Crane Wing errata poll


Pathfinder First Edition General Discussion

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2 people marked this as a favorite.

Since the other thread on this board is still locked, and might remain that way for a while, I figured I might as was do something marginally constructive regarding the most drastic change in yesterday's UC errata. With that in mind, post your vote on the latest change to Crane Wing.

-Change wasn't needed, it was balanced and acceptable
-Change was needed, but the feat is now too weak and needs revision
-Change was needed, it's now balanced and acceptable

For reference, here's the description of the feat, both pre- and post- change. Note that the d20pfsrd has acted with astonishing speed on this, already updating the description of the feat. As such, mywording might not be exactly as it is in your copies of UC:

Crane Wing 1.0:
Prerequisites: Crane Style, Dodge, Improved Unarmed Strike, base attack bonus +5 or monk level 5th.

Benefit: Once per round, when fighting defensively or using total defense, you can deflect one melee attack that would otherwise hit you. Such an attack does no damage and has no other effect on you. You do not expend an action when using this feat, but you must have at least one hand free, be aware of the attack, and not flat-footed.

Crane Wing 2.0:
Prerequisites: Crane Style, Dodge, Improved Unarmed Strike, base attack bonus +5 or monk level 5th.

Benefit: Once per round, when fighting defensively with at least one hand free, you can designate one melee attack being made against you before the roll is made. You receive a +4 dodge bonus to AC against that attack. If you using the total defense action instead, you can deflect one melee attack that would normally hit you. An attack so deflected deals no damage and has no other effect (instead treat it as a miss). You do not expend an action when using this feat, but you must be aware of the attack and not flat-footed.

Also, here's Crane Riposte:

Crane Riposte:
Prerequisites: Crane Style, Crane Wing, Dodge, Improved Unarmed Strike, base attack bonus +8 or monk level 7th.

Benefit: You take only a –1 penalty on attack rolls for fighting defensively. Whenever you use Crane Wing to deflect an opponent’s attack, you can make an attack of opportunity against that opponent after the attack is deflected.

Let's keep comments, if any, constructive. Vote away so Paizo can know how the community feels about this overall.


28 people marked this as a favorite.

Change wasn't needed, it was balanced and acceptable. At low levels it appeared "too powerful" in PFS because PFS features many humanoid creatures that make single or iterative attacks. Really showed how much PFS has sway in rules debate however. I'm a more than a little frustrated that it bled into actual rules change instead of them just banning it.


21 people marked this as a favorite.

-Change wasn't needed, it was balanced and acceptable.

The crane style feat chain was a balanced feat chain that gave life to fighting defensively as a playstyle and made actual duelist builds possible. It also incentivized the monk, one of the weakest classes in the game, thanks to their early access to the feat, especially with master of many styles. For other classes, it was a 5 feat investment, which is enormous, and one of few feat chains to actually be worth the investment.

Even without the fact that it makes Crane Riposte the worst feat in the game, Crane Wing 2.0 is gutted and garbage. We're talking about deflect arrows for melee attacks, with way more prerequisites, and that's overpowered? Crane Wing encouraged defensive playstyles, duelist builds and one-handed builds, all of which are underpowered compared to the standard of 2-handed power attacking. It's a sad day for Pathfinder.


2 people marked this as a favorite.

-Change was needed, but is now too weak and needs revision

Two things:
1. The errata is too harsh on a feat tree that already requires a hefty investment for monks and more so for non-monks. My suggestion would be to add a line to the original crane wing that says something to the effect of "deflecting an attack this way counts as an attack of opportunity" limiting the amount of AoO's the target might have, or "the next attack made by the character who deflects an attack is made at a -2 penalty."

2. Crane Riposte no longer functions UNLESS the specific overrides the general, meaning that Crane Riposte allows the character to make an attack of opportunity even while using the Total Defense action. This is a band-aid on a particularly poor errata, however, and would be best avoided in favor of a better errata for Crane Wing.

Grand Lodge

Change was definitely needed. Crane Wing was beyond powerful, and I say this from both home campaign and PFS experience. The errata, however crippled crane style and negated crane riposte. They should style the new crane wing off either the swashbuckler parry/riposte or snake style.

Sovereign Court

Not to detract from your thread in any way, but if we're actually polling and not just limiting ourselves to discussing, lets implement a way to do so :).

