AAAetios's page

Deriven Firelion wrote:

I even clearly showed how the sorcerer with their 36 up to 45 spells with signature spells actually has more top level spell options by a country mile than a prepared caster due to how sig spells and heightening work. So their 4 slows maybe 1 or 2 less than the wizard, but at least they can use those 4 slots in 10 different ways or more.

In the moment, with no idea what comes next, the sorcerer has more flexibility with their spells. With even 10 minutes a top level wizard will have multiple hundreds of spells at their finger tips, because of how heightening works.

Also, with a feat like infinite possibilities, an 18th level wizard can have one 7th level spell slot that can be any spell in their spell book. High level wizards never run out of spells to cast or ways to use those spells effectively.

I think it’s really telling that the “36-45” number Deriven keeps quoting is only really true for the level 20 Sorcerer, and got exceeded in flexibility by the level 1-10 actual play Wizard example I brought up several pages ago.

You’re 100% correct that if you actually compare them at the same level ranged, the Wizard just… wins in day to day flexibility. That’s literally what they’re designed to do. By the time the Sorcerer has 45 spells the Wizard will probably have had a flexibility in the range of hundreds of spells.

Old_Man_Robot wrote:

It is frustrating that some people read a statement like “Wizards are weak and could use some additional help” to be “Wizards don’t deserve help unless they are utterly worthless”. It’s a very strange mentality.

Wizards having things they are currently good at doesn’t detract from the other problems with the class.

Also, this thread is falling into the trap of overcharging the Wizard for the concept of prepared casting when it’s not exclusive to the Wizard.

The Wizard has one additional 1 spell slot per level compared to other prepared casters. This spell slot is restricted to those spells found within their curriculum. Their flexibility is better but no longer so-much better than other prepared casters.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure nobody would complain if wizards got some buffs (and I'm surprised Paizo's been digging their heels in about it for so long). The question is, which buffs? More/better focus spells? More forgiving spell prep? More unique feats? Some kind of extra, passive oomph a la dangerous sorcery? Something's missing from the class, I feel.

I think any buffs to Wizards need to be of the “raise the floor, leave the ceiling in place” sort. So definitely no “Spell Sub for every Wizard!” thing.

I would like the following:

- The weaker focus spells (Charming Push for example) brought in line with the stronger ones (Hand of the Apprentice and Earthworks).
- Experimental Spellshaping gets a significant buff and Improved Familir Attunement gets a small buff to match with the 3 best Theses.
- Curriculum spells changed to each reference two Traits rather than being bespoke, static lists. Mentalism = Mental + Illusion, Civic = Earth + Wood, etc.
- New Feats that give some unique, bespoke features to each School and/or Thesis.

These kinds of changes would do a good job making the Wizard easier for players to get a decent performance with, but not make it absurd in the hands of players who now now to use them.

AAAetios wrote:

this falls entirely in line with the fact that the Sorcerer has less versatility…

I mean yes and no. The wizard is more versatile tomorrow, but not more versatile five minutes from now. How much value there is there is going to lean a lot into campaign structure and how much the GM is willing to throw the wizard a bone.

Simply saying the Wizard is more versatile though isn't quite right, because the wizard can only access that versatility at specific intervals.

This is a needless correction. I have said several times in almost every single post I’ve made in the past page and a half that Wizard’s flexibility is day to day and Sorcerer’s is encounter to encounter (unless Spell Sub is involved of course).

I can’t verbosely include that caveat every single time I make a post.

You don't need the versatility. That's what I'm getting at. You just don't. If this is the selling point of the wizard: unnecessary versatility. It's a bad selling point.

I’m aware what you’re getting at, you’ve just done literally nothing to actually support that argument. All you’ve done is made some weird claims about how you’d break the game at someone else’s table.

My sorcerers as an example on top of their 36 spells

36 spells… aka a level 18+ Sorcerer… is less than the 50 ish spells I mentioned for my level 1-10 Wizard example that I used?

I’m sorry, what exactly are you hoping to prove here? Because this falls entirely in line with the fact that the Sorcerer has less versatility… If we used an actual play example from a level 1-20 Wizard the Sorcerer’s spell flexibiltiy would be an order of magnitude lower.

This argument that the only way to obtain versatility in a group is a wizard changing out spells is not how well built groups operate.

Absolutely no one claimed that the Wizard is the only way for a party to be versatile. It’s just that versatility is the Wizard’s (and Druid’s, for that matter) biggest strength, and it’s a good strength to have.

Why do you keep insisting that this caster versatility is some major advantage like an entire group of well built characters that don't even have a wizard is very viable.

A well built group of characters that don’t even have a Sorcerer is also very viable. So… what’s your point exactly?

I have run with no wizards in all but maybe three groups for the entire time PF2 has been out. We've never needed a high level wizard. They are a character that if you never play one or have on in your group, you wouldn't even notice like you did in PF1 where not having a wizard was a huge disadvantage.

And I have run games and played gameswithout a Sorcerer too. So again… what exactly is your point?

It seems like you’ve completely lost track of the argument here. No one said Sorcerers are unviable, you said there’s no advantage to bringing a Wizard over a Sorcerer. All we’ve done is point out the many ways in which that’s a false claim.

Schrodinger wizards, in practice most of those specific spells ends unused, after years GMing this game, people do remember when they that right spell, but forget all the other times that it ended unused during most adventure days and I had to custom made encounters just for the player to use it so they would not feel bad preparing it.

Schrodinger’s Wizard is, as the designers themselves put it, more or less a strawman. No one out here is saying the Wizard approaches every single scenario with near perfect information, just that they have the ability to approach with more or less “good enough” choices towards a very, very wide variety of situations.

In fact the very common refrain of “just use a scroll” falls more under a Schrodinger’s Sorcerer, because it requires a player to have basically perfect information for when they’ll need scrolls, as well as how many they’ll need.

Unicore wrote:

I still want to go back and look at the tank 2 spell selection for a sorcerer and try to understand how you cover even the basic basics?

Rank 2 tailwind, invisibility, dispel magic as a signature spell and then one bloodline spell is not covering half of what I want to be able to do with rank 2 spells as a wizard. Sorcerers do not get enough spells to really cover even basic stuff without using a ton of scrolls.

Why do you use tailwind in a repertoire? This is a spell where you in a wand.

I don’t think Unicore is saying you have to necessarily use Tailwind from your Repertoire. They’re saying “here’s a non-exhaustive list of rank 2 spells I care about, I’m already having trouble budgeting between Repertoire and scrolls and wands.” It’s a response to the constant claims on this forum that it’s easy to replicate this versatility via wands and scrolls, because in practice it really isn’t that easy to get all the versatility in there, only a portion of it.

And then, we have spells that we just don't have much of a reason to keep around all the time, or spells we want to cast so often we should just buy wands. Either way, casting them should be shoved off onto items.

How much gold will that end up being that the Wizard spends on other, more relevant, permanent items?

Further also you mentioned the "relevancy window" issue, but that's doubly true for these itemed spells! For example Earthbind is a spell you shoved off onto items. But I used Earthbind as my anti-flier strategy for levels 6-8, and a scroll of Earthbind is 30 GP which is... quite expensive for levels 6-7, it's somewhere between 1/6th to 1/4th of your total free currency available at these levels already! By the time it gets cheap for you (level 9 ish) I had stopped casting Earthbind as my go to anti-flier spell, I was casting Fly which, again, would cost too much GP.

On top of that, Sorcerers get a disproportionate benefit in effective spells known from staves, so we can't forget those.

...

And lastly, sorcerer focus spells can cover some spell functions, as well.

...

Now that I think about it, it's also true that a Sorcerer bent on learning a lot of spells benefits from casting dedications disproportionately when compared to a wizard, much as a sorcerer benefits from a staff with spells they don't know disproportionately. Even if we couldn't get all the way to the versatility of your list with Sorc alone, I'm almost certain we could get there with a multiclass dedication

I was ignoring staves, class features (Wizards don't have the best focus spells but they have Spell Blending, Spell Sub, or Staff Thesis available), and Archetypes too though!

And yes a Sorcerer gets higher marginal returns on taking a spellcasting Archetype for versatility than a Wizard does, but:

- the Wizard can pick a spellcasting Archetype for potency rather than versatility, for higher marginal returns. For example, my wizard had Cleric Archetype for access to a Staff of Healing, and
- the Wizard doesn't have to worry about picking a spellcasting Archetype, they can pick Rogue Archetype (for light armour, Mobility, and Skill Mastery).

Ultimately the problem here isn't that you can't make up for a Sorcerer's lack of day to day versatility, it's just that you pay an opportunity cost for it, an opportunity cost the Wizard doesn't have to pay (they pay the cost in other ways, by losing within-day flexibility).

None of those spells are necessary. I'm not sure what you're doing with them. Give me an example of a spell loadout that's necessary for what you're fighting and if it works for all day or you have to what? Change again the next encounter? You're not getting a day of rest between every encounter.

I gave you actual in-play examples of several dozen spells I swapped between over the course of a campaign and felt they were super relevant.

If you think I'm lying and can't take me at face value, that's your prerogative. I ain't tryna give you a day by day breakdown of how and when and why they mattered, especially given how you seem unable to approach this conversation without condescendingly "bragging" about how you play the game lol.

I'm wondering what you need to prove this isn't necessary. Someone like me to walk into your game with my sorcerer that changes nothing and wreck things? I already know what the high value spells are. These little niche spells are for what? What are you doing with them? Is your group standing around while you cast one of these spells while you somehow win the encounter alone? What's going on?

I'm wondering what you need to prove this is necessary. Someone like me to walk into your game with my Wizard that changes spells day-to-day and wrecks things? I already know what a high value the game places on versatility. These generically good spells are for what? What are you doing with them? Is your GM babysitting you by constantly giving you encounters that never demand variety and somehow generically good spells win the encounter alone? What's going on?

