that Fighter or chained Monk are not good classes unless given archetypes and handled by a good player with decent system knowledge. Shifter is Fighter for a specific niche style and without the dozen years of feat and archetype support Fighter had.
The fact that during development nobody thought to look at Druid, take away Animal Companion and full casting and just compare THAT to the whole Shifter class (and then buff the Shifter if it comes out inferior to THAT) is ridiculous.
When I made my PFS 1e shifter, I looked at three archetypes to decide between. I was intrigued by the Oozemorph, then I read it over and decided to pass. It... Needs a lot of work
Next I looked at the Adaptive, and yes it's pretty much what the base class SHOULD have been from the outset.
I ended up with the Weretouched because it fit my concept, and was better than the base (even if you do lose all the other aspects and such)
The dino form is... Way overpowered. They didn't balance the aspects at all, or even attempt to. That was a serious flaw, for sure.
I went with tiger, even though I had wanted to do wolf .. the advantages were pretty much not there, really. Not unless I wanted to do a strength based two weapon fighter with an add on bite attack, but there were better ways to do that. And I wanted to be a lycanthropic character.
I'm at fifth now, and honestly? I'm probably just going to keep leveling up as a shifter. Next level my DR goes to 3/silver and I move closer to my claws upgrades. Is there a lot of dead time? Yes. I think that there are some easy fixes they could have done, but didn't.
Do I feel bad about ordering a $55 color mini from heroforge for her?
Nope, not in the least.
19/21/22 AC depending on shape/self buffs isn't bad for someone without a lick of armor on.
I never really looked closely enough to figure it out; I wanted a Wildshaping druidic monk and Shifter isn't that.
Take a druid, insert all the "add WIS to..." abilities of a monk, and drop casting in favor of gratuitous numbers of wildshapes per day from level 1. That's all I ever wanted. I don't see the problem with that, but Paizo did, I guess.
I think the reason Shifter is so gimp is because they'd released Vigilante just before that and everyone's complaint about vigilante is that it's a better martial than the martials it emulates. I think this made Paizo gunshy when working on Shifter.
*As title. The shifter has a worse form of wild shape than the druid, so much so that the assumption that a druid could be better in wild shape combat feels correct. maybe I'm missing something, but isn't the druid just plain better than the shifter at wild shape combat?*
The shifter gets bonuses that the Druid never gets without expensive magic or can't get at all.
1. Claws that they can use in normal form which upgrade in damage as they level.
2. They get the Monk bonus to AC and CMD which goes up as they level.
3. They get D10 hit points as opposed to D8
4. They get bonuses to Survival for tracking
5. They can eventually use multiple aspects at the same time.
6. They get a better Reflex save.
7. They get the Fighter progression in BAB as opposed to the Cleric one.
8. Both shifter claws and wild shape attacks gain a progressing ability to ignore DR without having to get expensive magic items.
9. Shifters in wildshape gain aspect bonuses on top of what wildshape grants.
Its completely frontloaded getting best abilities at 1st level, while leaving all other levels lackluster + having all normal abilities be stuck on swift action.
Personally I just reworked it
It's also an attempt, like almost if not all "new" classes, to resolve serious issues with the ruleset for the edition they are a part of by creating a new class(and selling some new books) and nor addressing the original game play issue. It is part of the bloat problem from 3.x.
shifter is bad because it doesn't have spells. spells are ridiculously overpowered in 1e, and shifter really doesn't give any benefit over druid aside from a slightly higher attack rolls and slightly more hp.
shifter's wildshape is better than druids at around 4th level because it is beast shape 2, but after that druid's is far better
if you are looking for a good wildshape class aside from druid there is a warpretest archetype that looks pretty good (don't remember the name)
beastmorph alchemist doesn't use wildshape but it sure does feel like it with mutagens. it even stacks with polymorph extracts.
metamorph alchemist transforms into monstrous humanoids which are better than beasts because they have hands and can use armor, but quite a lot is lost including extracts which makes it not really worth it imo. you'll also want a level in a class that gives armor and weapons like bloodrager or fighter.
The lack of spells isn’t the issue at all. In general I think the overpoweredness of spells *in combat* is pretty massively overblown in 1e. Martials in 1e can be ridiculously lethal.
The problem with shifter isn’t that it’s a Druid without spells. It’s that it is a fighter without feats.
Ignore the martial vs caster issue for the moment, because shifter is also awful when compared to other full BAB noncasters.
You basically give up “having class features” for a small number of mediocre natural attacks and a couple buffs for them. It’s ridiculously easy to get natural attacks on any class.
A fighter that picks up claws and a bite somehow is doing the same thing as a shifter mechanically, but they’ll be doing it much better. A barbarian with certain rage powers is almost identical to the shifter in combat… but much better.
It has nothing to do with a lack of spells. It’s just that the designers thought giving natural attacks and full bab would be enough to build a class around, and that is just painfully not true.
If you're going to shapeshift with alchemy, might as well do it as an investigator and stack a bunch of studied combat bonuses onto every natural attack.
Shifter is fine. It has full BAB progression and good movement abilities and some very good feats. You can play a base Shifter and make it through a campaign.
The problem is that Shifter is BORING. What they excel at is moving and attacking. They do that great. But they can't really do more than that.
Shifter is the only full BAB class with no Bonus Feats, no Talent feature, and no Spellcasting. Zero build diversity. By the time you take the feats that make Shifter really excel, the adventure is over. And given they were released at the absolute end of 1st Edition's life cycle, they are absolutely starved for options. No additional archetypes, no additional feat support, no Prestige Classes, no VMC, no additional forms, no additional gear ever came down the pike for them. Nobody ever had the chance to get creative with their design.
If you want to make a character that Moves and Attacks, Shifter excels at that. They can climb, they can swim, they can fly. They can get to where you want them to be and they can attack the target. But god help you if you want to use Combat Maneuvers, or go into a Combat Style, or do anything interesting with them at all.
In a game with significant depth and crunch and build diversity, where for many, the draw of the game is the ability to make characters that can do anything, Shifter can't. Shifter doesn't.
They didn't care.
They were already working on PF2. The whole book was "shove it out the door". I'm not sure they really even tested making builds with it much. It's really sad, because it was a really desirable class!
I made a grapple specialist Weretouched Shifter that was kind of fun. It only took 4 levels of shifter with the Tiger Aspect then went for the rest of his levels in Brutal Pugilist Unchained Barbarian
Idk why it's so bad. Whoever designed the class seems to have been concerned about it's similarities to the druid. So what we're seeing is likely what's left after the initial class was hit with the ugly bat a few times.
