The Secrets of Laurie Grove: Investigating the Pitch Black Witch's Methods

Pitch black witch Laurie Grove is a captivating figure, known for her dark powers and mysterious presence. She possesses an air of both fear and intrigue, as people are drawn to her enigmatic persona. Laurie's deep connection to the supernatural and her mastery of the dark arts make her a formidable force to be reckoned with. Many tales and legends surround her, describing her as a powerful sorceress who can bend reality to her will. Her pitch black attire matches the darkness that seems to emanate from her very being. Laurie's abilities are said to be unrivaled, with the ability to cast spells, communicate with spirits, and manipulate energy at her command.

Just to be clear, the notion that spellcasters are "woefully underpowered during the first third of levels" in PF2 is not universally shared.

In The Show Must Go On, this is really noticeable, because the adventure pushes you to deal with no less than nine combat encounters in a single night at 1st level. Definitely agree that there should be caster bonus to spell attack rolls because spell attacks are rarely that much more powerful than single strikes the ones that are also have save , but not sure about DC.

Laurie's abilities are said to be unrivaled, with the ability to cast spells, communicate with spirits, and manipulate energy at her command. She is often depicted as residing in a secluded grove, where she conducts her rituals and practices her craft under the cover of night. With her piercing gaze and commanding presence, Laurie is not without her fair share of adversaries.

Pathfinder 2E ideas for caster runes (homebrew)

Updated! So, I reckon there is room for improving casters in PF2 (at least at single-digit levels).

Here's an idea: wand runes and staff runes, partly to give casters a bit of a boost, but mostly to give casters too something really significant to look forward to buying or looting.

Note: In both cases, the rune effects apply both when the caster is casting a spell from the wand or staff itself, and when the caster is merely wielding the wand or staff while casting that spell normally (using a spell slot). Wielding a wand or staff adds a somatic component to the casting, if not present already.

Wand runes are duplicates of weapon runes, except they are etched onto magic wands, and give their effects to spells with a spell attack roll only. The GM is free to say a particular weapon rune don't exist as a wand rune.

Example: you could now find or buy a +1 striking corrosive wand of acid arrow. The potency rune would give you +1 on your spell attack rolls (whether you cast acid arrow or another spell with a spell attack roll). The striking rune would add one damage die (so one +1d8 acid for acid arrow or +1d4 negative for chill touch etc). Finally the corrosive rune would add +1d6 acid damage (and more on a critical) exactly as the corresponding weapon rune.

Staff runes are special (new) runes that are etched onto magic staves. They give their bonus only to castings of the specific spells of the staff (whether you use a staff charge or your own spell slot doesn't matter). Here are three such runes:

Staff Focus rune: gives its bonus to your spell DC.
I'm gonna use the armor resiliency rune as my template, seeing this is kind of its opposite.
Staff Focus (+1) Item 8 340 gp
Staff Focus (+2) Item 14 3440 gp
Staff Focus (+3) Item 20 49,440 gp

Staff Area Striking rune: Adds dice to spell damage if the staff's spell has a burst, cone, emanation, or line.
Positioning this half-way between single-target (wand) striking and the above focus rune (since damage is less unbalancing than higher DC).
Staff Area Striking (+1 dice) Item 6 275 gp
Staff Area Striking (+2 dice) Item 13 3,475 gp
Staff Area Striking (+3 dice) Item 19 44,475 gp

Staff Recapacitation rune:
Updated! Yep, this is what you've been fearing - a rune to void the Incapacitation trait from a single casting of a single spell with a spell DC. A recapacitation rune has one charge, recharged daily. The rune tells you the maximum DC the rune can "recapacitate" for you (meaning that if you're wielding a staff with the DC 28 recapacitation rune, even if your spell save DC is 30, the target only needs to save against DC 28).
Staff Recapacitation (DC 17) Item 3 65 gp
Staff Recapacitation (DC 24) Item 7 380 gp
Staff Recapacitation (DC 28) Item 11 1,550 gp
Staff Recapacitation (DC 34) Item 15 8,000 gp
Staff Recapacitation (DC 42) Item 19 45,000 gp

CapnZapp

Legend

TBH, I secretly wished the game's structure would allow me to create +3 runes at low level, and the +1 runes at high-level. (Because it's at low level you need the big boost as a wizard! Assuming a wizard still gets more powerful as he levels up (relative to the other party members) they really don't need or deserve the big bonuses once they've gotten there! But anyway. )

CapnZapp

Legend

OP has been updated! One idea would be to rename general wand runes simply "wand runes", and rename "specialist wand runes" into "staff runes", and have them 1) apply to staves, not wands (d'oh!) and 2) to all the spells of that staff.