Even now what you don't seem to accept and keep ignoring is sorcerers have 36 to 45 spells known in their repertoire. If Arcane, they get a spellbook. They have signature spells, which basically allows you to heighten some lower level spell without having to prepare it at higher level.

I didn't ignore anything. In fact I explicitly mentioned how many spells a Sorcerer would've learned, signatured, and retrained in the same window I mentioned for my Wizard.

So you have more daily flexibility. What does that give you in actual battle? How often is it necessary? Do you memorize spells for a problem that your group can solve? I've seen that so many times where the wizard or prepared caster memorizes something like Earthbind to ground a flier, then the monk or barb trip martials just smashes the flier out of the air and kills them in a few rounds with the earthbind being completely unnecessary. That's why I stopped trying to use earthbind. It's one of those spells that looks good on paper, but if your martials are even marginally competent they don't even need it. You would have been far better off hitting the monster with a debuff or a damage spell.

I used Earthbind when our level 7 party was faced with two erinyes who flew far above enough that the party's martials couldn't reach them to Trip them, and they had ranged Strikes that would far outpace our damage if the melees had swapped to their backup ranged weapons. How exactly are these level 7 martials supposed to be Tripping these enemies who never enter their melee reach?

It should also go without saying that I am only preparing spells that cover my group's weaknesses, so no I don't memorize spells to cover things the party is already good at.

If you're playing in a group like mine, you better bring the power spells or you're just wasting their time. They don't need you to earthbind a flier. They don't need wall of fire or roaring applause. They're going to whack everything out quickly and efficiently without the need of special spells, though they would probably let you change spells so you feel good about your character.

That's the wizard right now. A class that a party has to give opportunities to feel good about their daily spell versatility.

If you think versatility is completely useless, it's usually an indication that the GM is catering the challenges you face to your party composition. Especially so if you are just standing in place and whacking things so quickly that nothing else ever matters.

Which makes it doubly funny that you think a Wizard can't be good without party help...

I still want to go back and look at the tank 2 spell selection for a sorcerer and try to understand how you cover even the basic basics?

What do you mean? Deriven assured us that they can break the game by coming to my table, neither of our actual concrete examples matter in the face of that assurance!

You could come with a bunch of scrolls but then you cant move if you want to use them. Im guessing every action is going to matter. A wizard can slot enough earth binds to keep it from escaping needed (of course the wizard will have self buffed with fly first so they can fly then earthbind) and unlike a sorcerer trying to replicate this with scrolls the wizard with the same scroll and learning time knows the spell and can slot it as much as they think they will need. A sorcerer cant afford to slot that niche of a spell let alone make it signature.

And of course, the crux of the point is that it's not just Earthbind specifically. That is one single spell. A well-played Wizard is swapping between dozens of such spells!

Like, the dead 1st rank slot is very relevant from 3rd to 6th level! And it's not like the other ranks have evergreen spells, either, so even at 7th level you need to concern yourself with what's on your 2nd and 3rd rank slots and yeah those have issues too.

I can’t think of any school except perhaps Ars Grammatica for which the 1st rank slot is already dead by level 3.

And by level 5 sure the slot has fallen off but… it’s also your 12th weakest slot at this point, before even considering scrolls, wands, and staves. I don’t think “the slot that was largely gonna be worse than a cantrip already got worse” is the huge downside you’re making it out to be.

Obviously YMMV depending on the table, but I’ve never been in a situation where I was fully out of slots and my fourth rank 1 slot was the deciding factor and I wasn’t better off just using one of my scrolls or wands or staves or cantrips. The game expects you to be looking to rest by the time you’re fully through with your top 2 ranks.

Not saying all Schools are perfect though. Ars Grammatica, in particular, often struggles to make good use of their Curriculum slots without homebrew.

And if the answer to all that is spell blending, Paizo sure made a mistake publishing any other thesis at all.

The “just use Spell Blending” thing is largely just a solution for people who look at the above theoretical inefficiencies and don’t want them to be around. There’s also the more practical solution of “use whatever thesis you want and don’t worry about needing to bleed every single ounce of value out of your weakest spell slots.

(Focus spells once again s**# on poor boundary, who has technically 2 spells it applies to but practically 1 because nobody uses phantasm minion in combat)

Boundary’s focus spell is fine.

Mentalism is the one crying in the corner.

So keeping in mind that one is a rank 1 signature spell, and one has to be a bloodline spell, what are the 5 total rank 2 spells that make up the obvious must have spells for a sorcerer? We can just look at a level 7 arcanesorcerer for now.

Mist? Revealing Light? Dispel magic? Invisibility? Laughing fit? Acid grab? Floating flame? Illusory creature? False Vitality? Telekinetic Maneuver?

Because my 7th level wizard casts all of those pretty regularly plus at least 5 more second level spells enough that scrolls would be a lot of wealth down the drain at this point. And none of those are heightened 1st level spells.

Exactly. It’s not about whether there are 4 or 5 spells a Wizard switches up between that the Sorcerer can more or less replicate. It’s the 40 or 50 spells which the Wizard switches between that the Sorcerer usually can’t replicate without a lot of good expenditure.

Over the course of levels 1-10, the spells that my Wizard found crucial for some or the other reason (at various levels) were:

- 1st rank: Runic Weapon, Befuddle, Fear, Force Barrage, Air Bubble, Mystic Armour, Interposing Earth, Summon Animal
- 2nd rank: Acid Grip, Floating Flame, Entangling Flora, Revealing Light, Blazing Armoury, Tailwind, Laughing Fit, Propulsive Breeze, Water Breathing, Timely Tutor, Blur
- 3rd rank: Floating Flame, Thunderstrike, Fear, Fireball, Force Barrage, Hypnotize, Slow, Dehydrate, Horizon Thunder Sphere, Haste, Wooden Double, Agonizing Despair, Earthbind, Lightning Bolt, Time Jump
- 4th rank: Floating Flame, Fireball, Horizon Thunder Sphere, Vision of Death, Cinder Swarm, Wall of Fire, Fly, Rust Cloud, Dispel Magic, Heightened Invisibility, Confusion
- 5th rank: Floating Flame, Dehydrate, Summon Elemental, Wall of Stone, Wave of Despair, Freezing Rain, Quicken Time

That’s all I can remember, I probably had way more spells that I used as a “one and done” on very short notice that I’m forgetting about. Some of those spells came out of scrolls and wands but the vast majority came out of my own slots.

A Sorcerer across these levels would’ve learned a total of… 20 spells, with access to 9 guaranteed retrains (let’s say 14-15 ish with reasonable amounts of downtime?), and 4 signature spells. They’d have had to spend nearly all their gold to match my flexibility via scrolls and wands here, while I spent a fraction of that on learning spells, and got to spend the rest of my gold on magic items that boosted me. What’s more is, I got plenty of “short notice” flexibility: the flexibility to spec into things on only a day’s notice without time to buy scrolls. Just a constantly swapping repertoire of spells, adjusting day by day to the challenges I expect to see in the coming days, something a Spomtaneous caster can’t really even try to match.

And the best part? I’m not describing a Spell Substitution Wizard… I’m describing an Improved Familiar Attunement one. It should go without saying that a Spell Sub will have exponentially more flexibility than I described.

Whenever we bring up the flexibility of Prepared casters, people always try to make light of it by saying that a Spontaneous caster can learn 4-5 of those spells and have “just as much” flexibility. The fact is, you can’t. Prepared casters have way, way more day to day flexibility than a Spontaneous caster, and Spell Sub Wizards have better hour to hour flexibility too.

It goes without saying that if you try to play a Wizard like a Spontaneous caster (as a mostly-constant pile of wide-ranging, generically useful spells) they’ll feel lacklustre compared to Sorcerers. But Prepared casters are a constantly shifting pile of narrowly-focused spells that catch the challenges you face within a single day, and that’s how you have to play them to make them shine. Another character can make judicious use of consumables and scrolls to approximate a small portion of that flexibility but a well-played Prepared caster will still have significantly more than the former can manage, while also getting to spend their gold on more permanent things (as well as always having the option to get scrolls or consumables whenever they best work).

Deriven Firelion wrote:

snip

Always being able to target the weakest save with the best kind of spells effect against an enemy is a silver bullet. It's back breaking and even in this game solves an encounter, it's just less obvious. I don't know how you can consistently write the same things to me and everyone else day after day and expect things to go differently. Some spells affect different scenarios more, some spells still invalidate skills. Consider how fly invalidates athletics used to climb. Easy simple example, no skill check. Yes the game is well balanced, but part of that balance is restricting these things. Flexible casting has a cost for a reason, the designers were right to give it a cost...

Yeah, “there are no silver bullet spells” is a wild take lol.

I throw Laughing Fit when facing a Black Dragon and know that we’ll die against its Reaction, Acid Grip when my friend is Restrained, Wall of Stone when facing 4x on-level enemies as a difficult encounter, Freezing Rain when facing 8+ lower level enemies as a difficult encounter, etc.

Not only are situationally good spells a powerful and useful thing in this game, the entire caster experience is balanced around their use.

AAAetios wrote:

I am curious to see some potential developer insight on why Sorcerers needed to get buffed so heavily.

Only the imperial arcane sorcerer got buffed heavily (and everyone that archetypes into it). It is just Ancestral Memories. The rest of the changes are minor. Especially when you consider the loss of Crossblood Evolution.

Baseline Sorcererous Potency is by itself a substantial buff, and all the new Blood Magic effects are a great boon to Bloodlines that have good focus spells (like Imperial) or good granted spells, and especially to those that are good at both (like Elemental). Propelling Sorcery, for instance, is really good.