Dammit Bardic Dave, that ninja was truly impressive. I literally posted all four of those posts within seconds of one another :P.


7 people marked this as a favorite.

—Change wasn't needed—

I should point out that you can't take Attacks of Opportunity while taking total defense, so as written the second part of Crane Riposte doesn't even work anymore.

I hate to say it, but Paizo has a pretty long record of missing stuff like this and accidentally writing rules that don't work / are completely useless. They really need to start prioritizing this sort of thing in the editing process. WOTC, for all its faults, never made these kinds of mistakes so consistently as Paizo does.

It's for this reason that I stopped DMing Pathfinder. I just got too tired of having to fix everything all the time.

Sovereign Court

189 people marked this as a favorite.

Favourite Your Vote-

1. Change wasn't needed, it was balanced and acceptable.

Sovereign Court

91 people marked this as a favorite.

Favourite Your Vote-

2. Change was needed, but the feat is now too weak and needs revision.

Sovereign Court

43 people marked this as a favorite.

Favourite Your Vote-

3. Change was needed, it's now balanced and acceptable.


Alexander Kilcoyne wrote:

Not to detract from your thread in any way, but if we're actually polling and not just limiting ourselves to discussing, lets implement a way to do so :).

Dammit Bardic Dave, that ninja was truly impressive. I literally posted all four of those posts within seconds of one another :P.

I was simply going to post periodically in this thread with the updated totals. Reason being, you can't convey WHY you feel a certain way based on simply favoriting a post. Why is at the core of this debate, why change was needed, why it's not necessary, why it should be made one way over the other, etc.

For those that would rather be quick about it, though, I suppose this can also work.

Sovereign Court

I didn't feel the two were mutually exclusive. Lets mixed methods this :P.


7 people marked this as a favorite.

I can't speak to the masses out there, but as far as professional game designers for Pathfinder go, I've seen only very few who find the old version to be anything even approaching balanced. And I've talked about the feat with a lot of professional game designers.


1 person marked this as FAQ candidate.

Change was needed, it's now balanced and acceptable.

Feat is currently more in line (power-wise) with all the other styles.

All I would ask for is a faq clarifying how crane riposte works now (even though the intent seems pretty clear).


Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

-Change was needed, but the feat is now too weak and needs revision

In some combinations it was a very powerfull featline, but it still worked. There seems to be a new trend to solutions that slow down combat further or make things more difficult, which i don´t like.

In my view, some minor adjustments would have done the trick too, without nerfing it into oblivion.


This will not go anywhere. The nerf to polearm have been not reversed even if the poll said people like more the old version (by a lot)


1 person marked this as a favorite.

How was a weaker version if Deflect Arrows unbalanced?


Cheapy wrote:
I can't speak to the masses out there, but as far as professional game designers for Pathfinder go, I've seen only very few who find the old version to be anything even approaching balanced. And I've talked about the feat with a lot of professional game designers.

it is the new version balanced?


I liked the older version. And i think the whole style feat thing is gonna suffer for it. Crane style was and others still give great options for dedicatet martials. I think crane style Got the nerf because it was the style that allowed weapons. I would have prefered that other styles was opend up to be viable with a weapon. I will allow most of the styles to work with weapons in a future game and see how that works out.
But for the nerf of Crane Wing. It is a bad call, i think.


2 people marked this as a favorite.

Change wasn't needed, it was balanced and acceptable


4 people marked this as a favorite.
Ral' Yareth wrote:


Feat is currently more in line (power-wise) with all the other styles.

Talk about damning with faint praise.


Azten wrote:
How was a weaker version if Deflect Arrows unbalanced?

I know right?


2 people marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber; Starfinder Charter Superscriber

1. Change was not needed, it was balanced and acceptable


It was slightly overpowered, but the change killed and buried it 10 feets under the ground.

Digital Products Assistant

Oops. Unlocked, that was my bad.


Aha, open again! Thank you Chris, apologies for any deviation from the topic in the other thread. I may not agree with this errata decision, but you guys have certainly been great about responding and moderating in the face of this discussion.


2 people marked this as a favorite.

Change wasn't needed. It was balance and acceptable.

The methods for getting around it were so plentiful I actually wouldn't normally take it; too situational and typically not an issue that would come up often enough in my games to be an issue. The change only made it even more situational.


