So You Want To Play A Shifter - Pathfinder: WotR

foreign [Music] what's going on everybody mortum here this time bringing you a look at the mechanics and a class overview for the shifter in Pathfinder Wrath of the righteous the shifter was recently added by a DLC called the last sarcoreans and that DLC is thus required to use it but the shifter relies on transforming its hands into claws as well as taking on the aspect of various beasts to enhance its ability to perform in combat now as you might imagine just from that description this is a class that is tied closely to the Druid as effectively when the shifter is shape changing Etc that is just the druid's wild shape feature but with several additions that make it much much more viable with the downside to that being that you lose your ability to cast spells so with all of that in mind let's actually start talking about a few things you need to know if you want to play this class for starters you need to understand how natural attacks actually work this video in general assumes your familiar with the Pathfinder 1e rule set but even if you're not you should glean some useful information from this so no worries if you're just checking out the class for the first time as well but the most important thing again understanding how natural attacks actually work natural attacks are things like biting your enemy using claws a wing a tail Etc each animal generally has a set of natural attacks as opposed to using a weapon like a sword most of our heroes will use iterative attacks meaning that as they level up and gain base attack bonus at certain Milestones such as 6 and 11 to their base attack bonus they pick up extra attacks however those attacks are made at a penalty and depending on your class Etc you'll gain base attack bonus at different rates well for natural attacks this works a little bit differently they simply allow you to use every natural attack that you have once per turn so a horse will have typically a bite and two hoof attacks some animals only get a bite some get a bite as well as claw attacks Etc but they'll be able to make every natural attack that they have that turn this applies to you as a shifter as well so when you turn your hands into claws you'll be able to attack with each of those claws per turn right away provided that's all you do that turn so whereas someone using a weapon will have to wait a few levels to make two attacks if you as a level one animal have two claws you'll be able to use both of those claws immediately this makes natural attacks very strong in the early game if you have a lot of them and then they typically fall off later though the shifter in particular has ways to mitigate that natural attacks are further divided into primary and secondary primary attacks are simply made at your full base attack bonus you don't get extra by having higher base attack bonus but your primary natural attacks always use that maximum bonus secondary natural attacks take a penalty to that so you'll still be able to use them once per turn but you'll have a slightly reduced chance to hit when you use your base attack bonus to roll on whether or not you landed set attack now that's the Bare Bones basics of natural attacks and when it comes to building Animal Companions and shifters it is a key piece of information naturally though shifters have ways to add and change that that make them an interesting class to play which brings us to the main features of the shifter class this is the shifter Clause the shifter aspects and shifters Fury let's start with our claws a shifter in their natural form will be able to extend their claws basically turn their hands into claws as part of a swift action now in Wrath of the righteous here this is simply a toggle you turn this on or off but if you're doing this in combat it is a swift action these two claws become primary natural attacks dealing 1d4 to begin with 1d3 if you are small but as you gain levels these claws will increase in power notably though as you level up they will also start bypassing various damage reduction to the point where by the time you hit about 19th level your attacks land basically all the time and the Damage will bypass most forms of damage reduction save for a few very specific ones but in this particular Adventure path just the base would be pretty well good to go now another key piece of the shifter claws however though is that when the shifter uses their major forms that is to say they wild shape into their aspects the primary natural attacks of their animal form also gain the benefits granted by your shifter Clause plus you can either use the base damage of your own claws or the damage of the form's primary attacks whichever is higher this is not something you have to toggle the game just picks and that of course brings us to our shifter aspects starting at level one you will pick a shifter aspect and then as you level up you'll pick up two four more each aspect comes with a minor and a major form there are ultimately 10 to choose from which means the Base Class shifter gets to pick five of them and we'll talk more about those here in just a moment because first I want to talk about shifters Fury now as I mentioned earlier natural attacks are very strong early game but can fall off late game when the people using weapon attacks start getting in excess of eight potentially even like 10 plus attacks per