Usually the main job (with main job I mean core purpose of the class) of a class is quite clear to me. A fighter damage, a wizard magic, cleric healing. This is superficial I know (and there are heaps of archetypes but to me every class still has its main purpose. But the purpose of the magus is not really clear to me. In what case is a magus necessary within a party and what would be his job?
[RPG] What job in a party does a magus have
maguspartypathfinder-1e
Related Solutions
I think this is more of a perception issue than anything else.
Almost all encounters in D&D are "bleed" encounters. It is very unusual for an encounter to actually threaten the party with a full wipe, or even single-instance unconsciousness/death. Their purpose is to drain resources and fill time prior to a high-challenge fight.
The issue with multiple healers is that they hide the bleed. Under normal circumstances, players see their hitpoints diminishing, and start to worry. They see their hitpoints go down to a "dangerous" level, which calls attention to the fact that they're burning healing surges.
When running a large number of healers, much of the resource loss becomes hidden from the players. Losing a healing surge to the healer is less of a big deal (and more likely to go unnoticed), and the healer's pool of available spells isn't visible to most of the players. This leads to surprise when an encounter begins to overpower the party, because many of the warning signs were hidden.
In my experience, primary healers tend to have the following effects:
Encounters last longer.
Encounter difficulty is more consistent (easy fights are unlikely to escalate due to bad luck).
Healers are a force multiplier: They make you more powerful up to a certain point, and then begin to make the party weaker as more are added.
So, to answer your questions:
Do Leaders polarize encounters and will multiple leaders polarize encounters?
Sort of. Healing takes a lot of chance out of the game, removing some risk from easy encounters and hiding risk in moderate to high challenge fights.
Is this due to Leaders main role as being healers?
Yes.
Will having multiple leaders make the game without a challenge unless there are bleed encounters?
Strictly speaking, no. You still have a finite amount of surges available per day, and a finite amount of healing per encounter. The precise layout of your party may make having additional healers make your party stronger or weaker at various points (two leaders may be more powerful than either three or one leader, for example).
Remember that by having additional leaders you are giving up damage-dealing strikers or controllers. This makes the fight last longer... Adding an additional healer means the party takes more damage.
Make It Harder
This is definitely something I've had happen. I wrote a whole blog post about the exact same thing - while GMing a fourth level Pathfinder party, I found that I had to make bosses eighth level to challenge the PCs. So you're probably going to need to up your CR/EL expectations. Pathfinder PCs have higher damage output therefore old 3.5e wisdom is somewhat out of whack (same with 3.0 to 3.5 - in general for 3.0 CR X you need 3.5 CR+1 and Pathfinder CR+2). You can see this in the encounters in Pathfinder Adventure Paths as well, the CR of capstone encounters is often like APL+5. So I'm afraid you're going to have to go for some "harder." Also, solo opponents in Pathfinder are meat for the beast because it allows the PCs to exert tactics without resistance; give bosses some help even if they are just a wad of mooks.
Play Harder
Now you can also push opponent effectiveness by improving their tactics and not just beefing them up - but I already do this, and it doesn't completely close the gap. But yes, try to come up with effective tactics for the bad guys, especially if they are on their home turf. No one plays too fair when their life is on the line. Random orcs aren't going to be brilliant but they don't just charge lemminglike into the blender either. Look at their preparations from the point of view of "if I were doing this to be effective." I like recruiting actual people to play main bad guys - they are a good 30% more effective than when your attention is split between running them and doing all your other work. Try some of the player-oriented tactical advice from this question on your NPCs/monsters. In a wilderness setting, people who have any warning will use terrain to their advantage - "Shoot at them from up in the trees," "Get in the canyon so they don't see us from far away," or whatever.
Goal Jiujitsu
Also if you're not having many fights a day, consider that challenge doesn't have to be all combat. What is the party's goal? Unless it's "harvest souls because we are serial killers," it's likely their goals involve finding things, saving things, building things, helping people, or whatnot where the challenge is more skill and roleplay oriented and not solved by killing. For example, in the Kingmaker adventure path, the PCs are in the wilderness trying to build a kingdom, and if they slaughter everyone that faces them then they don't have much of a kingdom once the fights are over!
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Best Answer
The magus is, ultimately, a fancy fighter. But the differences matter.