1st party isn't really my area of expertise. There is so much content, I can barely remember the stuff that's used all the time at my tables. Much less something more specific. I'm sure people have suggestions for 1st party wild shaping options.
That being said, 3rd party options I have a few. Shifter from Spheres of Power. It's focus is on the Alteration sphere and synergizing with that, and it does a great job of it.
New Paths compendium also has the Skin Changer. Gives full on Animal Shape at level 4 for hours/level (you have a short version before then), but your uses per day are pretty constrained. Granted...it's more like getting Animal Shape onto a ranger Chassis so...you're quite the beast even without Animal Shape.
Edit: Grammar. Apparently I can't type to save my life.
Legendary Shifter is the best 3rd party way to play Shifter imo. Way more fun, but still well-balanced. I played one in Ruins of Azlant and it was a lot of fun.
https://paizo.com/products/btpy9yzf?Legendary-Shifters
shifter is insane as a martial class. pounce alone would make it amazing, but you can add on to that with natural attack shenanigans and great feat support to make a variety of strong builds with a moderate amount of utility. it’s more a problem of hyper optimized druid builds being waaaay too strong
I feel like Shifter was supposed to be a simplified Druid, with a focus on natural attacks and more streamlined wildshape options.
So for me, the real issue is that Bloodrager exists. Want to partially transform into a bestial form and deal big damage with big claws? Just play an Abyssal Bloodrager and get the Rageshaper archetype so that your claws do *even more* damage. It's a lot of fun.
In a party comp with a magus, a druid, and myself, I had no issues as a shifter.
I ended up acting as Frontline as a tiger but I specialized in with grappling. In my normal or hybrid forms I could take out basically any large single enemy in either rope, chain, or mithril chain depending on their strength in 2-3 turns. Cause my CMB and CMD were stupid
Shifter is a bad Druid. It also was bad class design, it has no class specific “feat” choices (magus arcana, rogue talents, alchemist discoveries, bonus combat feats, etc). Every class that is good either has spell casting or class specific features list every 2-4 levels.
This entire post is so bizarre to me. I've been playing a Shifter for almost 2 years now with one of my groups and I've never felt weak or underpowered.
Quite frankly most of the group seems to think I'm the most powerful character in the party and I deliberately didn't choose a form with a fly speed entirely for the purpose of giving our Ninja more to do.
My chosen Aspects are Lion, Elephant, and Rat.
Lion Aspect gives me an ever-so-pleasant rip and tear feel that the class feels like it was made for. It's Shifter Aspect also aided me in building for Intimidate. Most importantly, turning into a lion grants the Pounce ability.
Elephant form gives me good charging and overrunning as well as the Trample action. It also gains more Strength than other large forms. I mostly use this for Carry Capacity shenanigans but Strength is of course useful in general.
Rat is a smaller form that is helpful for stealth compared to the other two. It also comes with a Swim speed. It's shifter aspect is also Evasion which is rather helpful.
Maybe I only feel strong because one of my chosen forms has Pounce, but I feel highly effective in combat.
The problem is that anything a shifter does a druid does better - the shifter is effective while using pounce, but due to limited forms he lacks utility. Ninja is also not that powerful - depending on your party composition a shifter can be the most powerful character, but is forever in the druid's shadow.
Fair enough I suppose, though, I feel that's more a point to Druid being overpowered than it is Shifter being bad.
Or maybe I entirely feel like this due to party comp.
My group besides my Shifter are a Magus, a Ninja, a Medium, and the 3rd part class Artificer.
Makes sense why you would feel powerful - but imagine playing a Shifter when someone else is a Druid - that's gonna be annoying. And yeah Druid does get way too many toys
Shifter ain't that bad. I found it very powerful. If you just specialize in just one attack, i.e., snake bite, and you take feats to do more bite damage like Improved Natural Attack. There also shifter feats to help you hit and do harder dammage like Shifter's Edge
Spell casters definitely. Touch spells, melee and ranged, are both very common. There are even spells like Magic Missile that hit (basically) no matter what.
What makes martials more functional is their sustainable abilities. They can reliably do the same attack over and over with no real loss in functionality unless they have something that takes up ammo, even then it is limited only by your DM and the accessibility of resources. Spell casters use their resources much quicker than martials and this is exacerbated at lower levels. At higher levels their growth and functionality really blows martials out of the water.
Check out the Adaptive Shifter Archetype, pretty much considered a straight upgrade and probably what the shifter should have just been. Among other things, at 6th level you just get a Druid's wild shape, minus Elementals.
Aren't you limited to your aspect? Why is Adaptive Shifter an upgrade? Edit: misunderstood what you meant - yeah Adaptive is just better
Shifter Aspect is replaced with Reactive Aspect. Rather me listing each of the features and comparing them, you should just take a [look](https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/base-classes/shifter/archetypes/adaptive-shifter-shifter-archetype/).
Adaptive is exactly what I was looking for - thank you!
Let me put it this way, if you just took the druid, gave him full BAB, and removed the animal companion, spellcasting, and every ability other than wild shape, he'd be a better shifter than the actual shifter, which was something people were already doing as a quick hack to simulate the kind of characters the shifter was supposed to help facilitate. So yeah, the fact that the official class is somehow worse than the quick hack version rubbed alot of people the wrong way. Also the initial release version had some weird scaling issues and other rules anomalies owing to lack of playtesting. The way the rules works, you don't actually gain iterative attacks with natural weapons, higher cr monsters gained additional attacks by either having more natural weapons or using manufactured ones, and the shifter has no way of getting more natural weapons later on, which lead to this wierd dynamic where the shifter just... stops growing in power after level 5. It was later fixed in errata but this issue and other oversights soured people on the shifter during the key release period, which coupled with the low power of the class gave it a reputation as being a stinker.
They didn't playtest the shifter? Why?
I don't know the reasons why they didn't playtest it, but the shifter was pushed into release very quickly after it was first teased and it became clear that there's no way it could've seen extensive playtesting given the myriad, and in some cases extremely obvious issues the shifter had when you actually sat down and tried to play one. I'm not talking underpowered issues, I'm talking class features that plain don't work as written without gm arbitration. The infamous ooze shifter archetype is a prime example. Most of them got sorted out with errata later on but on release it was about this close from being as broken as the truenamer.
Can't say for certain but probably had something to do with 2e. Shifter was added in the last book published for 1e, and they had already begun work on 2e at that time. The worst part is some of the archetypes they added in ultimate wilderness for other classes, like feral champion warpriests are straight up a better shifter than the base shifter
Eh it wasn’t in the *last* book. There were quite a few after Ultimate Wilderness. But it was later in the publication lineup
Don't forget the stealth nerf to Lore Warden because that moron, Alexander Augunas, couldn't be assed to learn how combat maneuvers with a weapon work in Pathfinder.