turn so one of the ways shifters can deal with that is their ability called shifter's Fury starting at level 6 shifters gain the ability to make their attacks with one natural weapon as a standard full attack that is to say iterative attacks this also turns all of your other natural attacks into secondary attacks for the purposes of this ability while you are transformed this means that those secondary attacks lose their shifter clawed benefits however in humanoid form both of your regular claw attacks will still gain them even though the second one is considered a secondary attack now this makes for a sort of interesting mid game where sometimes shifters Fury will be better and sometimes your regular natural attacks will be better you kind of just have to play around with it to determine which is the best in what situation which is where some of the skill in playing this class comes from but those are sort of the key class features and now we're going to go a little deeper and talk about some specific stuffs in regards to the basic shifter for starters they have a high fortitude and a high reflex Save which means they are very physically capable but they have a low will save which means they are more likely to be hit by Mental effects their base attack bonus is high which means full they get the highest possible base attack bonus by leveling up and they get roughly an average amount of Health beyond that they are proficient in medium armor simple weapons and a shield that is important information for an ability that they gain at level 2 called Defensive instinct when a shifter is unarmored not using a shield and conscious they gain their wisdom bonus if they have one to their AC in addition you gain a plus one bonus to your AC starting at fourth level and that will increase every four levels thereafter to a maximum of plus 5 at 20. in addition to your wisdom bonus which means you'll get a bunch of AC just naturally however you can still wear armor and receive half of this bonus if you are wearing non-metal armor you will instead add half of your wisdom bonus meaning that in some situations you'll actually gain more AC from having armor on because of the minimum amount that is added once you start hitting level 4 plus the half bonus from your wisdom so you'll again have to see what your AC is unarmored versus armored to get the exact math out of it but basically shifters get a nice bonus to their natural defense based on their wisdom score important to note that this will not stack with the monk version of the same thing but even still unarmored is usually the best way to go in terms of AC stacking anyway but from there I want to talk a bit more about the specifics of the shifter aspects as I mentioned there are 10 choices the bear the boar the dinosaur the mammoth the horse the lizard spider tiger wolf and Wolverine each one of these has a minor and major form the major form turns you into this animal which is not available until you hit level four and you also have to actually have the aspect of course course so starting at level one you'll pick your first one and then at 5 10 15 and 20 you'll pick another at levels 9 14 and 20 you'll gain the ability to use several minor forms at the same time so you can only physically transform into one of them starting at level four but at level nine you can start activating multiple minor forms this is important because those minor forms give you huge bonuses potentially to your base ability scores things like strength dexterity Constitution Etc now once your character hits level 20 you will be able to activate all of your minor forms at the same time which as you might imagine is outrageous but this is mitigated slightly by a duration limit you see your shifter aspects can only be used a number of minutes per day equal to three plus your shifter level there are some Feats to extend this but basically you're limited and how many times you can activate this per day so when and how often to use these bonuses and managing them is a big part of the shifter gameplay which I would say is probably the most complicated piece of actually playing them now your major form is usable a number of times again equal to your shifter level plus your wisdom modifier however each use will last one hour unless you have the master shapeshifter Mythic ability which makes it permanent or basically until you cancel it now ideally you want to be in major form before combat as doing so is a standard action in combat though it doesn't provoke attacks of opportunity it just uses up your turn so while you'll be able to use your major form quite a bit you are somewhat Limited in your uses of your minor aspects now the aspects themselves are all honestly pretty good they're minor forms give handy bonuses with only a couple of them probably not really being noteworthy and a big change here from the tabletop is that the aspects give you inherent bonuses versus enhancement bonuses so in the tabletop version enhancement bonuses were granted which do not stack with your equipment which also Grant enhancement bonuses which meant it wasn't a very good class but here those bonuses are inherent and the stack which is what keeps the shifter relevant into the late game the key deciding factor here when you're picking these forms first and foremost I would say pick whichever one sounds the most fun but knowing what abilities they get when