CapnZapp

Legend

I've updated the OP to incorporate the above idea, and to generally polish up the presentation.

I've updated the Recapacitation DCs.

BigZebra

Adventurer

Philip Benz

A Dragontooth Grognard

I'm quite interested in making a small number of wands or staves available with +1/+2/+3 focus bonus "runes" on them. The game wouldn't suffer from it, and spellcasters could really use the small boost. My players are currently 12th level with +21 for spell attacks, so these runes are going to be significant without really being game changing.

I'm more skeptical about the other ideas.

CapnZapp

Legend

Casters are woefully underpowered during the first third of levels.

They start holding their own during the middle third, and they're arguably more impactful than martials from level 15 onward.

My only good solution is: don't play a Wizard during the low levels at all.

Generate a Ranger or Barbarian or something. Then switch for a Wizard no earlier than level 7.

BigZebra

Adventurer

Casters are woefully underpowered during the first third of levels.

They start holding their own during the middle third, and they're arguably more impactful than martials from level 15 onward.

My only good solution is: don't play a Wizard during the low levels at all.

Generate a Ranger or Barbarian or something. Then switch for a Wizard no earlier than level 7.

• Runes on Wands and Staffs
• Make spells a one action thing with Flourish
• Improve all Cantrip dmg dice one size, i.e. d4 -> d6 etc.

Philip Benz

A Dragontooth Grognard

Just to be clear, the notion that spellcasters are "woefully underpowered during the first third of levels" in PF2 is not universally shared.

If your only yardstick is DPR, sure. But damage output per round isn't the be-all and the end-all of the FRPG experience. And even there, low-level spellcasters aren't horribly outclassed, since they can do lots of things with their unlimited cantrips.

This question is entirely a matter of personal opinion. Cap'n is far from the only one who is frustrated with the extent to which casters were nerfed in PF2, sure. There are plenty of people on the forums and on discord who complain about the lack of spellslots and what they see as the crummy math around spells, both targetted and save spells. But there are also plenty of people who understand why those things are the way they are, and enjoy it anyway.

Low-level wizards are fine, and a lot of fun to play. But you have to adapt your expectations.

BigZebra

Adventurer

Yup I know, that the overall versatility of spell casters are about more than just DPR. But man on Reddit and Paizo-forums there are so so so many posts about not being happy with mainly wizards, alchemist and witches. And yes I know that players don't write a post about how their wizard is great and all is fine. But still, it seems statistically significant.
I just wanna be prepared if some of my players enters this territory.

I am set to start a PF2 campaign soon (when our current 4e wraps up), and I'd prefer if their first impression was great, because there's many thing in PF2 that speaks to me.

Staffan

Legend

Just to be clear, the notion that spellcasters are "woefully underpowered during the first third of levels" in PF2 is not universally shared.

If your only yardstick is DPR, sure. But damage output per round isn't the be-all and the end-all of the FRPG experience. And even there, low-level spellcasters aren't horribly outclassed, since they can do lots of things with their unlimited cantrips.

This question is entirely a matter of personal opinion. Cap'n is far from the only one who is frustrated with the extent to which casters were nerfed in PF2, sure. There are plenty of people on the forums and on discord who complain about the lack of spellslots and what they see as the crummy math around spells, both targetted and save spells. But there are also plenty of people who understand why those things are the way they are, and enjoy it anyway.

Low-level wizards are fine, and a lot of fun to play. But you have to adapt your expectations.

It depends a bit on what you're putting them through. The issues faced by casters change a bit at the low levels.

At the lowest levels, the caster's problem is endurance. A 1st/2nd-level sorcerer will only have 3-4 proper spells per day, and at 3rd/4th that changes to 3-4 2nd-level spells and 4 1st-level spells. Other casters have even fewer spells, and if they're prepared casters they often face a situation where the particular prepared spell they do have left doesn't do any good. Some classes/subclasses also have useful focus spells, but that's nowhere near universal. That's pretty meager, particularly considering the gauntlets low-level parties face in early adventure paths – this definitely colors the perception of low-level casters. In The Show Must Go On, this is really noticeable, because the adventure pushes you to deal with no less than nine combat encounters in a single night at 1st level. At higher levels this becomes less of a problem because while you still only have 7-8 top-level spells for sorcerers (5-6 for others), you have more depth to use for utility spells and buffs/debuffs that don't scale with level.