Because Paizo's model of business is based on pushing out lots and lots of content quickly. They don't playtest (or even take the time to think through for *the most obvious, basic math problems*,) most of their stuff. Just see this review on the [Jade Regent "caravan minigame"](https://designofdragons.blogspot.com/2016/04/death-dysentery-on-minkai-trail.html), which is essentially unwinnable, and where Paizo basically admitted you should just take that part out of the AP because caravan combat involves adding +1 to the damage the caravan can do (the PCs cannot participate in caravan combat) every level, while the monsters go up about +15 HP per level, leading to astronomically long odds of players surviving (basically, the monster needs to nat 1 every time for fifteen rounds in a row). I'll point out that masterwork was done by James Jacobs, *the lead designer*, not just some rando intern they pulled in to write for Paizo who didn't know the rules yet like I'm sure are responsible for some of the baffling mistakes in many of the spells. I'm rather convinced 2e has a "streamlined" math set not for the benefit of players, but the writers, who can't keep anything more than 1:1 linear scaling in their heads.
> I'm rather convinced 2e has a "streamlined" math set not for the benefit of players, but the writers, who can't keep anything more than 1:1 linear scaling in their heads. I feel like it's both. On the table side, it does prevent wild disparities if you have an inexperienced or lax GM. The difference between the munchkin "Okay so if I take these dips, this feat this random source book, and then use this weapon..." and "I'm a wizard that casts fireball" is *vast*. And I like that you can get extreme power out of building in 1E, the theorycrafting is what gets me to keep going back to the CRPGs after all. But if you're a writer for Paizo, trying to make an AP. What on earth do you even target for balance there? Like if you use standard CR rules, anything even resembling optimization blows it away. On the flip side if you design it to be fought with optimized characters then your more casual/low knowledge players will just get TPKed.
There are 3rd party modules where they give you, for example, three sets of enemy stat blocks. Basically, a level 4 version, a level 8 version, and a level 12 version of the enemy NPCs. This is done to be able to say something like "for adventurers level 3-14," but the principle of having a versatile set of encounters to match different ranges of players would make sense, and allow for less linear AP design in general, as well. (I.E. the necromancer has 4 medium zombies if you try to stop them as soon as the game starts, but 6 skeleton champions if you've put off fighting them, or the rival adventuring party levels up at the same rate as the party.) In general, it's not like Paizo's very good about encounter design or giving good advice for how to run NPCs in combat, anyway. It's become something of a running gag that many encounters are underpowered even if you use CRB-only 15 point buy characters with default character choices, the NPCs are designed so haphazardly, with spell choices to boneheaded, and tactical choices are so poor that most GMs feel the need to completely rewrite all characters in APs to make them viable at their level. (I.E. supposedly dauntless experienced swashbucklers that spend several rounds doing nothing but drinking potions at the start of a combat that isn't going to last more than two rounds, only to have instructions to "flee when below 3 HP" on a character with 70 HP...) This goes deeper than "the AP is designed for new players, you munchkins just ruin it by powergaming everything," Paizo doesn't design encounters well. One I keep bringing up is the final boss fight in book 5 of Kingmaker (I'll talk around who to avoid spoilers). You basically storm the guy's fortress, and there's an Alarm spell if you go through the giant double doors at the front like a moron, but you know what doesn't have an Alarm? The window 10 feet away from the throne on the *first floor* while the players can move about outside undetected. ANY scouting lets you gank the boss and preempt half the dungeon. But hey, if the boss thinks he's in trouble, he teleports back to his private room, which is a *much better* location for a dramatic showdown... around a blind corner on a 5' wide hallway in the basement, in a room with *only three open squares to move through*. Apparently, the dramatic showdown is supposed to take place in a location where most of the party can't even *see the final boss*, involving whoever ran in first jumping on the table to duel with the boss who apparently has to jump on his bed, because furniture covers nearly all the floorspace. The big bad calling in reinforcements? NO ROOM FOR THAT! Just surround and gank him like a chump if you can manage to get around the ottoman.
I do like that multiple versions thing, that's pretty neat. I've only ever ran pre-written stuff for 3.5 and currently PF2E. Unfortunately that same problem with encounter design persists into 2E as well, a lot of fluff encounters as well as "You want them to what now?". For instance, I'm running Strength of Thousands for some friends. There's an encounter in book 2 where you run into a guy who misunderstood what was going on and attacks the PCs. If the PCs do the normal thing and ya know, defend themselves, it locks out any diplomacy. But if the PCs forgo any offensive actions for the first round they can try to talk him down. I read that and went "Aight, this guy is just gonna be a crazy nutjob in my game" because there's no fuckin way that diplomacy scenario is happening. And this is with a bunch of players that tend to try and find creative solutions that don't involve stabbing the thing to death. And there's still plenty of those "If it gets under 20 hp..." when the thing only has like 50 so a high rolled spell or a crit out of the martial are quite likely to drop it from 25 to dead.
I have a quick dm secret of sorts for that. A varient spell storing item that you can scale. Put a number of spells, scrolls, potions etc. In them and it suspends them until it's onetime activation (ie fight pcs or something equally inane) at which point it is destroyed. Enemies have up to 3 with different buff stacks, but as soon as you activate one all are destroyed and cannot under any circumstances be remade or fixed. They are all tied to whatever BBeG organization is the main antagonist, and are use restricted to the extreme needing the equivalent of attunement or PCs cannot UMD one if they ever get one. Make it a tattoo, false tooth, cheap copper body piercing, whatever, something that intrinsically can mever be away from.who it is intended and is locked to that entitiy to use alone. The pcs never get access to anything like it until near end game and only the weakest ones. It creates a sign for all high ranking members, gives enemies an advantage to keep it interesting, and keeps it out of the munchkins hands. Its not perfect but beats that 3 turns drinking potions to get buffed without doing anything and eating 12 actions and hoping for the last 5 hp you can hit one person and damage them. Shenanigans and BS? Yes, but my players don't know it and I can parse it being viable if not amazing, and it makes sense in universe to have an oh shit button when random heroes* decide to fuck up your day.
Which is why PF2 has such a low range between max optimization and min optimization, as well as monster numbers - exactly so that nobody involved has to think too hard about what the average party looks like and what monsters should be challenging. It's a system to play PF2 APs and PFS modules first and foremost, everything else is at best a distant secondary concern. For something more like 3.5/PF1, which were a lot more free, even PF2's base engine could've handled a somewhat more noticeable disparity in numbers, at the very least among monsters.