And yeah, losing the old Crossblooded Evolution is a bit of a loss but the new Crossblooded Evolution isn’t bad by any measure. It allows anyone to poach impactful blood magic effects from others, which then becomes even better once you can use multiple blood magic effects.

Power creep has been getting increasingly unreal since Howl of the Wild. Seems like the 1e developer mindset has found its way into the proverbial 2e henhouse.

I am curious to see some potential developer insight on why Sorcerers needed to get buffed so heavily. In my experience Sorcerers were already one of the strongest casters, with the only real downside being that some bloodlines just had very little going for them. I don’t understand how that leads to Sorcerous Potency being a default (rather than a choice you have to spend if you wanna be a deficated blaster) and Imperial Sorcerers getting a free -2/-3 to enemy Saves at higher levels.

And conversely if Paizo thinks Sprcerers deserved all that, I’m curious why Wizards don’t deserve that?

Xenocrat wrote:

AAAetios wrote:

I think the Wizard changes feel extremely bad now in the context of PC2 changes.

Sorcerers get their strongest level 1 Feat put into their base class.

I felt mildly happy for Sorcerer, then I found out what they did to Crossblooded Evolution and laughed until I cried. (It doesn't grant you an off list spell anymore - you get a second blood magic effect.) Oracle supremacy for cross tradition spells, I guess.

That is a big nerf. That will weak the sorcerer quite a bit. That was definitely one of their power feats.

Apparently they get a whole host of other Feats to make up for it though.

I am not 100% clear on exactly what the Feats are, but some of them flat out allow DC increases with a one Action cost or something like? This is like... fourth hand information though, so please take it with a fistful of salt.

Oracles losing their unique mystery mechanics was kind of a worst case scenario for me. This is a big shame. Not sure why Paizo decided to make them more like sorcerers instead of leaning into their unique powers.

Personally I think the new implementation of Cursebound is much better than the old one.

Thematically I love the idea that the curse is something that punishes you, and only punishes you when you use stuff that you’re “getting away with”. In this case the stuff you’re getting away with is Cursebound Feats.

Mechanically the Cursebound Feats are fantastic. The level 1 Feats all have roughly the same power level as a Psychic’s Unleashed Psyche options (Flames Oracle adds the same amount of damage as Unleash Psyche does, Life Oracle heals as much as Restore the Mind) but can happen on turn 1 unlike the Psychic, and can be used for more than two rounds. Most non-Battle Oracles also seemingly kept their old Cursebound Focus Spells, just without the curse. All that, plus the higher level Cursebound options seem considerably stronger. The level 10 one they showed off allows a 2-Action Activity to do 1 + Cursebound value number of MAPless Strikes that each deal 4d6 spirit damage while providing flanking to you and each other. If the other Feats are roughly in the same realm of power (scaled to their level obviously) it’ll be fantastic.

On top of all that, they now get much better granted spells (except poor Cosmos lol) and become 4-slot casters! (Some people are surmising them being 4-slot casters maybe a typo, because there’s another section of the book that refers to their level 1 spell slots as only being 2, not 3.)

I think this was overall a huge win for all Oracles, with the exception of Battle Oracles who will now need General/Archetype Feats to maintain the same flavour (I wish they’d released a Class Archetype to fix this).

AAAetios wrote:

Likewise. DPR calculations don’t really match up with in play experience at all for me in this game.

Depends on the game. It was not the case in PF1, but in PF2 damage is central. It's clear to me that the game designers have used damage as the main metric for character combat contribution.

I won’t speak for PF1E at all, since I haven’t played it. In PF2E, I find that DPR doesn’t line up with what I see in practice beyond the exact 2v2 Action scenario I mentioned above. Like a very simple example is how DPR crunching makes Double Slice Fighter appear to be the strongest damage dealer in the game or makes ranged look worthless next to melee DPR, even though in practice I find both of those claims to be false.

Also I really disagree on damage being used as the main metric for character combat contribution. Damage is a metric but the game takes into account a lot more, including action efficiency, action denial, reactivity vs proactivity, and reliability. The designers have said as much, they don’t just focus on DPR.

I sort of wonder how Paizo chooses their priorities here.

Like no shade, but in what world do Barbarians need sweeping unequivocal buffs while people are still trying to figure out if the Investigator is even really meaningfully better at all.

It's a little bit bewildering, especially considering that the pre-remaster Barbarian was already largely considered one of the game's better classes.

PC1 was in a similar place too. Nobody had "rogues get better saves while wizards get their fourth slot restricted even more and crossbows get the most conservative adjustments possible" on their bingo card when it was announced.

I struggle to really make sense of the design direction.

I think the Wizard changes feel extremely bad now in the context of PC2 changes.

Sorcerers get their strongest level 1 Feat put into their base class. Oracles are now, unless it actually is a typo, 4-slot casters who also get insanely cool Feats.

Even if Wizards are fine on a power level perspective (and I do truly believe they are, I’ve played and GMed for Wizards and they don’t feel weak)… what exactly was the rationale behind removing their fourth slot’s flexibility? Do they view Prepared Arcane casting to be that much of an advantage?

You like the DPR tools. They suit your sensibilities. I tried them out and did not find them accurate to real combat, at least not the way I play which as has been demonstrated on these boards is rather different.

Likewise. DPR calculations don’t really match up with in play experience at all for me in this game.

The closest match is that if you’re comparing 2 Actions to 2 Actions, the mean damage of those 2 Actions can be a decent metric. Even then, I find that mean damage alone is often the wrong answer and it needs to be looked at in conjunction with modal damage and “damage frequency buckets” (an easy example to see this is Vicious Swing versus 2 Strikes).

In anything more commons than a 2-Action v 2-Action comparison for options that only really do damage and have no additional “hidden” Action costs, I find DPR’s value drops off staggeringly.

AAAetios wrote:

Only tangentially related to the topic of the thread, but as a Wizard player I’m extremely confused by why every other caster got so many buffs in the Remaster while the base Wizard chassis actually ate a minor nerf in PC1.

In PC1 Druids were left untouched (slight buff via cantrip changes and focus spell changes), Bards received a pretty big “indirect” buff thanks to focus points changes with Warrior getting huge buffs, Clerics received the buff to Font, and Witches had all of their familiar abilities and Hex cantrips buffed.

Now for PC2 we have confirmation that Oracles have become a 4-slot caster with tons of bespoke Cursebound Feats, and Sorcerers get Dangerous Sorcery as a class feature and stronger Blood Magic Feats.

Between all these QoL improvements for all casters as well as the several buffs, I wonder why they felt that Wizards needed a restriction added? I don’t think Wizards were weak before all these changes, and likely they still aren’t, but did Paizo think they were overtuned in some regard?

Are you serious? 4 slot oracle now? I can't wait to see this. I may have to switch my cleric to an oracle. I really enjoyed oracles in 1E. That was a fun class.

Yeah, seen a few different people with the early release confirm the 4-slot Oracle thing.

Also heard a few people theorize it’s a typesetting error and I really hope it’s not lol. I’m actually on board with the Oracle being 4-slot the more I think about it, basically all of them except Battle work with the thematics of it. And mechanically, all the Cursebound stuff makes for enough downsides that I justify it.

That aside, I'm not really seeing a connection between "casts spells from a spellbook" and "one of your slots is super limited" those are kind of unrelated thoughts (if anything, it decentralizes the spellbook slightly because that slot benefits less from having a bigger book).

Pretty much. All the other comments are explaining the thematics of Wizards but I already get the thematics! I even love the thematics - Wizard was, and still remains, my favourite class.

What I don’t understand is why they needed to have such a limit inflicted on them at all. Does it break gameplay? Not at all, actually, I think pretty much any Wizard that’s not Boundary can still make good use of all their spell slots. It just feels bad watching every single other caster, including two different 4-slot casters get back to back buffs, and then wonder if Paizo just has a much higher estimation of the Wizard’s power budget.

I’d be interested to see if designers have ever commented (or will ever comment) about Wizards over performing in internal testing and feeling like this restriction brings them in line. It would explain a lot.

AAAetios wrote:

Only tangentially related to the topic of the thread, but as a Wizard player I’m extremely confused by why every other caster got so many buffs in the Remaster while the base Wizard chassis actually ate a minor nerf in PC1.

In PC1 Druids were left untouched (slight buff via cantrip changes and focus spell changes), Bards received a pretty big “indirect” buff thanks to focus points changes with Warrior getting huge buffs, Clerics received the buff to Font, and Witches had all of their familiar abilities and Hex cantrips buffed.

Now for PC2 we have confirmation that Oracles have become a 4-slot caster with tons of bespoke Cursebound Feats, and Sorcerers get Dangerous Sorcery as a class feature and stronger Blood Magic Feats.

Between all these QoL improvements for all casters as well as the several buffs, I wonder why they felt that Wizards needed a restriction added? I don’t think Wizards were weak before all these changes, and likely they still aren’t, but did Paizo think they were overtuned in some regard?

My guess is less that Paizo thought wizards "needed a restriction," and more that it was difficult to figure out a system that was a broad as the spell schools, which are an OGL-ism and had to go, that could be planned and implemented in the time that was allotted.

Perhaps, but why was just lifting the restrictions not an option? In the case of the other casters, it feels they lifted restrictions (Clerics no longer need Charisma, Oracles lose a lot of the fiddly bits from Premaster), so why leave a restriction in place at all? Why not just let all Wizards have all 4 of their per-rank slots, and make school choice just affect focus spell choices alongside some flavourful Feat (aka the way the Druid is treated)?

Only tangentially related to the topic of the thread, but as a Wizard player I’m extremely confused by why every other caster got so many buffs in the Remaster while the base Wizard chassis actually ate a minor nerf in PC1.