they transform into said form is also a big deal for instance my personal favorite of all these is the tiger this is because we get a bonus to our dexterity which is going to give us more AC in their minor form however when we change into a tiger we also gain a speed bonus of 10 feet in this case though most forms will get some amount we get the sensibility which lets you sense enemies even if they are say invisible or something in your vicinity and then we also get a bite attack two claw attacks and the Grabber ability on top of the pounce ability and then as you level up you even get some more bonuses but all three of the Tigers attacks are primary natural attacks which means they all benefit from shifter Claws and the pounce ability allows the tiger to both charge as well as make all of those attacks and that's a really big deal which we'll talk about here in just a moment but truth be told that's not terribly unique to the tiger either several other of the animal forms get things like that as well for instance the bear gets many of those same bonuses but also gets extra critical multiplier Etc as they level up plus all of these are primary natural attacks for a bear as well the difference being that their minor form grants different things in this case a constitution score increase the base shifter gets to pick up to five of these so you don't necessarily need to hone in on just one and with the way many of these are implemented as well as the way that some of the archetypes that we'll get to work a lot of these are great options no matter what you're doing especially if you're just playing the game on normal but from there I want to talk about a few more pieces of sort of miscellaneous information before we move on to the more interesting stuff like combat as well as the archetypes so first and foremost our ability scores the recommended ability scores for a shifter are strength deck dexterity Constitution and wisdom now truth be told that's a lot of ability scores to try to manage so there are some things you can do to sort of mitigate this for starters Charisma is not super useful for us and you can basically dump it which will give you a few more points to spend elsewhere and then generally speaking constitution of course is just helpful for your health but you don't need to go crazy on it and then strengthen dexterity are where things get interesting because as a martially focused character the more strength the better however via things like Feats Etc you can get by with a lower strength score and focusing more on dexterity as dexterity will give us more natural AC as well and since we're unlikely to be using a lot of armor with this class that can be a really great way to go which brings us to our Feats added with the class and the DLC were a handful of Feats that make life a little more interesting for the shifter but first I want to talk about weapon finesse while it doesn't explicitly say natural attacks you can use weapon finesse to turn your attack rolls into dexterity-based attack roll as opposed to strength however we'll still be using our strength bonus on our damage Rolls by focusing on dexterity and taking weapon finesse we can make it convenient to hit enemies that way but we might not necessarily deal a lot of damage and that is where the more interesting shifter specific Feats come in such as shifter's Edge because the follow-up Feats to weapon finesse require you to only be using a weapon in one hand we get the shifter's edge feet we get the shifter's edge feet as an alternative which allows us in that specific scenario to also add half of our shifter level to the damage so potentially up to a maximum of 10 which is roughly in line with the bonus you would likely get from this anyway and this feed in particular will allow you to focus in specifically on dexterity and make your life a bit easier but we also have a feat called shifters multi-attack which reduces the penalty on your secondary attacks with natural weapons which is going to make shifters Fury a very viable thing late game which makes this particular feat almost man mandatory I would say and then two more shifter specific Feats that I wouldn't really worry about so much are shifters rush and extended aspects shifters Rush lets you in combat if you've moved more than 10 feet or made a charge freely activate your major form or in the case of a druid their wild shape this sounds good but kind of isn't simply because in combat if you're trying to be efficient here you would already be in your major form before you charged or moved with the only real benefit of this particular feat being that if you happen to get caught unaware you'll be able to quickly change into your form without it eating up your entire turn but ideally you'd want to be transformed if that was your plan before you got to that stage which is why I say I wouldn't pay it much mind and then we have extended aspects this just increases your uses of the minor aspects which can be helpful beyond that though it is pretty much just standard Marshall stuff in terms of the talents you want weapon Focus weapon specialization focusing on the primary type of natural attack you're going to be using though with this DLC you can pick weapon Focus for a variety of very specific natural attacks all the way down to Hooves spikes Wings etc etc so beyond those very specific Feats we talked about the