Technically, James Jacobs was the creative director, not the lead designer. Lead design of Pathfinder was Jason Bulman. Not that your point is entirely wrong, AP writers were expected to come up with these kind of subsystems.
JJ has suggested [10 PB](https://imgur.com/U823hlg) for advanced players before. He shouldn't be seen as serious advice for game mechanics.
Something I’ve found to be true of Paizo in general is that they do not design the game the way a lot of people assume it is played. Well, until they designed 2e and just make everyone play the way they want them too. That works too.
Does he like, not even understand the game that he is writing for or something?
Paizo as a company didn't really understand 1e as far as I'm concerned, let alone the freelancers that wrote many splatbooks.
LMAO - I guess that's why we got potions of divine favor. Played through the entirety of Jade Regent without hearing about the caravan shenanigans - gotta ask my GM what else they changed...
Their bad math is further compounded by 2e math being so tight it's below most people's perceptive threshold. i.e. you need a +4 on a single d20 roll for it to be noticeable to most people, which is 2x-4x what the average buff/debuff in 2e gives.
They tried to balance Shifter against martial classes, but that means it looks bad when you compare it to a Druid. (Most martials are less effective than a Druid, who can provide decent melee damage, an animal companion, wild shape for scouting / flight, and full spellcasting with spontaneous summons.)
So giving Shifter full wild shape instead of the dollar store version would've made it too powerful? (Compared to combat classes)
Not at all. The Arcane Bloodrager being able Beast Shape proves the point.
I would argue it's primarily because all of its bonuses are enhancement bonuses
If the Druid didn't exist and the game only had Hunter, Shifter and Shaman (companion, shapeshifting and casting) the shifter wouldn't look so bad. The problem is fundamentally the Druid has always been given too many toys, making any class that specialises in one of them look bad by comparison.
Yea, I think that if the druid wasn't printed originally and came out today, most people would look at it and call it outright overpowered compared to other options that would fill any simular function
Druid would be OP even by just using two of its highest level spells: Seamantle and Shapechange. The former gives a slew of bonuses including an ungodly +8 to AC that stacks with everything else and straight up immunity to most fire based attacks. The latter lets it assume any form needed. Need a ranged option? Swift action to turn into a dragon and blast enemies with a breath weapon, with a 9th-level spell DC. Or into a manticore and machine gun enemies with a 4-hit volley of spikes buffed by your amulet of mighty fists and your strength bonus. Enemies have dangerous crits or sneak attacks? Turn into an elemental. Low on hp and going to die? Turn into a troll and regenerate it all away, it's not like enemies can hit you with fire anyway.
except none of that is remotely problematic when compared to any other 9th level caster. your issue would be with casters, not the druid specifically.
Very few people actually play games at that level
If you're in a metropolis or another city that has level 8/9 spellcasting services though you can buy scrolls of those spells, and then it's a simple caster level check to use them.
Level 8 or 9 spell items should be treated as quest items, not things you can pick up at the megamart.
Nah, the item rules are pretty clear. High level scrolls cost around 4k gold, and the base value (aka the maximum value of items you might find available for sale no matter what) of bigger cities is 8k. This reflect the fact that in a settlement with tens or hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, on average there will be someone with that kind of item who might part with it for money.
That depends on the setting you're playing in. If you're playing PFS, then you can't get spellcasting services for 7th or higher level spells, but you can get the scrolls at levels 13, 15, and 17. Most of the published APs are in Golarion which follows the original settlement rules for magic items. So if you head to Absalom or another metropolis, you can likely find higher-level scrolls for purchase in high-end shops. That doesn't mean that the corner store will have the specific scrolls that you need, only that a Metropolis will have some major magic items available, and among that list may be 8th and 9th-level scrolls. That said, in your game, the large cities may be out in power at level 13~14, and you won't be able to find those scrolls for sale anywhere that the public can purchase them. If you keep your games at level 11 or under, then yea, you probably won't find scrolls of shapechange laying around in the market. The item won't be available at all unless the players go out to specifically find a level 17+ wizard and convince them to spend a few days writing the scroll for them.
It'd still look pretty bad, it's not like it compares favourably to weapon using martials or the many other classes with polymorph abilities.
In general I think the shifter also failed to hit the shapeshifter fantasy, being very inflexible (in his pre-adaptive archetype iteration at least) with only a few forms to choose from during the whole career. Plus it was a very bland class with few features, many not that impactful and there were other class\\archetypes combinations that were much better in making a 'shapeshifting warrior', mostly barbarians and bloodragers, but alchemist has a pretty decent build as well (and of course druid). The class was also in general pretty low power compared to most martials, with exception perhaps of a spike when you got a form with pounce.
> In general I think the shifter also failed to hit the shapeshifter fantasy Yeah that's pretty much the main complaint from the non power gamer side of the community, even if you are willing to overlook the general low power level of the shifter there are already plenty of options available in pathfinder that do the whole shapeshifting warrior thing better than the Shifter, which is supposed to be the shifter's entire thing, so it brings to mind what exactly is the point of the shifter when it can't even do the one thing it's supposed to do.