2 people marked this as a favorite.

-Change wasn't needed, it was balanced and acceptable.

The problem was the ease of acquisition since a single dip in Master of Many Styles monk would let you pick the feat up as early as level 1. It was a feat well balanced for the level when it first became traditionally available (level 5 at the earliest). The published change throws the baby out with the bathwater - a better fix would be to refine the requirements or reverse Crane Wing and Crane Deflection - that way it requires a bigger investment, comes online later, but still provides a unique and attractive quality to fighting with a free hand.

As it stands now you can simply take Crane Style for the Fighting Defensively benefits, grab a shield which will overall impact your Armor Class more than the new Crane Wing ever will, and leave the one-handers (yet again) in the dust.

I really hope this change gets rolled back.

Scarab Sages

D) People play monks?

Seriously though. I don't think it needed changed. The 1/r deflection is a more usable ability than calling a 1/r +4 AC.


2 people marked this as a favorite.

-Change wasn't needed, it was balanced and acceptable


I personally feel the change wasn't necessary. I tend to follow the advice about avoiding single creature encounters though, especially single creature encounters where the creature only has one means of attack.

I mean this is a team game unless every character had the original feat and was fighting defensively or using total defence couldn't the single monster with one melee attack just have targeted a different character instead.

Encouraging total defence is a bad move in my mind because it is essentially selfish behaviour. And the need to declare which attack you want to get the +4 dodge bonus against slows down the game.

Scarab Sages

4 people marked this as a favorite.

-Change wasn't needed, it was balanced and acceptable. The only problem with the feat was Master of Many Styles made it possible to get at level 2nd level, or first level as a human. The feat was designed to be used at mid to high levels, where is was strong, but there were many counters to it. By taking it at first or second level it becomes imbalanced at that level of play.

Master of Many Styles is the culprit of many low level power imbalances. Since PFS operates at lower levels, this impacts all play levels. Instead of nerfing the feat, change master of many styles to require bonus style feats to meet the monk level requirement.


well so far it's a 2-1 margin that thinks it was fine.

and a 10-1 margin that thinks it wasn't needed or was way to severe.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

Change was needed, but is now too weak and needs revision. While, for most cases, it wasn't broken, there were enough cases where it eas that I'd see the reason to nerf it. However, I feel like either having to declare it before the attack roll, or having it only be +4 AC (and have it expressly state that it still works with Riposte) would have worked, but both is too much, especially when it doesn't even indicate that it works with Crane Riposte anymore (with the exception of total defense, but that's hardly worth mentioning).

RPG Superstar 2012 Top 16

1 person marked this as a favorite.

Voting is always going to favor the naysayers on the internet, because negativity sells.

THe fact there's only a 2-1 bias, which means 80-90% of people are silent, means there's clear bias towards the feat chain needed to be fixed.

Now, agreement they fixed it properly is a detail thing. I do hope they revise Crane Riposte back into some form of usefulness.

==Aelryinth


3 people marked this as a favorite.
Aelryinth wrote:

Voting is always going to favor the naysayers on the internet, because negativity sells.

THe fact there's only a 2-1 bias, which means 80-90% of people are silent, means there's clear bias towards the feat chain needed to be fixed.

Now, agreement they fixed it properly is a detail thing. I do hope they revise Crane Riposte back into some form of usefulness.

==Aelryinth

you're right a 2-1 margin in favor of it staying the same definitely means that it needed to be fixed.....


2 people marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Adventure Path, Lost Omens Subscriber; Pathfinder Battles Case Subscriber

-Change wasn't needed, it was balanced and acceptable.

Agree that the speed with which Master of Many Styles could acquire this combo was very quick. However it just meant adjusting combat slightly to adjust for player tactics, this is assuming not all enemies are mindless meatbags. There are so many ways to make things a challenge with this feat the way it was, and should remain 1.0, that it shouldn't have ever been an issue.

EDIT: Having run 3 different players in different games who have used this feat tree to the great enjoyment of all WITHOUT any hiccups or absolute game shut downs as seem to happen in PFS. I'm currently playing a character who uses this feat tree as a Kensai Magus and am still reliably smacked around in melee. All I can say is YMMV apparently when it comes to this feat.