rest of their feet selection is again just pretty standard Melee character Feats and you'll pretty much be good to go so from here we'll wrap this up with a little bit of how this class functions in combat some of the best practices you should be using that kind of thing and then we will wrap it up with some of the archetypes that sort of change the play style a bit so in combat this is not a terribly difficult class to play most of the Nuance to playing this class comes down to knowing when to activate your various minor aspects as well as when to toggle things like shifters Fury versus your regular natural attacks things like that that's kind of where the skill ceiling for this class is but mechanically speaking in combat it's very simple you don't have a lot of buttons to push no spells to manage you simply turn on shifters claws versus shifter's Fury your aspects your major forms and then you just attack now in terms of shifters Claws and shifters Fury those are toggles and you'll want to make sure that they're on which you can always tell by the spinning white bar that circles the icon when you have it highlighted so that's how you'll know you have something toggled on and then at that point you just click on your aspects when you want to use them again typically speaking you want to do this before combat starts and then when you are using your new animal form you basically proceed in combat as you would normally so in this particular example you can see that I have the major form tiger activated but the tiger gives us an ability called pounce which means I can charge an enemy and also use all of my natural attacks in the same turn typically speaking in order to do something like that you need to make a full attack which requires you not to have made any movement that turn major forms that Grant pounce allow you to do both charge and make that full attack and in this particular example I was actually able to kill the enemy that I charge but because the second enemy was still in range I was able to continue using my natural attacks against that Target which is one of the reasons the ability pounce can be really really strong and why I personally like the Tiger but again there's no real wrong answer here most of them are pretty good especially when it comes to their major forms and much of the shifter class is going to be coming down to finding the one you like and if you're playing the bass class you'll get just a wild amount of these shapes so you don't have to be particularly choosy which means ultimately this is a very easy class to play and honestly I would say is a great class for people trying to learn more about the system in general because there's a lot of ways to play this class while simultaneously being very easy to manage on top of still dealing really good damage as we go to wrap this video up I want to talk about some of the archetypes for the shifter class and what they change and things that are important to understand about them starting with the child of the Manticore child of the Manticore removes your ability to choose all of the various shifter as effects rather you have a manticore form and this Manticore form enables you to instead of making melee natural attacks to make ranged natural attacks so this means your shifter claws gets replaced with gross spikes and your Manticore aspect will actually allow you to attack more times per turn with those spikes as well as you level up of course and also as a bit of a trade-off for losing all of your aspects rather than getting a minor aspect bonus to just one thing you get a bonus to strength and dexterity which means that if you would prefer to play a ranged shifter child of the Manticore is your option you just won't get quite as many forms but beyond that still functionally more or less the same if anything it might actually be a little easier for most people to play so very cool archetype there then we have the Dragon Blood shifter this one again loses all of its aspect choices for the draconic aspect selection which will of course let you turn into a dragon and functionally this works much the same as the rest of the class does except for one particular ability which is that depending on the type of aspect you choose here you'll gain energy resistance to the type of energy associated with your dragon type and whenever you prevent damage of that type with this ability you'll actually absorb it and heal for that hit point amount which is pretty cool Honestly though that's a little niche for my tastes and given the variety of other methods you can use to turn into a dragon in this particular game I don't personally feel like the trade-off of all of your shifter aspects for that is really worth it but to each their own then we have the FAE form shifter which again loses all of their aspect choices and picks up the Fey aspect now the minor aspect is pretty underwhelming you're going to gain concealment which is a flat percent Miss chance against you and then some damage reduction against a specific few types of damage along with some other bonuses the big deal here is really phase shape at level 4 their major form turns them into a type of Fae creature that also looks kind of demonic known as an ant cow this is going to give you a bunch of primary natural attacks five to be specific but much more importantly this form allows you to make sneak attacks the same way a