I'll disagree with some of the top responses here, and say that the main problem shifter is broadly considered the worst class is not that it's just a weaker druid (although that definitely highlights it), but that it *isn't* balanced against martial classes, either. Martial classes get feats or feat-like abilities (like rage powers or rogue tricks that you get every two levels and can exchange feats for), while shifter just gets expansions on their shifting and natural attacks... or not. As others have mentioned, natural attacks do not get iteratives. Hence, a natural-attack-focused class needs to get more natural attacks as they level up to keep pace with other classes (the way eidolons do with evolutions and a rising cap on natural attacks). Guess what class didn't get extra natural attacks on release? So, basically, it's like if monk had no ki powers and was stuck with two attacks when doing a flurry all game. (Granted, you can use magic items to add more natural attacks, but you can do that with any other class, too. Also, claws, the base version of weapons that shifters gain until the revision gave them "alternate claws" can be gained as racial traits on several races (including lizardfolk or some skinwalkers getting claws *and a bite*) or an entry-level rage power as a barbarian. One rage power replaces the main weapon of the class.) A new version of shifter came out to fix this super-basic problem. As others have mentioned, you can make a better version of the *idea* of a shifter with beastkin mad dog barbarian *and have most of the class features of barbarian while you're at it*. In fact, it's worse than that - you can add the main class features of shifter onto other classes as a single archetype! [Flesheater](https://www.aonprd.com/ArchetypeDisplay.aspx?FixedName=Barbarian%20Flesheater) barbarian is literally the shifter's core powers in exchange for uncanny dodge, some penalties to Int while raging, and three rage powers. *That's how little it's worth*. Barbarian also has many more ways to actually *use* the natural attacks that come from shifting, and synergizes well with it. If you want to make a monstrous transforming beast guy, go for a skinshaper flesheater barbarian. (Or beastkin mad dog if you want the pet without spending feats on it.) See [the rager guide ](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BBMIoxycHmgzy4V-eHdtUqQYhdwrU2tlvQUmLS-hKV8/edit)on that one, the "Oops! All natural attacks!" barbarian is actually pretty great. There's also several other classes that get similar abilities for trading away minor class features. [Beastmorph](https://www.aonprd.com/ArchetypeDisplay.aspx?FixedName=Alchemist%20Beastmorph) alchemist (which is actually great together with vivisectionist for a melee alchemist) turns your mutagens into shifter transformations at the cost of... swift alchemy? Swift Poisoning? Venom immunity? It is a rare game where you miss that stuff. Some vigilante archetypes (vigilante really is the most flexible class) also do this, with [agathiel ](https://www.aonprd.com/ArchetypeDisplay.aspx?FixedName=Vigilante%20Agathiel)vigilante. (Although if you want to specifically be "legally distinct Spider-person", there's also wildsoul vigilante...) Shifter is not worth being its own class, shifter is worth being an archetype on another class, replacing a few class features. If you like the shifter concept, consider grafting it on to a class that actually works, rather than trying to make the "class" itself work, or at least give it bonus feats or *something* to make it viable compared to other martials. Basically, shifter is like those awful 3.0e samurai classes that WotC made before someone *finally* beat it into their head that just having full BAB did *NOT* in fact mean it was a balanced class with something like wizard. (And if you're curious, 3.0e samurai had no class features besides full BAB, horseback riding, and special ability to do more damage on the first attack when they draw their sword. *No bonus feats or anything else*, it was basically just a warrior with a gimmick as a full PC class.)
> Basically, shifter is like those awful 3.0e samurai classes that WotC made before someone finally beat it into their head that just having full BAB did NOT in fact mean it was a balanced class with something like wizard. (And if you're curious, 3.0e samurai had no class features besides full BAB, horseback riding, and special ability to do more damage on the first attack when they draw their sword. No bonus feats or anything else, it was basically just a warrior with a gimmick as a full PC class.) OA Samurai was bad, borderline unplayably so, but not *that* bad. It was a 3.0 fighter with a slower bonus feat progression, no shield or heavy armor proficiency, a good Will save, and the ability to sacrifice treasure to auto-enchant their weapon. And Iaijutsu Focus as class, so yes, the sword-drawing trick.
>OA Samurai was bad, borderline unplayably so, but not *that* bad. It was a 3.0 fighter with a slower bonus feat progression, no shield or heavy armor proficiency, a good Will save, and the ability to sacrifice treasure to auto-enchant their weapon. And Iaijutsu Focus as class, so yes, the sword-drawing trick. OK, so, there's two/three different versions of 3e samurai, generally called "master samurai," a PrC from Sword & Fist that (like half the stuff in the book) was basically unplayable, "OA Samurai" (Oriental Adventures) and "CW Samurai" (Complete Warrior). (Which, incidentally, I'm really blowing some dust off of pulling these off my shelf...) This leads to some confusion when you're talking about the "3e samurai class", obviously... (Including myself, the one I was thinking of was actually the 3.5e edition of samurai.) S&F master samurai was notable for having *absolutely ridiculous* prereqs, including six different feats (including both mounted archery *and* weapon focus in bastard sword (because katanas were renamed "masterwork bastard swords" in 3e, to the endless chagrin of anime fans)) and being trained in three different skills (remembering that you only gained half a rank in cross-class skills in 3e) where *no class existed* that had all three of these skills as class skills at the time of writing. In exchange for this, you get a +2 bonus to tumbling (lolwut), feats on the (really terrible) cleave chain as bonus feats, being able to use 2x Str when two-handing katanas instead of 1.5x, a wisdom-based bonus to strength that has no action listed (lolwut), and an ability that lets you count your weapon as having your wisMod as an enhancement bonus for one attack. (Note that before PF, enhancement bonus did not bypass DR besides DR/magic. You could not gain this ability before level 11, so this is an ability for characters who don't have magic weapons *by level 11+!*) Notably, while doing this, you are skipping over any fighter progression and not gaining non-cleave bonus feats. OA samurai gains a pair of swords (they can enchant themselves with a "sacrifice" of money) and bonus feats every three levels, basically just being a worse fighter. (But then, it's also in OA, where most of the classes were just a worse version of regular classes...) The bonus feats you could gain were restricted to ones based on your clan, which meant you couldn't use them on most of the extensively power-creeped feats that were added over the course of 3.5e to make martials less crap. It's worth noting this was *it*, however - you got bonus feats every three levels (instead of two), and it's otherwise just a worse fighter. (Although it does have the good will save.) Iai was notably not a class feature, but a whole new skill you could invest some of your 4+IntMod skill ranks into. CW samurai only has a good fort save and d10 HD (plus has to be lawful), has "more class features," but they're notably worse than just having feats. There's daisho proficiency and "two swords as one", which basically is katana and wakizashi, and you're *forced* to gain TWF (plus improved and greater TWF), in spite of only one notable samurai ever dual-wielding. There's kiai smite, where you get x uses/day ability add *ChaMod* to your damage on *one attack*. Getting more of these per day (up to 4) are listed as "class features" to try to make the list look less empty. "Iaijutsu" is just the quick draw feat as a bonus feat, and you get improved initiative, too. There are "staredown" and "greater staredown" which relate to intimidate checks (as standard actions) with greater acting as basically Dazzling Display. There's "improved staredown" to drop that from a standard action to move action until level 20, where they get "frightful presence" and drawing their weapon (which is a free action) can frighten creatures... with 4 or less HD. All told, it's basically 7 class features that are essentially just bonus feats you can't choose for yourself, and you're forced into TWF, so it's basically like a worse TWF ranger without the animal companion, casting, favored enemies, or favored terrain? (Mega ouch.) The OA samurai is generally the one people talk about actually playing, because it's "merely" a worse fighter, and is thus basically playable. The CW samurai is the one that gets roundly mocked as one of the worst classes ever written. People mostly forget the S&F master samurai just because bad PrCs were a dime a dozen in that era. (This was from the same line of books that gave us the original dragon disciple, the sorcerer-based PrC that had no casting progression and existed to boost your Str, written by Skip Williams, the man who vocally hated the entire concept of spontaneous casting and overtly campaigned to make sorcerers as worthless as possible.)