At the lower mid levels, about 5+, the main problem you start feeling is that your spells start fizzling because your spell attack, and to some degree your spell save DC, is behind where it needs to be. This is felt most strongly at level 5-6 when martial characters are three points ahead of you on attack rolls, and you're still low enough level that attack roll-based cantrips are a significant part of your arsenal

Staffan

Legend

I am set to start a PF2 campaign soon (when our current 4e wraps up), and I'd prefer if their first impression was great, because there's many thing in PF2 that speaks to me.

1. Be very careful about using higher-level enemies. Low-level characters don't really have the tool boxes to handle these, and it sucks when you use one of your 2-4 spells and there's no effect because of a critical save.
2. Use smaller adventure areas. In adventure paths, I often see parts of an adventure that have 10-15 encounters in a dungeon or the equivalent. This is not to be emulated. Try to keep things to four encounters or less per adventuring day.

BigZebra

Adventurer

1. Be very careful about using higher-level enemies. Low-level characters don't really have the tool boxes to handle these, and it sucks when you use one of your 2-4 spells and there's no effect because of a critical save.
2. Use smaller adventure areas. In adventure paths, I often see parts of an adventure that have 10-15 encounters in a dungeon or the equivalent. This is not to be emulated. Try to keep things to four encounters or less per adventuring day.

Thanks for the reply, but I am solely using their APs. I plan on running the new Quest for the Frozen Flame. I hope they got the balance right now . But I am well aware of Paizo's tendency to tune the enccounters.

Philip Benz

A Dragontooth Grognard

I've heard good things about QftFF. Since it appears to be strongly focused on martial classes, there will probably be less drop-off in efficiency from long adventuring days - assuming they go all-out with the Medicine skill, to get non-magical healing as often as possible.

I've also heard that it's very skimpy in the loot-drop department. That jibes with the sort of "economy of scarcity" that I think this adventure has going. I'm really interested in hearing how this works for you (without any strong spoilers, please) because I have insisted for a long time that you can play the game without necessarily having all of the "expected" magic items and runes.

MaskedGuy

Explorer

Warning: I have discovered my love of creating dice result charts, please correct me if I did my math bad. WALL OF TEXT INCOMING. (edit note: already noticed I forgot to clarify nat 1 and crit failure possibilities and how this compares to other dcs/rolls npcs can do versus pcs. Also do note: high, moderate and low bonuses are most common ones, extreme ones are rarely used due to how imbalanced there are, so I'm mostly arguing on principle here.

I will also add that while I think extreme saves should be able to fail at level 22 and 23, adding +3 to dcs might make crit fails too common for regular bonuses, so maybe there should be alternate solution to level 22 and 23 extreme saves like them just being lower than they currently are?)

Definitely agree that there should be caster bonus to spell attack rolls because spell attacks are rarely that much more powerful than single strikes(the ones that are also have save), but not sure about DC. Like dc increase would help make casters more useful vs boss enemies, but it would make them comparatively much more dangerous vs bosses that aren't already ridiculous.(and with those bosses they can focus on buffs and area control spells)

Well to find out, I decided to compare to maxed out caster vs trivial, low, moderate, severe and extreme solo enemies (so level 20 wizard vs level 20-24 enemies), this is how math works out:

My main observation besides obvious "casters hate their lives vs boss enemies if they are dc focused" is that save growth chart behaves like NPC have profiency level above legendary. But yeah, if caster had +3 rune to DCs, suddenly even level 20 enemy with high dc fails on 11 on dice. That isn't however bad thing necessarily. There is also another benefit, since Class DCs/spell DCs seem to be only PC ability that can only be succeed with level 22-23 extreme bonuses. (level 24 extreme bonuses in general require nat 1 on their roll versus pc. Extreme strike of 46 vs max heavy ac of 47, extreme skill of 48 versus max save dc of 48. Like yeah, level 23 extreme skill +46 has same effect of succeeding on roll of 2, but at least crit fail chance exists.) So if +3 item bonuses to exist, 23 extreme would fail on 3 and 24 on nat 1(so also crit failing) which "feels" more in line with everything else to me.

