00:00:00 [Music] 1,000 subscribers in just one single month of me making videos I cannot believe it y’all have been awesome and it feels lovely to have such an Engaged and positive Community already y’all have been asking really good questions providing really valuable feedback and I can’t wait to continue doing this I started the channel expecting to just share my insights into the game for some small group of like-minded people y’all are encouraging me to keep going to keep trying to reach more and more people

00:00:29 thank you so much for continued support and I’ll do my best to continue to earn it as much as I would love it if I could be every single Pathfinder player One-Stop shop for optimization advice I can’t be I only have so much time and I can only release so many videos what’s more is there are so many parts of the game I’m really not that familiar with and I don’t want to give advice on those don’t ask me to optimize your Alchemist I really don’t know how to get started on that thankfully there’s so much other

00:00:57 optimization advice out there there are incredible content creators like swing Ripper and incredible guides written by people such as gordal who provide really good Insight in how to play the game how to be tactical about it how to build your characters unfortunately with how much advice there is out there there’s also quite a lot of misleading advice or even advice that perhaps works at one table but would be considered unfriendly at other tables now when I released the very first video that I did on this

00:01:28 channel I stated that my goal is to provide everyone with the tools to evaluate the game and make their own effective optimization decisions rather than me just providing you with what I consider optimized and don’t worry that’s still happening trust me well in the age of the internet the single most important skill for optimizing a tabletop role playing game experience is to learn how to spot bad optimization advice so here we go this is our 1,000 Subs special learning how to spot bad optimization advice before we get

00:01:59 started a claimer if any of the red flags that I talk about in this video make you think of a specific user on some social media or make you think of a specific content creator or somebody who’s written a specific guide do not try to call them out in the comment section of this video this is not intended to be a call out for anyone anyone is free to provide whatever advice they think is most pertinent to the audience they’re aiming their videos or guides towards if they disagree with us and want to discuss it they can do so

00:02:29 in the comments section themselves but do not try to quote others or call out others if any such comment is found I will simply remove from the channel because I don’t think it’s productive and my goal is to just equip you with the tools to make sure the advice you see online applies to your table it’s not meant to call anyone out and I do not want that the first and in my opinion the biggest red flag that optimization advice might not be telling you the whole picture is when it ignores your your party there’s no such thing as

00:03:03 a character that exists in a vacuum in Pathfinder the game is literally built to reward you for coordinating with your party if you follow optimization advice that gives you four optimized characters who don’t know how to coordinate with one another that party will perform worse than one party that was built entirely on Vibes but they know how to work together that is simply the fact of the matter in Pathfinder the game is designed to reort teamwork and not reward build optimization you can always

00:03:33 build your characters to be good at certain tasks but you have to always account for your party while you’re doing that there’s no such thing as doing so in a vacuum the other problem with this advice is it often ends up encouraging selfish builds the game assumes teamwork that teamwork has to come from somewhere and if it’s not coming from you that’s more of a burden on everyone else to make sure your build functions this can strain other party members action economy it can strain their resources and more importantly

00:04:03 than anything else it can just be bad table etiquette it will strain your friendship with them because you might be forcing other people into a role they did not sign up for if you want to build a damage dealing character one of the first most popular piece of advice is build a double Slice fighter who has a pick in one hand a light pick in the other tries to crit as much as possible and once you reach higher levels instead of just double slicing every turn you now use other ways to get even more

00:04:32 attacks in agile Grace two weapon flurry desperate finisher use every action every reaction and every build decision point to maximize your damage that’s how you build a good damage dealer right except not really the game will punish your lack of teamwork at some point you’re holding two weapons neither of them has the Parry trait or any other controlling or defensive tradeit and you don’t have a shield you’re using all your actions and your reaction offensively so it’s not like you have anything left to move away from the

00:05:04 enemy or discourage your enemy from attacking friends this means your party is going to take a ton of damage it’ll be you if you happen the squishiest character in the front line or where still it may be another character in the back because you’re exerting no Battlefield control once you have decided to commit your reactions to on your turn damage as well now your party needs a burst healer like a healing font cleric for example who makes sure that the amount ount of damage your party is taking does not just end up tpking you

00:05:34 when you have one sequence of bad roles speaking of bad roles even a fighter is not going to hit every single attack despite their heightened accuracy if you check the reliability of a double Slice fighter against a boss somewhere between 15 to 30% of the time you will still end up not doing anything on a given turn and to offset that you now need Buffs and debuffs to make sure you hit as as much as possible because you’re not helping anyone else’s reliability they all have to help yours so now you need a

00:06:05 flanking buddy who might need a mro Bard making sure that you get to hit as much as possible this build is placing assumptions on all four party members even if it’s just presenting assumptions on you if you built just a more muted version of the same build like a dual wielding fighter who doesn’t expect to double slid every single turn just on the turns when it’s reasonable to you will end up with a much more effective build that works with the party you’re in of course that doesn’t mean teamwork

00:06:35 is bad if you’re playing in a party where you already have a Healer and you already have a Bard or some other way of Shoring up your reliability go for it build your Nova damage double-sized fighter it’ll be really fun just don’t build it in the vacuum and expect it to work without checking with other players seeing what they’re building seeing what you have to compromise to make sure you’re not defining their build for them this goes beyond just damage dealing double slice Fighters as well there’s

00:07:03 other examples of this in discussions about spellcasters you will often see people say that The Bard or the healing fond cleric are just the best spellcasters in a vacuum and that’s not really true the best spellcaster depends on the rest of your party if your party looks something like flurry of Maneuvers monk who likes using Mobility to keep themselves safe and precision crossbow using Ranger who uses mobility and one single big spike of damage every single turn and then you have a resentment

00:07:34 witch who focuses on debuffs and other such stuff if you’re trying to slot in a fourth party member you don’t need a Bard or a cleric for this party this party doesn’t need that much more reliability in terms of its attacks because it is so defensively oriented it’ll just buy itself time to get that reliability Out and because it’s so defensively oriented it won’t need emergency burst healing now you should look at perhaps a truid or an elemental sorcerer someone who can bring blasting crowd control area denial minor amounts

00:08:08 of defensive buffing to shore up your allies already good defensive actions and in an absolute emergency still have healing available this Caster will fit your party so much better than one of the commonly suggested casters like a Bard or a cleric and that’s ultimately this advises biggest red flag it assumes that teamwork is oneway and that oneway teamwork is even optimal it’s assuming that the fighter should just go strike strike strike strike strike and The Bard should always support the fighter and

00:08:39 the cleric should always heal whoever needs the healing but that’s not how parties and Pathfinder are supposed to be built everyone is supposed to be participating in teamwork and if you have a character who’s like hey I want to play a Healer great but if you don’t you should not be optimizing your character as if you do have such a character in your party the next big red flag is using a one siiz fits-all metric using a metric and presenting it as fitting a broader criteria of situations then it really fits and using that to

00:09:10 substantiate your claims which may not hold true in all situations and yeah you got me DPR is usually the biggest metric that tends to be presented in such a way but it’s not just DPR I’ll get into that later Mark cyer and Michael S both