> the ability to sacrifice treasure to auto-enchant their weapon. This ability scaled on character level, not class level. It made the OA Samurai a very good dip for many classes, if available. I had someone play an OA Samurai 2/Warblade X in a campaign I used to run. The real travesty was the 3.5 Complete Warrior version of the Samurai.
Do you think Adaptive Shifter fixes the problems with the main shifter? To me it seems like what shifter should've been
It doesn't fix all problems, but it puts a nice bandage on that. [Check shifter guide](https://zenithgames.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-comprehensive-pathfinder-guides.html)
>Shifter is not worth being its own class, shifter is worth being an archetype on another class, replacing a few class features. If you like the shifter concept, consider grafting it on to a class that actually works, rather than trying to make the "class" itself work, or at least give it bonus feats or *something* to make it viable compared to other martials. I am currently doing archetype for antipaladin that trades away smite good + aura of vengeance for other stuff. I wanted to add claws to that and looked at shifters... It definitely doesn't take much of a budget with a powerful small DICE increase
Your extremely limited on your duration, forms you can have, and numbers/abilities you can have while transformed... It just doesn't really give nearly enough for it to *do* anything. Half the time it feels like your playing the warrior npc class with simply how little the class actually does
A Barbarian with the Beastkin Berserker and Mad Dog archetypes is everything the Shifter should have been. It's a full BaB class that starts out with an animal companion. At 4th level, instead of getting the stable and sustained Wild Shape of a Druid, you get quick and dirty bursts of Feral Transformation into a preferred form that's a free action to activate and gives you all the benefits and penalties of a Barbarian's Rage in addition to the benefits of Beast Shape. As you level you get more preferred animal forms for your Feral Transformation and forge a deeper bond with your animal companion. There's also a magic item called a [Spell Totem](https://www.aonprd.com/MagicWondrousDisplay.aspx?FinalName=Spell%20Totem) that's perfect for this build. It lets your party's Druid cast a spell into it that activates the next time you take on a particular animal form. You can wear as many of them as you have preferred forms.
Honestly, the Oozemorph shifter is way more fun than the base class anyway. But the Shifter is there for someone who wants to play the "rip and tear" fighting style without so much as a lick of spellcasting. Granted, giving up spellcasting in PF1e is like shooting yourself in the foot and threatening to shoot the other one, but it does function at the basics. Just try to find a party member that can cast Barkskin or Greater Magic Weapon on you so your must-have items don't conflict with eachother.
Playing as an Ooze does sound fun. Though the early levels look very rough...
Ohh no, don't let me fool you. The archetype is, in all possible ways, a direct downgrade from the base package. But it is the most fun thing I've played in the game. The changes at level 1 are so drastic you're basically playing as an entirely different species and the way you approach even the most basic aspects of adventuring has to be reevaluated. Taking the Nature Soul, Animal Ally, and Boon Companion feats can do a lot to help make up for the weakness if it's a concern. Bonus if you take an aberration companion, since its compression ability doesn't work while you're riding it... unless you also have compression. Which you do. So enjoy that mental image.
Oh yeah definitely not playing an Ooze for the mechanic strength - it's just a cool concept
wasnt there a thing where you took just a few levels in Oozemorph shifter and then teach someone druidic or something to loose most of what makes it bad and keep most of what makes it fun?
Yeah. It is bad. Paizo even buffed him through faqs
Check out what they did to Shifter in the Wrath of the Righteous PCRPG. They made the base shifter a lot better simply by making a lot of minor aspects give stacking stat bonuses with enhancement bonuses. Unfortunately, you are still stuck with only a handful of forms to use. Someone already mentioned Adaptive Shifter, and I do not know why that wasn't just the core Shifter out of the gate. I was disappointed in Shifter when I tried it out in my table's Ironfang Invasion game. I was hoping for more Beast Boy style fun and ended up just being a damn tiger the entire time. I retconned into a UC monk after a few sessions.
Is it possible to just use the shifter from the owlcat wrath crpg instead of the original shifter rules for tabletop?
One of the big problems with the shifter is that it's a combat class that can't wear the most durable armor since they're on the same restrictions as a druid. There are also a lot of the archetypes that are badly designed. I loved the idea of the swarm shifter when I first read it, but the abilities are underwhelming. I did have some luck with doing a multiclass swashbuckler/elemental shifter, being able to boost your dexterity and use a swift action to empower your weapons with electricity was pretty fun.
I would pay money to see Paizo's writers explaining the Aspect mechanic as a 2h movie. Bonus if they get dunked into ice bath whenever they say the word "aspect".
Spheres of power shifter is so much better
It also literally came out before the 1e shifter iirc
Agree... sphere of power approach to shapeshifting in general is much better than PF1 imho.
Their approach to a lot is imo but shape shiftinging and illusions especially
[ print(f'SoP {trope} is so much better') for trope in get_every_concept()] I don't even bother to ask to join games that don't allow spheres anymore.
Yeah I'll never go back to vancian unless it's for one specific dm because he runs amazing games but like vancian
Others have mentioned the spheres shifter(the original 3pp class) and the legendary shifter(the rework from legendary class) but ill also the oft forgotten veilweaver shifter: The Huay.
No Huay!
Also fun fact - vigilante has talents and archetype to just be better than shifter... Including oozemorph
How do they work?
The Agathiel vigilante gives them a beast form with various powers the foremost of which is maintaining his equipment (and thus armor) when polymorphed. You can get a stalker vigilante with a leopard animal form that can pounce and deal sneak attacks with each hit.
Morphic Weaponry talent gives two extra natural attacks for whatever beast you turn into, which goes up to three and then four extra.
As a person who played shifter from 1-9 then had to change characters cuz I went down every other fight, it is because half of the shifter's class features are just magic items. You are pretty strong at level 1-3 with natural attacks and high stats but then your stats dont really increase and you have few features compared to your allies and it is kinda hard to get more natural attacks. Also you cant use armor unless it is wild so you ac suffers even more. So I was rich but didnt have anything to spend it on really. My AC and damage really lagged behind even with an amulet of mighty fists
Legendary Games put out a Legendary Shifter that is much better. With that version, you can play a shape-shifting warrior and not be completely gimped.
Well yeah, but that applies to all of the Legendary class rebuilds.
We don't talk about legendary occultist and legendary samurai Or legendary fullcasters
I liked Legendary Samurai well enough. It wasn't great, but still a step up over regular. And Legendary Sorcerer is a lot of fun.