In PC1 Druids were left untouched (slight buff via cantrip changes and focus spell changes), Bards received a pretty big “indirect” buff thanks to focus points changes with Warrior getting huge buffs, Clerics received the buff to Font, and Witches had all of their familiar abilities and Hex cantrips buffed.

Now for PC2 we have confirmation that Oracles have become a 4-slot caster with tons of bespoke Cursebound Feats, and Sorcerers get Dangerous Sorcery as a class feature and stronger Blood Magic Feats.

Between all these QoL improvements for all casters as well as the several buffs, I wonder why they felt that Wizards needed a restriction added? I don’t think Wizards were weak before all these changes, and likely they still aren’t, but did Paizo think they were overtuned in some regard?

It doesn't matter how many different flavors of direct damage you pick, you're still going to underperform if you neglect to go for the combat utility at your disposal, which falls outside of Easl's listed specialization.

On a semi-related note, this is why I dislike when people dismiss the differences between spells traditions’ versatility by saying “well X tradition has <2 spells> that target that Save so you’re wrong to say it can’t target Reflex well!”

Spellcasters are balanced around not just how many different Saves they can do target to do one thing, but also how many different things they can do while targeting one Save. This is especially true for the 4-slot casters because they actually have so much variety between all their options to actually use a huge slice of the variety that their spell list delivers.

Unicore wrote:

I wonder how many players who think wizards are weak in combat ever got to the point they were casting power word spells with their third actions?

I think it's the worst message to give. The Wizard is fine right from level 5. Before, like all casters (especially those with no access to Heal) it's a bit harder. But from level 5 on you should have fun with your Wizard, even if you don't care about downtime and out of combat narrative power.

Agreed. There’s no reason to focus on super high levels.

In fact I think Wizards start off pretty good right at level 3 now, as of the Remaster. Thunderstrike, Dehydrate, Floating Flame, Acid Grip, and Entangling Flora did a lot to patch up their previously lacklustre performance at these levels, and remember level 3 is still a level where cantrips are going to be relevant sustained damage rather than poke damage filler.

It’s really just levels 1-2 that are a struggle and tbh I feel like a lot of characters struggle at those levels. I feel like if you’re not a melee Fighter, Barbarian, Cleric, or Magus, those levels can just suck.

They should also give Spell Substitution to every prepared class so they can at least somewhat compete with spontaneous casters by being able to adjust spell slots as needed to make them more effective.

I think the big problem here is that the designers don’t actually view being a Prepared casters as failing to “at least somewhat compete with Spontaneous casters”. In fact I feel like they may even view it as being slightly stronger than Spontaneous because they restrict the Wizard’s fourth slot much more heavily than a Sorcerer’s (and Arcane Sorcerers exist so it’s not a case of Arcane vs less flexible lists either).

And the thing is, my experience does line up with that virw, and I know a lot of other players’ does (for example SwingRipper pretty explicitly stated that he considered Prepared as more useful than Spontaneous when building his 4-character optimized party example). What I’m guessing this means is that somewhere, somehow your table (and the section of the community you have most exposure to) plays in a way that causes the power to misalign with whatever the designers set as their point of choice for balance. Could be any number of things: playing high level more frequently than low level, GM generosity with gold, a bias towards a specific narrower subset of combat encounters, etc.

So if the Prepared/Spontaneous distinction continues to exist in future editions, I doubt Paizo is actually planning to buff the former. It feels like they are balancing Prepared casters at a point closer to their ceiling (and the ceiling is really high) while they balance Spontaneous casters closer to their “average” usage. If they make more drastic changes to spellcasting as a whole, then all these evaluations are off the table obviously, and that point they’ll balance it in context of whatever spellcasters actually look like in that world.

I will agree that the current implementation of schools/curriculums leaves a lot to be desired. I don’t even think it’s a power level thing (I think all schools except Boundary range between passably good to pretty strong), I just think it’s weird to give such small bespoke spell lists for what’s supposed to be the most flexible caster.

I really hope we see something similar to Fabula Ultima's take on rituals in PF3e. For those that don't know, FU's rituals essentially allow you to do anything that spell doesn't cover and that your character could realistically do to which the GM sets a MP price for the action. In a sense it works like a prestidigitation spell on steroids and I think with a couple more restrictions and a little less GM fiat it could fit perfectly within the scope of PF. It could also fit perfectly for more magic-based settings like Eberron in which everyone knows at least some magic, even if they don't know to cast spells exactly, allowing them to do mundane tasks through it like cooking or washing the dishes with rituals.

It’d be fun if Rituals and Skills in general could both be expanded on with a section of “this is the kind of effect that’s appropriate for this tier of play”. Rituals could be split by odd spell ranks roughly, and Skills could be split by Proficiency tiers and what they enable to do.

And the page space for this could be offered by massively shrinking (or eliminating) the Skill Feats section in the book, and letting all this stuff be more like “this is GM fiat but here’s 75 examples to make it really consistently ruled”.

Wall of Thorns and Entangling Flora (former Entangle) are new additions on the arcane spell list.

The "new" Revealing Light replaces Glitterdust and Fearie Fire and is also available for all four traditions. I think the new version is stronger than either of its predecessors, so it's an overall upgrade for all traditions.

Noise Blast (Sound Burst) is also new on the arcane list.

As an added note, Entangling Flora even got a significant buff that makes Web more redundant. Entangle used to only work to enlarge plants in an area that already had plants or fungi, but Entangling Flora just conjures those plants.

Arcane's distinction is having the most spells. It still has over 600 spells on its list and over 100 more than the runner up Occult list.

And not just the most spells, but it also tends to have some of the best spells in all the categories where it overlaps with someone else.

Arcane has almost all of the best blasting and control options from Primal. Arcane has almost all of the best debuffing options from both Primal and Occult, and a nice chunk of Occult's buffing options. Primal has blasts and control but strongly lags behind in debuffing and severely lags behind in buffing, Occult has top notch debuffing and buffing but strongly lags behind in the other two categories.

Arcane's strength is having more spells than anyone else and, aside from lacking healing/restoration magic entirely, being tied for first place or second place by a small margin in nearly every relevant category.

AAAetios wrote:

Both intuition and explicit statements from the designers tell us that players tend to consistently rate options with a forgiving skill floor as being some of the strongest options in the game.

Yeah, I also agree. Hence the Fighter, Cleric and Bard being rated so high when I personally don't find them specifically impressive (especially the Cleric, the Bard's ok and the Fighter's strong).

The Cleric is a particularly convincing example because Healing Font specifically has a party-wide impact on lowering the performance floor.

In PF2E, mitigating or avoiding damage generally tends to be more Action-efficient than healing it up, and then healing spells are usually massively numerically boosted to make sure that tempo loss is actually worth it in the first place. So to any party with a Cleric, every single slot in that Font corresponds to an extra crutch for another player playing closer to their respective class's floor.

If the Cleric's role as a Divine caster were replaced by, for example, a Battle Oracle who makes judicious use of Call to Arms and other more proactive mitigation options, and the party coordinates to ensure that the these options blank as much damage as possible, the party might actually end combats faster, just because it is more efficient to eat that damage with a Reaction as it happens than with 2-Actions on a future turn. It's just that there'd be less room for error in such a party, so the community at large views the Cleric as a significantly stronger option (I still think Clerics are stronger than Oracles for what it's worth, just the gap isn't as high as people imply it is. They're still both Divine casters with all the fundamental strengths and weaknesses of a Divine caster).

AAAetios wrote:

IMO the list goes (in order of most reliant on slotted spells to least): Wizard >...

I overall agree with you but I'm curious why you separate Witches and Sorcerers into 2 groups.

Generally Occult/Divine casters have a greater reliance on class features, Feats, focus cantrips, and focus spells to generate their full value, slightly de-emphasizing their reliance on slotted spells. Compare the sheer potency of Resentment's familiar ability and Hex to something like Inscribed One's familiar ability and Hex. Compare Faith's Flamekeeer to Silence in Snow or Wilding Steward.

This isn't always true, to be clear: Mosquito and Ripple in the Deep have stronger than average Hex/familiar combinations, while Baba Yaga has a pretty bad combination, and Starless Shadow / Spinner of Threads are decent at best.

You can draw a similar set of comparisons for Sorcerers, with one small caveat that I forgot: they don't just get power from Blood Magic + focus spells, they also get a nice chunk of their power from Bloodline spells, which are slotted. So I think my rating of "Arcane/Primal Witch > Occult/Divine Sorcerer" should be reversed.

So yeah, I split them because I feel that generally an Arcane/Primal caster is assumed to derive more of their power from their spell lists than Occult/Divine casters do. Note that this has been somewhat confirmed by Sayre before here.

I wonder if the reason the Bard is rated so high is that it's easy to get close to its top contribution when other casters (like the Wizard) ask for more skill to be mastered.

Almost definitely. Both intuition and explicit statements from the designers tell us that players tend to consistently rate options with a forgiving skill floor as being some of the strongest options in the game. This tends to be doubly true in a well-balanced game because options with a forgiving floor tend to be given a lot of explicitly powerful options to offset the fact that the class's ceiling is lower than the other less forgiving class's. When two classes perform roughly equally at their peak (like say the Wizard and the Bard) but one performs higher at its floor (like Bard > Wizard) it creates the perception the high-floor one is a stronger class.

Witch of Miracles wrote:

You are not seeing the forest for the trees.

You start Unnoticed. Because you turned invisible out of sight and outside the encounter.
The rules given are for turning invisible in an encounter.

Yeah, I think RAW is pretty damn clear on this.

“ If you're unnoticed by a creature, that creature has no idea you're present. When you're unnoticed, you're also undetected.”