For the basics, the magus gains four major class features:
Spells. One way of thinking about the magus is that the magus uses spells like the fighter uses feats, accepting per-day restrictions in exchange for greater power and much greater variety. This is true, but spells also mean much more than that; see below for more details.
Spell Combat. This is what allows the magus to do what it does; while the spells are the workhorse of the class, spell combat is the iconic feature that makes a magus a magus. Basically, magi get to two-“weapon” fight, but with the offhand weapon instead being a spell. This means the magus can fight and spellcast simultaneously, which is huge.
Spellstrike. The magus can turn a touch-attack spell into a weapon-attack spell, combining a attack with the spell effect. This is nice, but not actually all that critical; one additional application of your weapon damage doesn’t matter so much, and a magus should feel comfortable not using this if a non-touch-attack spell is better in a given situation. At early levels, though, using spellstrike on arcane mark (an at-will touch-attack cantrip) can turn spell combat into actual two-weapon fighting, which is sometimes all you really want.
Arcana. These are various side-benefits that make your magus your magus, different from others. Some of them are quite good, though like most of the “ability off of a list” features, they’re very hit-or-miss.
About fighting and about spellcasting
So on some level, the magus is this fighter who is using magic instead of bonus feats to be better at fighting. But magic is very nearly equal to power in Pathfinder. Being a fighter who uses magic to be better at fighting, rather than a fighter who uses skill and training to be better at fighting, makes you a better fighter, and it makes you a much better adventurer.
Even with a relatively slow spell progression, magi get many, many more spells than a fighter gains feats. That means a magus is much more capable of having answers to a variety of situations—both combat and non-combat. These spells can make the magus fight better than a fighter can (by having more options available), and make the magus far more useful outside of combat.
So the magus’s usual role is that of the fighter, but a fighter who is more versatile, more capable of dealing with the variety of challenges that an adventurer faces, and less forced into a singular niche. Against extremely vanilla opponents (who pose no special challenge to a fighter), the fighter is probably more effective, but especially as more levels are gained, such enemies become rarer and less threatening overall; most real threats do have some special challenge that causes problems for a fighter. Because a fighter can only prepare for so many things, while a magus can prepare for many more things than a fighter can, the magus is more reliably useful, more useful against greater threats, than the fighter is. And outside combat, there is no competition.
A downside: magi multiclass poorly, but then so do most Pathfinder classes
There are some downsides to the magical approach to combat, though: it does kind of lock you into the magus class. You qualify for feats (mostly) independently of class, so if you take a level of fighter at 10th, you can get a 10th-level feat. But you only qualify for better spells (and, though it’s less critical, better arcana) by taking more levels of magus. So if you take a level of magus at 10th level, instead of getting a 4th-level spell as a 10th-level magus would, you get a 1st-level spell. Therefore, magi are not as good at multiclassing. Ultimately, however, Pathfinder punishes multiclassing massively, and the only time it’s really viable is when you can get something particularly potent from a level, maybe two, of a class, delaying some other primary class only a little. The magus class features only work with magus spells, so it is not good for this purpose.
About “role” and how there’s not really any such thing in Pathfinder
Finally, a last point about “role”—Pathfinder doesn’t really have any such concept. Above I’ve described the things that a magus is natively good at, but that isn’t necessarily the same thing. I’ve tried to emphasize, even, that much of what makes the magus better than the fighter is his ability to contribute to non-fighting things. But the fighter’s “role” cannot accurately be described as “damage”—the fighter can be built to do one or two of many things, and a given fighter may not be interested in damage at all, instead focusing on defense or combat maneuvers or intimidation or what have you.
Meanwhile, both cleric and wizard can be built to do far more damage than the fighter can. Clerics, in particular, can be so much more than just healing, being one of the most powerful and well-rounded classes in the game, capable of dealing damage in melee or at range, taking hits, buffing allies, curing debuffs and damage, and even summoning assistance. And by the same token, while “magic” can cover what a wizard does, that term is misleading: “magic” can and does cover just about everything.
So I also recommend that you avoid pigeonholing classes in this manner. Classes have strengths and weaknesses (well, most of them; some of them really seem to lack any real strengths, and others real weaknesses), but they mostly can and should take on many roles—and which roles are as much up to the character, the campaign, and the individual choices made in character creation, than it does to do with the class used.