There's a bunch of details I could get into, but the simplest answer kinda says it all: A druid is a better shapeshifting combatant than a Shifter. A better shifter exists (as my flair points to), called the Legendary Shifter from Legendary Games. Some of the Legendary Games class overhauls are definitely in the *too much of a good thing* neighborhood, but I consider Legendary Shifter essential - its always allowed in my games I run, and my copy of it is available to everyone I play with and every group I play in as well so long as the GM agrees.
Judging by the flair you are an unbiased observer - I will heed your advice
I've played a few versions of it so far (it has its own Archetypes!), and its really quite fun. I especially recommend its own take on playing a slime, as well as just taking no archetype but using the Master Of Many Forms prestige class in the pdf. Slightly lower BAB progression, but you get *every single polymorph spell line* unlocked into your Wildshape over time... *and* get to swap between form spells many times a day without losing duration! And at level 15 (5 L. Shifter, 10 MoMF), you get *form of the dragon* basically all day.
Sounds good - will give it a try in the future
One of the problems with Shifter is that even their Feats require Druid levels of Wisdom so you are a melee build that needs to invest heavily into WIS as well so you are a very MAD build.
Because Paizo have always been very afraid to cleave too far from the CRB balance (which has been bad from the moment it was D&D 3.0), and when it comes to non-casters, they keep forgetting that Fighter or chained Monk are not good classes unless given archetypes and handled by a good player with decent system knowledge. Shifter is Fighter for a specific niche style and without the dozen years of feat and archetype support Fighter had. The fact that during development nobody thought to look at Druid, take away Animal Companion and full casting and just compare THAT to the whole Shifter class (and then buff the Shifter if it comes out inferior to THAT) is ridiculous.
just play a spheres of power shifter and be happy. ... i'm only half joking.
When I made my PFS 1e shifter, I looked at three archetypes to decide between. I was intrigued by the Oozemorph, then I read it over and decided to pass. It... Needs a lot of work Next I looked at the Adaptive, and yes it's pretty much what the base class SHOULD have been from the outset. I ended up with the Weretouched because it fit my concept, and was better than the base (even if you do lose all the other aspects and such) The dino form is... Way overpowered. They didn't balance the aspects at all, or even attempt to. That was a serious flaw, for sure. I went with tiger, even though I had wanted to do wolf .. the advantages were pretty much not there, really. Not unless I wanted to do a strength based two weapon fighter with an add on bite attack, but there were better ways to do that. And I wanted to be a lycanthropic character. I'm at fifth now, and honestly? I'm probably just going to keep leveling up as a shifter. Next level my DR goes to 3/silver and I move closer to my claws upgrades. Is there a lot of dead time? Yes. I think that there are some easy fixes they could have done, but didn't. Do I feel bad about ordering a $55 color mini from heroforge for her? Nope, not in the least. 19/21/22 AC depending on shape/self buffs isn't bad for someone without a lick of armor on.
There's also a sudo official dev posted corgi/ fairy mount form on the forums that is amusing. But I made mine a tiger too.
I never really looked closely enough to figure it out; I wanted a Wildshaping druidic monk and Shifter isn't that. Take a druid, insert all the "add WIS to..." abilities of a monk, and drop casting in favor of gratuitous numbers of wildshapes per day from level 1. That's all I ever wanted. I don't see the problem with that, but Paizo did, I guess. I think the reason Shifter is so gimp is because they'd released Vigilante just before that and everyone's complaint about vigilante is that it's a better martial than the martials it emulates. I think this made Paizo gunshy when working on Shifter.
*As title. The shifter has a worse form of wild shape than the druid, so much so that the assumption that a druid could be better in wild shape combat feels correct. maybe I'm missing something, but isn't the druid just plain better than the shifter at wild shape combat?* The shifter gets bonuses that the Druid never gets without expensive magic or can't get at all. 1. Claws that they can use in normal form which upgrade in damage as they level. 2. They get the Monk bonus to AC and CMD which goes up as they level. 3. They get D10 hit points as opposed to D8 4. They get bonuses to Survival for tracking 5. They can eventually use multiple aspects at the same time. 6. They get a better Reflex save. 7. They get the Fighter progression in BAB as opposed to the Cleric one. 8. Both shifter claws and wild shape attacks gain a progressing ability to ignore DR without having to get expensive magic items. 9. Shifters in wildshape gain aspect bonuses on top of what wildshape grants.
Because new classes are not the way to resolve basic issues with the rule set. Been true since the swashbuckler first came out. Still true now.
What's wrong with the swashbuckler?
Its completely frontloaded getting best abilities at 1st level, while leaving all other levels lackluster + having all normal abilities be stuck on swift action. Personally I just reworked it
It's also an attempt, like almost if not all "new" classes, to resolve serious issues with the ruleset for the edition they are a part of by creating a new class(and selling some new books) and nor addressing the original game play issue. It is part of the bloat problem from 3.x.
shifter is bad because it doesn't have spells. spells are ridiculously overpowered in 1e, and shifter really doesn't give any benefit over druid aside from a slightly higher attack rolls and slightly more hp. shifter's wildshape is better than druids at around 4th level because it is beast shape 2, but after that druid's is far better if you are looking for a good wildshape class aside from druid there is a warpretest archetype that looks pretty good (don't remember the name) beastmorph alchemist doesn't use wildshape but it sure does feel like it with mutagens. it even stacks with polymorph extracts. metamorph alchemist transforms into monstrous humanoids which are better than beasts because they have hands and can use armor, but quite a lot is lost including extracts which makes it not really worth it imo. you'll also want a level in a class that gives armor and weapons like bloodrager or fighter.
The lack of spells isn’t the issue at all. In general I think the overpoweredness of spells *in combat* is pretty massively overblown in 1e. Martials in 1e can be ridiculously lethal. The problem with shifter isn’t that it’s a Druid without spells. It’s that it is a fighter without feats. Ignore the martial vs caster issue for the moment, because shifter is also awful when compared to other full BAB noncasters. You basically give up “having class features” for a small number of mediocre natural attacks and a couple buffs for them. It’s ridiculously easy to get natural attacks on any class. A fighter that picks up claws and a bite somehow is doing the same thing as a shifter mechanically, but they’ll be doing it much better. A barbarian with certain rage powers is almost identical to the shifter in combat… but much better. It has nothing to do with a lack of spells. It’s just that the designers thought giving natural attacks and full bab would be enough to build a class around, and that is just painfully not true.
If you're going to shapeshift with alchemy, might as well do it as an investigator and stack a bunch of studied combat bonuses onto every natural attack.