If there has been no explicit chance for an enemy to perceive you (not capital P Perception check, I mean any reason for them to know you’re around like hearing you fight in a room next door) you’re Unnoticed by default. If you become invisible you’re not gonna downgrade it to Undetected somehow, you’re still Unnoticed unless you were so close as to be heard by others while casting the spell. Someone has to actually notice you for you to stop being Unnoticed (and again that doesn’t mean direct perception. It could be, say, you open a door and they see it swing open).

Also as a weird note, Seek and Search actually don’t have any rules on how to resolve a check made against someone Unnoticed. Personally I’d rule it as the invisible character making a Stealth check against the potential observers’ Perception DCs with a -4 circumstance penalty because of the Unnoticed condition, plus the invisible character can do things like move behind cover or whatever to gain the circumstance bonus to Stealth as is standard.

Witch of Miracles wrote:

It's not that spells aren't the primary contribution of a caster. It's that spells and spellcasters are more easily replaced than they've ever been, so they're proportionally less valuable.

Hard disagree. I nearly never cast a Focus Spell with my Sorcerer and I always forget about my Bloodmagic. I nearly never cast a Hex during combat with my Witch (but quite a lot outside combat as I play a Wild Witch). I sometimes use my Focus spells with my Oracles but I've played entire PFS adventures without casting a single one. And I've stopped playing my Psychic because its side abilities were not compensating the lack of spell slots.

Witch of Miracles wrote:

Think about Divine Font. Divine Font is strong

All my casters have access to Heal (but the Psychic I've stopped playing) and I rarely cast it even twice in an adventuring day. So it's just 2 Heals, nothing impressive (and part of the reason why I consider the Cleric one of the worst caster in the game).

Witch of Miracles wrote:

Think about Dirge of Doom.

6 levels. Outside these 6 levels, either the Bard doesn't have Dirge of Doom or anyone with a bit of Charisma can grab it. Hardly a defining feature for me.

Same for Psychic Amps that everyone poach here and there.

When I say that these side abilities are just side abilities, I mean it. Slotted spells are the actual strength of casters. And the Wizard having the highest number of them is also the epitome of specialized spellcaster. You want to blast the hell out of the enemies, a Wizard with Sorcerer Dedication for Dangerous Sorcery is one of the top damage dealers in the game once level 5, maybe even the highest. Sure, everyone can be a damage dealer, but I still think it's much more of a thing than Dirge of Doom and Divine Font combined.

Strong agree on the part of spellcasters relying primarily on slotted spells.

IMO the list goes (in order of most reliant on slotted spells to least): Wizard > Arcane/Primal Sorcerer > Druid > Arcane/Primal Witch > Occult/Divine Sorcerer > Cleric > Oracle > Occult/Divine Witch > Bard > Psychic > Summoner > Magus.

And just to be clear, every single class on the left of the Psychic on the list is still very budgeted around their slotted spells, like even a Bard derives 70-80% of their power from using slotted spells at the right time, all the way up to a Wizard is closer to 95-100%.

SuperBidi wrote:

AAAetios wrote:

Even at its baseline, an extra rank-2 slot is nothing to scoff at

A rank -2 Scroll costs 10% of an at level consumable. Considering that you get the feat at level 14, you'll hardly need even half a dozen of them. So you payed a level 14 feat to gain... half a consumable.

AAAetios wrote:

As for Spell Repreperation, there are plenty of 3rd and 4th rank spells that are good to be spamming all day long every single day.

A level 4 Scroll costs 70 gp, a level 18 consumable costs 7k, you can buy a hundred such Scrolls if you want. So you're paying a feat for what's virtually free.

These feats are absolutely useless. They are a shame.

I was not intervening about the feat comparison (Sorcerer also has some pretty bad feats) but just to point out that there are extremely few feats that increase your number of spells per day that are worth reading.

As a side note:

AAAetios wrote:

The big thing here is that a Spell Repreperation Wizard can operate nearly entirely out of those low rank spells if they want to

Why would you decide to play a level 18 Wizard like a level 7 one?

A bland, tasteless

It being bland or tasteless is very much subjective.

I personally think “I’m such a big nerd that I break the fundamental rules of spellcasting” is literally the reason to play a Wizard. That’s the whole reason I even play Wizards, just like how people play Fighters for the flavour of “I’m so good at weapons I don’t need a damage gimmick”.

moderately ok feat.

I’ve been trying to argue since the very beginning that pretty Wizard, Arcane Sorcerer, and Arcane Witches get class features and Feats that range between “alright” and “moderately good with a high ceiling”.

A free 70 gold as many times per day as they get a chance to reprepare and use a lvl 4 blasting spell like vision or death or a level 4 fireball.

A low level blast is a terrible use of a spell slot that’s going to be 5 whole ranks below your maximum rank by the time you get Reprepare Spell.

Your low rank spells at this level are likely dedicated to out of combat usage, long duration enchantments, Reaction or 1-Action spells you squeeze in between your 2-3 Action higher rank spells, or “silver bullets” that are always good to have around for unique situations. Reprepare Spell doesn’t interact with long duration enchantments (obviously), and doesn’t compete with scrolls for out of combat utility, but for the last two categories it practically means you have an infinite number of those prepared. That’s a pretty good use of the Feat.

Need I remind you that the Sorcerer’s get a weaker version of this as a capstone Feat, where they can only use it once per encounter while the Wizard can Reprepare any number of spells that they used previously in an encounter.

AAAetios wrote:

Scrolls hit diminishing returns fast because of handedness Action economy.

You can just have a Familiar to hand them to you.

A familiar handing them to you would still involve:

1. You predicting the spell you need correctly well ahead of time if you want your familiar to have already been holding it.
2. Interact Actions (which can trigger Reactions and cause you to lose your familiar).
3. The familiar standing out in the open the whole time and exposing themselves to AoEs and incidental attacks.

It’s not a terrible strategy but it’s not so good as to obsolete the Feats. This is especially true because, as you yourself said, why would you try to fight like a level 7 Wizard at level 18? You’re not using these rank 1-6 spells for casting Slow or Fear or whatever else you’re primarily using them for things you can’t predict you’ll need in your hand ahead of time. By the time you need to use Wooden Double, or Time Jump, or Acid Grip in a high level fight, it may already be too late to worry about drawing a scroll or having a familiar give it to you.

What I wanted to show is that you can already have a near unlimited amount of low level spells without any feat.

Sure. But the kinds of low rank spells you tend to use in the middle of combat tend to be the kinda of spells that don’t give you a convenient window to draw them.

AAAetios wrote:

Even at its baseline, an extra rank-2 slot is nothing to scoff at

A rank -2 Scroll costs 10% of an at level consumable. Considering that you get the feat at level 14, you'll hardly need even half a dozen of them. So you payed a level 14 feat to gain... half a consumable.

AAAetios wrote:

As for Spell Repreperation, there are plenty of 3rd and 4th rank spells that are good to be spamming all day long every single day.

A level 4 Scroll costs 70 gp, a level 18 consumable costs 7k, you can buy a hundred such Scrolls if you want. So you're paying a feat for what's virtually free.

These feats are absolutely useless. They are a shame.

Scrolls hit diminishing returns fast because of handedness Action economy. Carrying 10 scrolls of Wooden Double to protect yourself isn’t a viable strategy because you’ll often find yourself spending multiple Actions juggling them into place and/or not be have space for the staff, wands, shield, weapon, etc combination that you’d like to have on your person.

A Retrieval Belt can help with that but now we’re no longer spending tiny amounts of gold, we’re spending “on-level permanent magic item” amounts of gold that could’ve been spent on a lot of other relevant stuff (Greater Retrieval Belt is almost directly competing with Shadow Signet, Type II Ring of Wizardry, Accolade Robe, quite a few relevant Greater Staves and Spellhearts, etc).

To say nothing of the fact that even if you fix the Action cost of drawing it, it still requires near perfect foresight to be able to use these. Like if you need a Time Jump in combat you're… probably using that to escape an enemy’s Reach without trigger Reactions. But… drawing the scroll will trigger that Reaction anyways. Same way you’re not always gonna know “I’m gonna be crit soon, I better have Wooden Double in my hand now”. Same with not knowing what spells are relevant to a specific encounter: if you’re level 15 you don’t know ahead of time whether a 6th rank Slow to destroy a mass of enemies is what you want right now, or if you want an Unexpected Transposition to protect yourself from an enemy, or if you want Cast into Time to quickly unrestrain a friend while dealing damage, or whatever else. Casting such things out of your own slots is a big boost.

I’m not saying scrolls are useless, of course, but “just use scrolls” isn’t an answer to everything. Extra spell slots come with tons of their own advantages, even lower rank ones.

AAAetios wrote:

The big thing here is that a Spell Repreperation Wizard can operate nearly entirely out of those low rank spells if they want to

Why would you decide to play a level 18 Wizard like a level 7 one?

Eh fair enough, I was being silly there.

The actual strength is being able to prepare several lower rank spells that you can efficiently spam in between turns of spending 2-3 Actions on higher rank, meaningful spells and/ir silver bullets that are so good when they matter that they’re worth having “always on”.

I will say, I definitely underestimated how many spells have a Duration and thus won’t count for this Feat, so it’s gonna move lower in my valuation. For example this Feat doesn’t help you spam Slow or Hidebound. The main spells here that I see being handy are Wooden Double, Zephyr Slip, Time Jump, Acid Grip (it’s one of those “silver bullets” I mentioned, since it’s so effective at breaking Grabbed/Restrained), Brine Dragon’s Bile (just to spam a bit of damage between rounds), Dimension Door (notably you can expend it on Contingency and Reprepare it however many times you want), and probably a few others.

So I think it’s still good but I do agree that I over evaluated it initially.

My players stop to use scouting strategies after 2 stealth failures that resulted in the scout player fleeing and my NPCs calling "Intruders! Call for reinforcements" and they having an entire hideout going after them!

