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Despite every effort to the contrary, my efforts to make a druid for PFS for this coming wed have taken me almost a full week and I'm still not done.
I say this to frame my complaint here fully as between the time I started making the character and now the rulebook was updated TWICE:
Why on Golarion are Druids losing a skill rank?! They're already being forced to dedicate additional ranks more than others as their order throws additional "signature skills" at them, yet now I'm supposed to go with 3 plus int mod rather than 4 + int mod?!
Please explain the reasoning behind this.
As someone who just made a Druid recently, I have an answer for this. A basic design philosophy so far seems to be that a character with 10 Int will at level 1 have a number of trained skills equal to their number of signature skills (not counting Lore and Background's interaction). Druids have 3 signature skills for being a Druid, +1 from their Order, and 4+Int Trained Skills. But then part of the Order also involves getting the Order's Signature Skill as Trained. As a result they effectively had 5+Int Trained Skills, and 4 Signature Skills, which violated the design philosophy. There were two ways they could have handled this, either decrease the number of chosen trained skills, or take away the auto-trained from Order. They decided the former.
Since they took the opposite approach for Sorcerers (granted, they were a different magnitude of issue), I'd like to voice my confusion on the matter, too.
I find the low number of skills especially disappointing since Druids have less spellcasting than other major casters and get almost nothing back for that. At level 1, druids have 2 level 1 spells per day. Sorcerers have 3, wizards with a school have 4. All of them have a power that can be cast with a spell pool, and wizards and sorcerers have more skills they're trained in. So...
Clerics, with the same casting as druids, have 5 skills to 4, and have channel energy that translates to 3+cha extra of their highest spell slot per day. Druids feel kinda shafted all around to me at the moment. They do have their extra feat synergies based on their order, but, what do you want at level 1: 2-3 extra spells, or 1 extra hp on your animal companion? Plus, putting all the power in those feats means a druid is naturally less effective than counterpart classes unless they take a specific set of feats, losing a lot of power if you try to build a druid outside of that assumption.
Skills improve automatically now
Eh, not really. It's not called a treadmill for nothing.
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So instead of creating variety of druids as intended goal of PF2 is to have the ability of creating more varied characters compared to PF1, they gone the total opposite direction when it comes to druids, especially wildshape druids. All wildshape druids will follow the same progression, with the same skills allocations, same ability scores assignment, and all be dressed the same as not sane wildshape druid would not wear the druid vestments.
Jason and the team should really look at redesigning the druid to obtain more variations for the druid, especially the wildshape druids, i throw in the plant druid too.
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Why restrict Druids?
Because Wldshape, that's why. It is just irrational fear from the past.
Wildshape is your third spell and it gives you one or two skills. Formally
Unfortunately this is not true as it is optional (even order specific), comes online at 4 character level (utility form is noncombat) and it is nerfed with duration.
And it is very disappointing.