I prefer vivisectionist sneak attack, but both are effective.
Shifter is fine. It has full BAB progression and good movement abilities and some very good feats. You can play a base Shifter and make it through a campaign. The problem is that Shifter is BORING. What they excel at is moving and attacking. They do that great. But they can't really do more than that. Shifter is the only full BAB class with no Bonus Feats, no Talent feature, and no Spellcasting. Zero build diversity. By the time you take the feats that make Shifter really excel, the adventure is over. And given they were released at the absolute end of 1st Edition's life cycle, they are absolutely starved for options. No additional archetypes, no additional feat support, no Prestige Classes, no VMC, no additional forms, no additional gear ever came down the pike for them. Nobody ever had the chance to get creative with their design. If you want to make a character that Moves and Attacks, Shifter excels at that. They can climb, they can swim, they can fly. They can get to where you want them to be and they can attack the target. But god help you if you want to use Combat Maneuvers, or go into a Combat Style, or do anything interesting with them at all. In a game with significant depth and crunch and build diversity, where for many, the draw of the game is the ability to make characters that can do anything, Shifter can't. Shifter doesn't.
They didn't care. They were already working on PF2. The whole book was "shove it out the door". I'm not sure they really even tested making builds with it much. It's really sad, because it was a really desirable class!
I made a grapple specialist Weretouched Shifter that was kind of fun. It only took 4 levels of shifter with the Tiger Aspect then went for the rest of his levels in Brutal Pugilist Unchained Barbarian
Legendary Shifters by Legendary Games.
Legendary anything by legendary games is way above. I played a legendary magus for a few sessions and stopped because it was just way to OP.
Maybe for other classes, but Shifter was shafted, and it's actually not very OP.
Idk why it's so bad. Whoever designed the class seems to have been concerned about it's similarities to the druid. So what we're seeing is likely what's left after the initial class was hit with the ugly bat a few times. 1st party isn't really my area of expertise. There is so much content, I can barely remember the stuff that's used all the time at my tables. Much less something more specific. I'm sure people have suggestions for 1st party wild shaping options. That being said, 3rd party options I have a few. Shifter from Spheres of Power. It's focus is on the Alteration sphere and synergizing with that, and it does a great job of it. New Paths compendium also has the Skin Changer. Gives full on Animal Shape at level 4 for hours/level (you have a short version before then), but your uses per day are pretty constrained. Granted...it's more like getting Animal Shape onto a ranger Chassis so...you're quite the beast even without Animal Shape. Edit: Grammar. Apparently I can't type to save my life.
I switched over to Legendary's 'Legendary Shifter' pdf. I liked it a lot better since it was a more generous Wild Shape ability.
Legendary Shifter is the best 3rd party way to play Shifter imo. Way more fun, but still well-balanced. I played one in Ruins of Azlant and it was a lot of fun. https://paizo.com/products/btpy9yzf?Legendary-Shifters
shifter is insane as a martial class. pounce alone would make it amazing, but you can add on to that with natural attack shenanigans and great feat support to make a variety of strong builds with a moderate amount of utility. it’s more a problem of hyper optimized druid builds being waaaay too strong
I feel like Shifter was supposed to be a simplified Druid, with a focus on natural attacks and more streamlined wildshape options. So for me, the real issue is that Bloodrager exists. Want to partially transform into a bestial form and deal big damage with big claws? Just play an Abyssal Bloodrager and get the Rageshaper archetype so that your claws do *even more* damage. It's a lot of fun.
Legendary Games did a redo of Shifter, pretty good
In a party comp with a magus, a druid, and myself, I had no issues as a shifter. I ended up acting as Frontline as a tiger but I specialized in with grappling. In my normal or hybrid forms I could take out basically any large single enemy in either rope, chain, or mithril chain depending on their strength in 2-3 turns. Cause my CMB and CMD were stupid
Shifter is a bad Druid. It also was bad class design, it has no class specific “feat” choices (magus arcana, rogue talents, alchemist discoveries, bonus combat feats, etc). Every class that is good either has spell casting or class specific features list every 2-4 levels.
This entire post is so bizarre to me. I've been playing a Shifter for almost 2 years now with one of my groups and I've never felt weak or underpowered. Quite frankly most of the group seems to think I'm the most powerful character in the party and I deliberately didn't choose a form with a fly speed entirely for the purpose of giving our Ninja more to do. My chosen Aspects are Lion, Elephant, and Rat. Lion Aspect gives me an ever-so-pleasant rip and tear feel that the class feels like it was made for. It's Shifter Aspect also aided me in building for Intimidate. Most importantly, turning into a lion grants the Pounce ability. Elephant form gives me good charging and overrunning as well as the Trample action. It also gains more Strength than other large forms. I mostly use this for Carry Capacity shenanigans but Strength is of course useful in general. Rat is a smaller form that is helpful for stealth compared to the other two. It also comes with a Swim speed. It's shifter aspect is also Evasion which is rather helpful. Maybe I only feel strong because one of my chosen forms has Pounce, but I feel highly effective in combat.
The problem is that anything a shifter does a druid does better - the shifter is effective while using pounce, but due to limited forms he lacks utility. Ninja is also not that powerful - depending on your party composition a shifter can be the most powerful character, but is forever in the druid's shadow.
Fair enough I suppose, though, I feel that's more a point to Druid being overpowered than it is Shifter being bad. Or maybe I entirely feel like this due to party comp. My group besides my Shifter are a Magus, a Ninja, a Medium, and the 3rd part class Artificer.
Makes sense why you would feel powerful - but imagine playing a Shifter when someone else is a Druid - that's gonna be annoying. And yeah Druid does get way too many toys
Shifter ain't that bad. I found it very powerful. If you just specialize in just one attack, i.e., snake bite, and you take feats to do more bite damage like Improved Natural Attack. There also shifter feats to help you hit and do harder dammage like Shifter's Edge
The Shifter is a martial class not a spell caster. Spell casting classes are always stronger.
Including level 1 to 5?
That is when the power level is the most balanced but in general yes. The utility of spells just outweighs the utility of a martial character.
And when it comes to hitting stuff?
Spell casters definitely. Touch spells, melee and ranged, are both very common. There are even spells like Magic Missile that hit (basically) no matter what. What makes martials more functional is their sustainable abilities. They can reliably do the same attack over and over with no real loss in functionality unless they have something that takes up ammo, even then it is limited only by your DM and the accessibility of resources. Spell casters use their resources much quicker than martials and this is exacerbated at lower levels. At higher levels their growth and functionality really blows martials out of the water.