Scouting is a good strategy but also risky. If your GM tries to make the NPCs acts realistically and your checks fails you can end in a pretty dangerous situation.

Conversely, if GM makes NPCs act realistically, Familiars get way, way better. Even in a world where familiars are commonplace, if you’re in a dungeon and you see a rat/bat your reaction won’t be to call the entire camp’s worth of enemies down; at worst you’ll shoot a few arrows at the creature and if it scurries away you’ll just include it in your next report.

This is, of course, context dependent. If you’re trying to sneak into the king’s personal quarters the rat will absolutely justify a huge reaction. However it is true that in every single context, a familiar will warrant less of a reaction than an actual Rogue who gets caught.

AAAetios wrote:

Superior Bond, Reprepare Spell

More laughably bad feats. A spell slot 2 ranks under your maximum at the cost of a level 14 feat??? And even worse: free rank 4 spells at level... 18??? Or how to pay for free stuff!

You are still severely underestimating these Feats. Even at its baseline, an extra rank-2 slot is nothing to scoff at because most casters operate out of their top 3 ranks of spells (and Wizards more so than others due to relying harder on spell slots than focus spells or cantrips). At the level you get it at, Superior Bond is an extra use of Wall of Stone (even at rank-2 it still has enough HP to be amazing) or Freezing Rain or Wave of Despair, which is inherently insane. By the time you’re at level 20 it’s an extra use of Contingency or Ferrous Form or Power Word Stun. Dismissing the spell for being two ranks below the max is kind of insane, because at the levels you’re using this feature at, rank-2 spells are insanely good.

And I call this all “at a baseline” because Superior Bond + Bond Conservation combines into being way more spell slots than you’d otherwise have.

As for Spell Repreperation, there are plenty of 3rd and 4th rank spells that are good to be spamming all day long every single day. 4th rank Hidebound, Wooden Double, Zephyr Slip, Time Jump, Slow, Confusion, 3rd rank Fear, the list goes on and on. The big thing here is that a Spell Repreperation Wizard can operate nearly entirely out of those low rank spells if they want to because they scale incredibly well, and then dedicate their higher rank slots to long duration buffs, Contingencies, things that Counteract, silver bullets for specific situations, or Action efficient damage options. The Feat is a massive force multiplier.

All that being said, you’re still ignoring the elephant in the room: the discussion wasn’t about whether you like Wizard Feats in a vacuum. The claim here was that Sorcerer Feats are significantly stronger than Wizard Feats which… isn’t really true, and these were provided as examples of Feats that are on the level of most Sorcerer Feats. Both Wizards and Arcane Sorcerers have fairly little room for extremely generically strong Feats because of how much of their power budget is invested into the Arcane spell list itself.

Lord Fyre wrote:

What should a prospective wizard do?

When you play you must scout, think ahead and be smart about what you are doing. If that is not you or your group them play an Arcane Sorcerer instead of a Wizard. In a longer campaign the Wizard can be better.

100% this. It cannot be emphasized enough. Prepared casting inherently loses ground to Spontaneous casting if you don’t have a party that’s thinking strategically. Not just tactically (as in turn by turn combat tactics) I mean strategically, as in you spend time scouting ahead, retreat and end the adventuring day early if you feel like the Wizard can improve their spell list for tomorrow to make the encounter easier, skip and/or change the order of encounters, etc.

Other Prepared casters can deemphasize this because they get compensated with super strong class/subclass features (Witch), focus spells/cantrips (Witch/Druid), or a ton of additional generically useful slots (Cleric). Wizards have to rely on this to function anywhere near their ceiling.

d) Improved Familiar Attunement is fine but familiars are niche still, unless you want to go full in - but then be a witch.

Well the big thing is that, as you already established, the best way to function as a Wizard is to be consistently gaining information about what’s coming up and using that to your advantage. Improved Familiar Attunement tends to be pretty useful if the rest of your party is unable to support you via their own scouting, stealthing, etc. If you don’t have an ally that’s excellent at these things, it’s often better to just throw your familiar in instead, and Improved Familiar Attunement + Enhanced Familiar can give you enough unique abilities that your familiar will often auto-detect things with special senses and/or be completely unnoticed without a check while also leaving room for some of the spell slot and focus point related abilities if you need them.

I feel like y’all are trying to make Bond Conservation into something it’s not, and then severely underrating it because it doesn’t fill the vision of it basically letting you be a Spontaneous caster.

I’m with AestheticDialectic on this one. While the theoretical ceiling may be incredibly super duper high, it’s not anywhere near necessary to perform at the ceiling for the Feat to be useful. The Feat basically just gives you 2-4 extra spell slots depending on your exact level and how well you time its use, and that’s already plentiful. When you take the caster who’s meant to be using as many spell slots as possible and has meh focus spells to offset that, and you give them even more spell slots, they’ll be happy.

The fact that it doesn’t represent that many spell slots at the level you first obtain it and scales to represent more is also pretty intentional. The gap between a Spontaneous caster’s combat-to-combat flexibility and a Wizard’s is relatively small at lower levels, it’s only when the caster has like 5+ Signature spells that the latter starts to feel much more restricted, so that when Feats like Bond Conservation, Superior Bond, Reprepare Spell, etc come into play to make sure the Prepared caster gets additional brute force potency for the day. Notably, it’s why three of the Wizard Thesis are designed to become exponentially more powerful as you level up.

All that being said, regardless of your views on Bond Conservation specifically, I still don’t buy this argument that Sorcerers somehow have way stronger Feats. The benefits of most of the Feats Sorcerers get are just about as marginal as the Wizard Feats I listed.

AAAetios wrote:

It's odd to count Spontaneous casting as a differentiating/thematic element for Sorcerers but not count Spellbook Prepared casting as one for Wizards? Like they are virtually identical in terms of what they add to their classes' from both a mechanics and thematics perspective.

If talking about what sets Wizard aside from other Prepared casters it's one extra spell slot per rank, Thesis, and a few unique Feats. When talking about Sorcerer and differentiating it from other Spontaneous casters it's one extra spell slot per rank, Blood Magic, and a few unique Feats. The budget is roughly similar, and in both cases (as is the case for most Arcane/Primal casters) you'll find roughly equally small wiggle room differentiating one caster from another because so much of the power budget is just "this class gets a really good list of spells".

But was you that put Wizards and Arcane Sorcerers in the same bag when in practice they are fundamentally different.

I compared them in how they tend to have very little room in their power budget for bespoke features. My comparison still stands, everything I said about the power budget of Arcane/Primal casters not leaving room for as many bespoke features still holds true.

As for the specific Feats you addressed:

- Spellbook Prodigy: I’ll admit, I overrated this one. Idk why I thought it did more than it did lol.
- Nonlethal Spell: It is a situational option for sure, but plenty of classes get situationally powerful options that fit their theme well. Not saying it’s an all star everyone should pick at all, but it is uniquely good for campaigns that matter,
- Conceal Spell: Whoops yeah, used the Legacy version. The new version is stronger and earlier though.
- Bond Cinswrvation: You’re ignoring its real power though. It lets the caster who already has the largest number of unconditional slots in the game have even more slots.
- Clever Counterspell: When used right, it is far better than anyone else’s ability to Counterspell.
- Reprepare Spell: You’re seriously underestimating this one. It’s actually flat out stronger than the level 20 Sorcerer Feat you pointed to, because it can be used to reprepare any number of spells between combats, while the Sorcerer Feat only recasts one spell per minute. You can blow your whole lower rank load for combat 1 and for combat 2 go in as if it’s still the first combat of the day.

Overall I’m still confused what Feats you’re referencing that are supposed to be massively outperforming these Wizard options. Could you give a few examples?

AAAetios wrote:

Deriven Firelion wrote:

AAAetios wrote:

I feel like the problem YuriP outlined isn’t really about Wizards but more so about spellcasting occupying such a huge chunk of the power budget that there’s very little room to give the classes bespoke features that are evocative of their respective fantasies.

The problems they outlined for the Wizard can be mostly summed up: the Wizard should be so learned they can break the rules of spellcasting, but Thesis + Spellshape doesn’t deliver fully on that. However the same can be said about any Arcane Sorcerer’s theme, can it not? Their fantasy is their blood is overflowing with magic which should increase the potency of their spells and/or let them draw on those spells to boost their own prowess, and that usually gets expressed via… a Blood Magic effect that gives you a +1 somewhere or the other. In this comparison the Sorcerer’s Blood Magic pops up more frequently than a Wizard’s Thesis does, but the Thesis tends to have a larger impact when it’s relevant so it all evens out. Ultimately the problem is that 95% of their power budget is embedded into Spellcasting, and that leaves almost no room for features to baby a consistently powerful impact on gameplay?

Hell the same can be said for almost any Arcane or Primal caster in the game. It’s usually Divine/Occult casters who get that extra bit of thematic expression to their mechanics because of how much more limited their spell lists are (and of course casters with serious limitations on spell slots like the Magus that too).

The only way I see them getting a stronger thematic expression is if their spells are deemphasized, but that will also upset a lot of people.

How do you reach this conclusion when most of the caster classes have powerful bespoke features to fill their class fantasy?

You could just read the post you're replying to where I clearly address almost everything you mentioned. Bards, Clerics, and Psychics are covered by this part of

...

Again, I genuinely have no idea what any of this has to do with what I said. You keep claiming (across multiple threads) that I’m manufacturing problems but you’re literally manufacturing arguments on my behalf.

Nowhere have I stated, or even implied, that spellcasters are weak. Nowhere have I said Bards are overpowered. In fact I have explicitly said multiple times that I have a much higher opinion of Wizards than you do…

Please take the five seconds it takes to actually read what you’re responding to.