I think difficult thing here is that I think its partly intentional math wise that targeting boss creatures with Spell DCs is supposed to be hard and that majority of casters have no reason to start with 14 in key stat, so all of them are likely to have either +5, +6 or +7 in casting stat depending how experimental they want to be. So its kinda design choice of "do you want to base DCs around stat of +5 or +6 and give extra boost to +7, or do you want to base them around maximum possible due to how powerful spells are?". I personally honestly like idea that chances should be based around +6 at max since giving apex item to -1 or +0 stat to boost it to+4 should be a valid option as well.

Besides that, I can also understand desire for "I maximized this stat, so I want to do good in it even versus powerful foes" especially when you compare difference between PC saves vs enemy DCs. Like basically PC saves work decently versus their own level npcs regardless of proficiency(they range at level 20 from expert tolegendary) as long stat itself is good. So with resistance runes minimum possible expert profiency save is +26(-1 in stat) and maximum possible legendary save is +38(+7 in stat)

so to compare difference between PC saves/DCs to NPC saves/DCs, level 20 extreme/high/mod dc are 47, 42 and 39. So max save character succeeds on those on 9, 4, and nat 1. For extreme level 24 DCs(52, 48, 45), they succeed on 14, 10 and 7.

So basically pc investing on their optimizing their save is eventually rewarded so that even versus final boss they have decent chance to succeed (compared to lower level extreme foes) while casters are rewarded only when facing equal or lower level foes.

. Okay I wasn't planning to touch on spell attack rolls(I thought caster legendary +35 spell attack vs master martial +36 and legendary martial +38 was pretty self evident especially due to how late casters gain legendary proficiency), but I figured out I might as well check if math favors spell attacks to saves at level 20. My own theory is that math favors spells that don't require saves or attacks for high level bosses, but let's see.

Hmm I think its fair to say that casters are really harmed by level 22-24 npcs having sort of "legendary+ proficiency" jump. Like with bosses you are supposed to rely on debuffs and flanking for flat footed. Like thing to remember about boss ac is that it should always incentive PCs to flank if boss isn't immune to flat footed, but ranged characters trade easy flat footed for distance. Still though, extreme final boss with high in stat succeeds on DC on 3 and caster hits them on 16 on spell attack roll, so weirdly enough, they do have better chance of doing something to them on spell attack roll than save. Still though I think none of this makes lack of +3 item bonus to attack rolls fairer.

Staff Focus rune: gives its bonus to your spell DC.
I'm gonna use the armor resiliency rune as my template, seeing this is kind of its opposite.
Staff Focus (+1) Item 8 340 gp
Staff Focus (+2) Item 14 3440 gp
Staff Focus (+3) Item 20 49,440 gp

Some paint her as a villain, invoking fear and caution in those who cross her path. However, others see her as a misunderstood figure, harnessing her powers to protect and preserve the delicate balance between the realms of mortals and the supernatural. Regardless of one's opinion, it is undeniable that Laurie Grove and her pitch black witch persona hold a certain allure that continues to captivate imaginations and perpetuate her legend for generations to come..

Reviews for "Diving into the Dark World of Laurie Grove, the Pitch Black Witch"

1. Jennifer - 1 star - "Pitch black witch Laurie Grove was a complete disappointment for me. The story felt disjointed and confusing, making it difficult for me to follow along. The characters lacked depth and development, and I found it hard to connect with any of them. Additionally, the writing style was uninspiring and did not capture my attention. Overall, I was left feeling let down by this book and would not recommend it to others."

2. David - 2 stars - "While I appreciate the effort put into creating an atmospheric setting in Pitch black witch Laurie Grove, I found the plot to be lacking in originality and execution. The story followed a predictable path without offering any real surprises or twists. The characters felt one-dimensional and their motivations were unclear. I was hoping for a thrilling and suspenseful read, but unfortunately, this book failed to deliver. It was an average read at best and didn't leave a lasting impact on me."

3. Stephanie - 2.5 stars - "Pitch black witch Laurie Grove had an intriguing premise, but it ultimately fell short of my expectations. The pacing was slow, and the book seemed to drag on unnecessarily. The main character, Laurie Grove, lacked depth and her actions often felt unrealistic. The romance subplot felt forced and overshadowed the main plot. While there were a few moments of suspense, they were not enough to save the overall lackluster storyline. I was hoping for a captivating witchy read, but sadly, this book didn't deliver."

The Witchcraft Pursuits of Laurie Grove: an In-Depth Look at the Pitch Black Witch