-Change was needed, but the feat is now too weak and needs revision

The enormous nerf bat that this feat took to the face was pretty dumb. I remain open to being convinced that it needed a little bit of change though.


3 people marked this as a favorite.

This change is yet another of those wtf were they thinking moments.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

-Change was needed, but the feat is now too weak and needs revision

I wouldn't have minded seeing some kind of limiting factor to the 100% success rate of the deflection, or an increase in the pre-requisites (and tweaking MoMS) to make sure it wouldn't pop up in early levels where it's more potentially problematic. However, the nerf went way too far.

Paizo Employee Design Manager

1 person marked this as a favorite.
Chengar Qordath wrote:

-Change was needed, but the feat is now too weak and needs revision

I wouldn't have minded seeing some kind of limiting factor to the 100% success rate of the deflection, or an increase in the pre-requisites (and tweaking MoMS) to make sure it wouldn't pop in early levels where it's more potentially problematic. However, the nerf went way too far.

I think 90% of the problem with the feat, was not the feat, but Master of Many Styles. I have huge issues with Master of Many Styles, primarily related to the fact that I never see it in its own build, but constantly see it as a two level dip in like, every other build imaginable.

That still leaves 10% of the problem credited to Crane Wing, which probably needed a little love and cleaning up, but didn't deserve to be dragged out back with Crane Riposte so they could both be shot in the head. Crane Riposte now doesn't work at all, and all Crane Wing now does is
1) Allow you to deflect one attack when you are doing absolutely nothing to contribute to the ongoing encounter and are unlikely to be hit anyways
and
2) Provides you with roughly the same benefit that having a shield which only works once a round would give you, at the cost of some pretty serious investment.


Pathfinder Maps Subscriber

The one and only MoMS I've played was pure, to level 12.

Liberty's Edge

1 person marked this as a favorite.
Scavion wrote:
Change wasn't needed, it was balanced and acceptable. At low levels it appeared "too powerful" in PFS because PFS features many humanoid creatures that make single or iterative attacks. Really showed how much PFS has sway in rules debate however. I'm a more than a little frustrated that it bled into actual rules change instead of them just banning it.

I think the change blows. The main problem was MoMS. To nerf the feat in absolute trash shows poor judgement on Paizo's part. I am very disappointed not only at this change but the implications that this throws over future products.


4 people marked this as a favorite.
Alceste008 wrote:
Scavion wrote:
Change wasn't needed, it was balanced and acceptable. At low levels it appeared "too powerful" in PFS because PFS features many humanoid creatures that make single or iterative attacks. Really showed how much PFS has sway in rules debate however. I'm a more than a little frustrated that it bled into actual rules change instead of them just banning it.
I think the change blows. The main problem was MoMS. To nerf the feat in absolute trash shows poor judgement on Paizo's part. I am very disappointed not only at this change but the implications that this throws over future products.

Martials can't have nice things except for rage powers and 4th level spellcasting.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

-Change wasn't needed, it was balanced and acceptable

I refuse to believe that Monks went from broken, unusable classes at the bottom of everyones list... to Overpowered with one feat that has so many prerequistes.

I've been a bit giddy to play a monk just because they are cool now. Now... not as much.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
phantom1592 wrote:
I've been a bit giddy to play a monk just because they are cool now. Now... not as much.

Well there is one bright spot. Even with this feat and other splat monks were still not cool. They may be comparable to fighters and rogues. But that's nothing to sing home about. You could gestalt rogue and fighter together and they would still be under-powered.


3 people marked this as a favorite.

I'm picking a fourth option. Change was needed and still needs to be nerfed.

Only because I love seeing people lose their shit over little things like petulant children. It entertains me :)


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Odraude wrote:

I'm picking a fourth option. Change was needed and still needs to be nerfed.

Only because I love seeing people lose their s&!* over little things like petulant children. It entertains me :)

Classy.

Spoiler:
I am also loving the rage :P


I'm torn between Option 1 and Option 2. While I think Crane Wing may be a tad too powerful, I'm hesitant to see what other revisions Paizo could come up with based off the current revision.

The feat went from 'slightly' too powerful to trash. Paizo has said they would rather tweak things to make them better, than make wide changes, but Crane Wing was a complete re-write compared to how it was before.


Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

So, after Jason Buhlmans comment i changed my mind.
The feat is perfectly fine after the errata.

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