AAAetios wrote:

I feel like the problem YuriP outlined isn’t really about Wizards but more so about spellcasting occupying such a huge chunk of the power budget that there’s very little room to give the classes bespoke features that are evocative of their respective fantasies.

The problems they outlined for the Wizard can be mostly summed up: the Wizard should be so learned they can break the rules of spellcasting, but Thesis + Spellshape doesn’t deliver fully on that. However the same can be said about any Arcane Sorcerer’s theme, can it not? Their fantasy is their blood is overflowing with magic which should increase the potency of their spells and/or let them draw on those spells to boost their own prowess, and that usually gets expressed via… a Blood Magic effect that gives you a +1 somewhere or the other. In this comparison the Sorcerer’s Blood Magic pops up more frequently than a Wizard’s Thesis does, but the Thesis tends to have a larger impact when it’s relevant so it all evens out. Ultimately the problem is that 95% of their power budget is embedded into Spellcasting, and that leaves almost no room for features to baby a consistently powerful impact on gameplay?

Hell the same can be said for almost any Arcane or Primal caster in the game. It’s usually Divine/Occult casters who get that extra bit of thematic expression to their mechanics because of how much more limited their spell lists are (and of course casters with serious limitations on spell slots like the Magus that too).

The only way I see them getting a stronger thematic expression is if their spells are deemphasized, but that will also upset a lot of people.

How do you reach this conclusion when most of the caster classes have powerful bespoke features to fill their class fantasy?

You could just read the post you're replying to where I clearly address almost everything you mentioned. Bards, Clerics, and Psychics are covered by this part of the original post:

It’s usually Divine/Occult casters who get that extra bit of thematic expression to their mechanics because of how much more limited their spell lists are (and of course casters with serious limitations on spell slots like the Magus that too).

Sorcerers were already explicitly covered by me pointing out that their focus spells and blood magic are benefits that come up more often than the Wizard's Thesis comes up, but end up being less impactful on a per-use basis than the Wizard's Thesis is, so it evens out.

Druid is the only one I didn't explicitly address, and that still falls into what I suggested. It has a lot less of a thematic expression than Clerics or Bards because a huge percent of their power budget is invested into their very powerful spell list and it leaves very little room for mechanics that strongly reflect their themes. They have more room for it than a Sorcerer, but still not a ton of room.

Once again, you reiterate that there is this one class that doesn't have powerful bespoke features...etc, etc.

I truly don't know what point you're trying to make here.

Are you implying that Wizards, Arcane/Primal Sorcerers, Arcane/Primal Witches, and Druids have a huge chunk of their power budget invested into class features, Feats, and focus spells? If so, come on, we both know that is not true. In fact we have explicit confirmation that the designers do specifically boost Occult/Divine casters compared to their peers for this exact reason.

I don't think that sorcerers are in same situation because the sorcerer base context is naturally more flexible. Blood Magic looks more like a bonus to help to differentiate one sorcerer lineage from others but what really makes each sorcerer distinct from others sorcerers is the mix of different traditions + different focus spells + blood magic and what makes sorcerers different from wizards is the flexibility of spontaneous spell casting + more flexible usage of spell slots (you can use all your 4 slots as you want once that they are no bounded to a school or to repeat spells that you already cast this day).

It's odd to count Spontaneous casting as a differentiating/thematic element for Sorcerers but not count Spellbook Prepared casting as one for Wizards? Like they are virtually identical in terms of what they add to their classes' from both a mechanics and thematics perspective.

If talking about what sets Wizard aside from other Prepared casters it's one extra spell slot per rank, Thesis, and a few unique Feats. When talking about Sorcerer and differentiating it from other Spontaneous casters it's one extra spell slot per rank, Blood Magic, and a few unique Feats. The budget is roughly similar, and in both cases (as is the case for most Arcane/Primal casters) you'll find roughly equally small wiggle room differentiating one caster from another because so much of the power budget is just "this class gets a really good list of spells".

My point with sorcerers was more about theirs feats. That their feat selection is so better than the wizard that even some feats that they have makes more sense if it was in wizard than in sorcerer list but for some reason it was in sorcerer feat list.

Is this really the case? I see this brought up often, but Wizards have quite a few bombs in their Feat list that are (mostly) unique to them: Spellbook Prodigy, Nonlethal Spell, Silent Spell, Spell Protection Array, Explosive Arrival (think Summoners have a version of this?), Irresistible Magic, Bond Conservation, Scroll Adept (this one Witches get something similar iirc), Clever Counterspell, Reprepare Spell, Spell Combination, etc.

Not saying Sorcerers have bad Feats or anything, but I sincerely disagree that Wizards don't have both powerful and thematic Feats. Perhaps Premaster this was the case (a lot of the lower level ones I mentioned either didn't exist or were weaker) but Wizards now have a very good list of Feats.

Or be in a party with a fire kineticist, and alchemist and hit a a solo boss creature with overwhelming energy.

Even without contribution from allies, there are many ways to trigger weaknesses multiple times as a Wizard. Spells like Floating Flame, Dehydrate, Fiery Body, etc can really help you bring out multiple pings when needed.

I feel like the problem YuriP outlined isn’t really about Wizards but more so about spellcasting occupying such a huge chunk of the power budget that there’s very little room to give the classes bespoke features that are evocative of their respective fantasies.

The problems they outlined for the Wizard can be mostly summed up: the Wizard should be so learned they can break the rules of spellcasting, but Thesis + Spellshape doesn’t deliver fully on that. However the same can be said about any Arcane Sorcerer’s theme, can it not? Their fantasy is their blood is overflowing with magic which should increase the potency of their spells and/or let them draw on those spells to boost their own prowess, and that usually gets expressed via… a Blood Magic effect that gives you a +1 somewhere or the other. In this comparison the Sorcerer’s Blood Magic pops up more frequently than a Wizard’s Thesis does, but the Thesis tends to have a larger impact when it’s relevant so it all evens out. Ultimately the problem is that 95% of their power budget is embedded into Spellcasting, and that leaves almost no room for features to baby a consistently powerful impact on gameplay?

Hell the same can be said for almost any Arcane or Primal caster in the game. It’s usually Divine/Occult casters who get that extra bit of thematic expression to their mechanics because of how much more limited their spell lists are (and of course casters with serious limitations on spell slots like the Magus that too).

The only way I see them getting a stronger thematic expression is if their spells are deemphasized, but that will also upset a lot of people.

WWHsmackdown wrote:

For me ki points, number of rages, and hunters mark being a spell were some of the worst parts of being a martial in 5e, a system that constantly kicks martials for thinking theyre people too, like the casters. The fact that PF2e axed those limitations and let the martials just be able to always do their thing was one of the reasons I jumped ship. Everybody deserves to do their thing, not reach the Xth fight of the day and say "sorry guys we have to retreat, I don't have enough juice to be my class anymore". It's so arbitrary

To be clear, I don't think it makes much sense to give martials important expendable resources without also giving them something worthwhile in exchange for spending them, some kind of ability that does punch above their baseline by a solid margin. That's sort of why I said "meaningful" resources. For example, I think rounds of rage is a dull resource that feels meh to manage because it gates the one thing that makes your class your class, but resource-limited powers to use while raging could be great.

I can understand attrition feeling like just one more thing keeping you down in 5E, where resources take away one of the only benefits you can begin to have over a caster. But in a system with more universal and intentional power ceilings (like 2E), I don't think resource management on martials needs to feel this way. Would you remain opposed to it even in a system where power ceilings were carefully managed?

I agree that the issue in 5E isn’t that resources for martials are inherently bad, it’s that the game just doesn’t seem to have tight enough math to balance them out carefully.

It means that at some tables a Monk is Ki-starved across 4 fights per day while at other tables a Barbarian is wondering what to even do with 4 Rages when you just get 1 fight per day, and the Rogue wondering why they’re designed to just be worse than everyone else for the first 6 fights of the day. Casters are mostly insulated from this problem because they can simply choose to expend their resources in a way that most suits the adventuring day at hand (relying on Reactions and blasts for short adventuring days, and Concentration spells for longer ones), so it ends up feeling like martials always run out before casters do.

I think in a system that’s properly mathed for it, martial resources can feel just as good as caster ones. I’d imagine Rage isn’t a limited resource but an earlier and more buffed version of Whirlwind Strike, for example, could be.

AAAetios wrote:

Guntermench wrote:

Quote:

This is one of the many cases of the designers balancing the game around expectations of what a savvy player can achieve, but that not lining up with what a good number of players want to achieve.

I'd argue it's balancing around what players what to achieve, with their playerbase having a reasonably high optimizer population. My limited experience with playing and less limited reading of PF1e has me not surprised in the slightest they seem to fully expect players to munchkin out every point of damage if given the opportunity.

Perhaps you’re right. I’ve truly never met a player who actually bothered using a weapon on a spellcaster in TTRPG, except for players whose explicit fantasy involved being at least a little bit gishy, but of course we’re all limited to our own perception of the community.

And we do have 5E as an example of what happens if you don’t balance around the people who will perform at least reasonable optimizations.

No. There is no problem but one you are fabricating. This is your personal desire and a handful of posters that keep showing up to rehash this again and again that we can't even be sure it is the same people wanting to rehash old arguments.

They keep using the term casters, when most are absolutely fine. The wizard is debatable at best which means fine for some, not fine for others.

What are you even talking about? What does any of this have to do with what I said.

All I said is not everyone wants to carry a weapon. I have no idea what problem you think I’m fabricating lol.

Quote:

This is one of the many cases of the designers balancing the game around expectations of what a savvy player can achieve, but that not lining up with what a good number of players want to achieve.

I'd argue it's balancing around what players what to achieve, with their playerbase having a reasonably high optimizer population. My limited experience with playing and less limited reading of PF1e has me not surprised in the slightest they seem to fully expect players to munchkin out every point of damage if given the opportunity.