rogue does and you're going to gain the same amount of sneak attack damage as a rogue does so you lose in versatility from your shapes and aspects you kind of pick up and just raw damage with the only real downside here being simply that you don't gain as many inherent bonuses to your ability scores but given that this effectively just makes you a more effective version of a rogue that's pretty easy to look past then we have the fiend flesh shifter a little disappointing here to be honest with you their main thing happens at level one which changes their shifter Clause to allow them to overcome the damage reduction of any evil Outsiders period which is a nice ability but there's so many ways to do that in game already that it kind of just doesn't matter that much and unfortunately we're giving up all of our aspects for this and even making a change to defensive instinct which changes to fiendish resilience which basically just gives us the flat bonus and some resistance to electricity and fire so we lose the wisdom to our AC bonus which kind of sucks but even then our fiendish aspect which replaces all of our other aspects is also a little underwhelming frankly we just gained a Gore attack as well as some damage reduction and then some useful benefits as you level up this isn't a bad one but honestly with the way it's implemented a little underwhelming in terms of the damage you're capable of dealing in comparison to all of the others but then we have the rage shaper The Raid shaper again like a lot of the others loses all of their aspect choices and their shifter claws gets replaced with terrible slam which will allow you to deal extra damage to constructs on top of your natural weapons being considered slam attacks and defensive instincts changes to invulnerable defenses which gives you a ton of damage reduction which I would honestly say is the biggest hit to this particular archetype as losing the extra see from your wisdom on top of all of your aspects leaves you with not a lot of great options for boosting up your ability scores in comparison to the others and with the lower AC you're going to get out of this on top of that you're going to be hit more often as well a lot of that we trade off for devastating form which effectively acts as a barbarian's rage while also allowing you to grow one size category larger but this will also give you a ground slam ability once per Forum transformation that is a big AOE slam that has the potential to knock down enemies if they fail their reflex safe so a pretty cool archetype for the most part and it gets some bonuses from the rage that will help mitigate its loss of the aspects which may or may not be your thing and then last but not least we have wild Effigy wild Effigy functions a lot like a regular bass class shifter however all of their aspects are made out of stone animals which changes a few of your other abilities for starters we pick up armor plating which gives us a bunch of damage reduction based on our shifter level and then at 4 fourth level we get heart of the earth which replaces defensive Instinct so again no wisdom bonus to AC but rather as we level up we gain an increasing level of the fortification armor property which has a percentage chance of just negating Critical Hits and precision damage or sneak attacks so while we'll be getting hit more critical hits and sneak attack damage that type of stuff can be drastically reduced on top of some immunities to things like petrification and bleeding and on top of that at level 6 you get stone claw strike which can eat up more minutes from your aspect usage to Grant your claws the ability to ignore a certain amount of damage reduction which is a solid enough option for people who don't want to deal with say trying to stack AC and would prefer to just mitigate the resulting damage which isn't my personal choice but you know it's not a bad way to go especially if you're just playing on normal but all of that is going to wrap up our look at the shifter class its mechanics how everything works Etc I hope you found this informative it taught you about the class some approaches you may or may not want to take but overall I would say shifter is a really nice addition to the rest of the game it is a class that has a lot of variety while at the same time maintaining a certain amount of Simplicity to its approach that allows it to be pretty newcomer friendly but that is going to do it for today's video so I certainly hope you enjoyed it if you did like comment subscribe all that YouTube jazz but regardless of any of that truly thank you so much for watching I really do appreciate it may you wander in wisdom and have an amazing day [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Mortismal Gaming

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Keywords: Mortym, Mortismal Gaming, pathfinder, pathfinder wotr, pathfinder wrath of the righteous, pathfinder wotr dlc, pathfinder dlc, pathfinder wotr new class, wotr new class, pathfinder wrath of the righteous new class, shifter class details, pathfinder shifter class, pathfinder wotr shifter class, pathfinder wotr shifter class overview, pathfinder shifter class details, pathfinder shifter class overview, pathfinder sarkorian dlc, pathfinder shifter class guide, shifter class guide

Id: CgwvqxCTXog

Length: 24min 47sec (1487 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 15 2023