Perhaps you’re right. I’ve truly never met a player who actually bothered using a weapon on a spellcaster in TTRPG, except for players whose explicit fantasy involved being at least a little bit gishy, but of course we’re all limited to our own perception of the community.

And we do have 5E as an example of what happens if you don’t balance around the people who will perform at least reasonable optimizations.

Unicore wrote:

People seem to be forgetting that low level cantrip damage was actually exceeding performance expectations enough that some of the cantrips got a minor nerf to their damage in the remaster, while others got dice adjustments where they broke about even.

I don't think the change in Cantrips was intended to be a nerf so much as to make them work in parallel to other spells. Like a Wizard does not add their INT modifier to the damage of a lightning bolt or a fireball but did to an electric arc or a casting of produce flame. This lead to people either accidentally adding their casting mod to the damage of spells when that was the intention or forgetting to add their casting mod to cantrip damage.

Man, I wish I could find a link but I can't. I literally saw a comment on Reddit not one week ago where someone sourced and quoted the designers saying that cantrips were exceeding performance expectations but I cannot find it now. Maybe Unicore has the link?

I myself don't mind picking up a bow, sword, or polearm as a caster. But some folks want that weapon that looks like casting.

This is one of the many cases of the designers balancing the game around expectations of what a savvy player can achieve, but that not lining up with what a good number of players want to achieve.

At low levels cantrips are a primary source of damage for casters (by level 5 they begin falling off and should be replaced with focus spells and lower rank spells in most circumstances). You'd expect that at levels 1-4 then they're roughly balanced to be as strong as about 2 Strikes from a bow, but they practically can't be. If they were balanced that way, a caster using 2-Action Save spell + 1 Action to actually fire a bow would then exceed the damage profiles of a lot of ranged martials.

So cantrips end up being a little weaker than two bow Strikes, and this means that a caster with no interest in using a bow for their occasional third Action will be slightly under the damage curve (not significantly mind you, but enough to feel annoyed every once in a while).

Wand of Fatal Lightning: Does 1d6 lightning damage with Fatal d10 trait.

But here we hit the second part of the problem.

Such a "weapon wand" would presumably scale off of your Spellcasting Attack modifier, not your Dex. At higher levels as your cantrips fall off, so do your weapon proficiencies (relative to martials). By level 5 you are likely going to be -3 or -4 relative to a Dex martial who wants to use a bow, and probably still -2 relative to a switch hitter. This is because as your spells get stronger, the value of having a 3rd Action that can deal good damage that MAPlessly combines with those spells gets higher too.

And if you scale the wand off of Dex there'll be complaints about "forcing" casters to be multiple attribute dependent, even if objectively they are balanced after MAD.

I think ultimately the best solution might be to give cantrips 3-Action versions that do significantly boosted damage, because that way people who want to do "bow + cantrip" can still do that, but those who just want their spells' damage for the sake of their fantasy can just focus on the cantrips at lower levels without any issue.

The magic system has been changed over the years and tweaked. You like to make a lot of assumptions about my logic. It has nothing to do with logic. PF is a D&D derivative that built off the 3E brand. It's customers like that brand offered and that's why they stayed. No one completely destroys their brand by making huge, wholesale changes. Business is not necessarily logical, but it can be measured and Paizo has very little incentive to move too far away from what its customers expect.

You are not, in fact, the sole arbiter on what constitutes the Pathfinder brand. Plenty of people want subsystems that aren't Vancian or pseudo-Vancian casting, and they can discuss that in peace without you insisting that D&D's historical popularity means somehow their concerns stop existing.

Whether such players are in the majority is data only Paizo/WOTC have, and whether such players need to be listened to is a decision only Paizo/WOTC can make. The popularity of the subsystem in the 40 years when D&D was a hyper niche hobby does not change the data, and that historical popularity does not necessary mean the last 10 years of customers are in love with it.

I can say with absolute certainty having tested the kineticist class myself, it is weaker than both casters and martials in its current form. It has some interesting stuff, but a lot of weaknesses and useless abilities.

Where did this conversation about power even pop up? What does it have to do with the fact that people who like Kineticist-style non-Vancian magic are just discussing what they'd like to see in future renditions of such magic?

Tremaine wrote:

Again you list things that the guys wanting to play blasters do not want to be able to do, as reasons the only fun thing about combat in this game (doing damage) should be bared to wizards.

I listed the advantages that they have while only blasting.

Unless you mean people that want to play a blaster wizard want to only cast Shocking Grasp? That would be an easy change for you to homebrew, just remove every other spell and I guess make it a cantrip that takes two hands.

This is pretty much the whole problem isn’t it? This is how a lot of the blaster conversations online seem to go.

“I want to blast good”.

“Here’s 17 different ways to blast good”.

“Nope, I want to blast good with exactly one single spell all day long”.

That’s just not gonna happen. A blaster Wizard or Sorcerer still has 4 spells of all ranks (and 3-4 of their max rank) and is balanced to function with that in mind. If you choose to function with less, you’ll perform worse.

A level 5 Elemental Sorcerer who wants to spend all their time blasting absolutely can… and should have a spell repertoire that contains a nice mix of spells like Thunderstrike (Signature), Interposing Earth, Horizon Thunder Sphere, Fireball, Lightning Bolt, etc (notice that I purposely stuck to only choosing blasts, I didn’t choose Fear, for instance). If you choose to use fewer of these options you’ll just be weaker, just like how a Barbarian who refuses to skirmish and has no intention of carrying a backup weapon will feel weaker than one who does those things.

PF2 and D&D 5e tried to solve this with cantrips (but in 5e cantrips are super strong because they uses a normal action and competes with normal martial strikes).

It doesn’t really change the rest of the point but I do really feel the need to add, cantrips actually do terrible damage in 5E. The only exception is Eldritch Blast, and even that only if you have 2 levels in Warlock. All the rest of the cantrips do less damage than a crossbow until level 11 and are not worth using unless they have a relevant rider (like Thorn Whip, Ray of Frost, Mind Sliver, etc).

But these classes also have their own payback in form of lower number of spell slots.

It should also be noted that non-Universalist Wizards have even more of a spell slot advantage at level 1-2, because being a 3-4 caster + Drain Bonded Item represents a 50% spell slot advantage over non-Sorcerer casters at level 1, and 40% at level 2. I’m pretty sure that’s why Wizards have their main subclass features delayed till level 3.

And as others have mentioned a few times, levels 1-2 are where cantrips are already an excellent source of damage, so this extra spell slot is a huge upgrade on a class that could technically function at these levels without any spell slots in the first place.

People seem to be forgetting that low level cantrip damage was actually exceeding performance expectations enough that some of the cantrips got a minor nerf to their damage in the remaster, while others got dice adjustments where they broke about even.

It’s also worth pointing out that the cantrip damage change wasn’t just an across the board nerf.

As best as I can tell, Electric Arc and Ignition are really the only two cantrips that were good to use previously and got meaningfully nerfed (and one of those was very transparently overtuned before and is still very good).

- Ray of Frost lost damage but began targeting a Save that Arcane/Primal didn’t have a nicely scaling option to target, so overall it was a buff.
- Gouging Claw just got a flat buff, and is more in line with the “melee should do more damage” policy of PF2E.
- Divine Lance technically lost damage but Spirit damage means it’s gonna be doing nonzero damage for the first time in a while.
- Chill Touch became Void Warp and had ranged damage now, which is awesome.

Looking at the buffs holistically, this also means that all non-Occult spell lists got an overall buff. Arcane/Primal can target Fortitude much better than before, and Divine actually has damaging cantrips now.

It’s why I’m always confused when people say the cantrips change was a flat nerf because after we converted to Remaster my Wizard started using cantrips more often, not less.

AAAetios wrote:

WWHsmackdown wrote:

[All classes just doing their things as they should all the time just makes way more sense to me. I could be wrong though, maybe the 35 and younger crowd really resonate with spell slots and couldn't live without them, I have no data. In my defense, paizo and WOTC are the only developers I see using spell slots, most everyone else uses different bespoke magic systems

I wonder how the wider gaming community feels about spell slots in Baldur’s Gate 3? The game is, by far, the best representation of what “mainstream” understanding of d20 games ends up looking like.

From my own limited experience interacting with BG3 communities online, I feel like people definitely don’t really care about with spell slots one way or the other, it’s mainly the already invested tabletop players who have strong opinions on the system. I will say that given that the fact that people seem to love Sorcerer, Paladin, and Warlock more than the rest of the magic using classes does potentially indicate that bespoke, narrowly themed abilities are more appealing to players than the versatility spell slots represent (and it’s not a power thing because spell slots are objectively pretty damn powerful). It’s just hard to draw that conclusion that it’s entirely possible people are just in love with the Charisma classes lol.

And the designers who have designed the game this way for decades with other games using different magic systems attempting to unseat D&D and failing.

People who think D&D's magic system is not one of the best ever made in terms of its simplicity, versatility, and effectiveness as a game design system should rethink that because it has worked for decades to the tune of the top selling tabletop RPG of all time including this PF splinter which has also been successful.

That’s all well and good but something historically being successful doesn’t mean it’s perfect and doesn’t need to ever be reevaluated.

In particular, the TTRPG audience that loves spell slots and got upset at 4E for doing away with them is now a much smaller minority of the audience. There’s no guarantee that this is the best system to address everyone’s desires anymore, and in fact plenty of evidence to the contrary.

How popular is the kineticist? Is this an assumption? I think it is fairly well-designed, but not better than the any other high quality classes in the game. No one is really drawn to playing in my group. I gave it a whirl and it's fun enough, but not any better than any other class and far less versatile than casters and less single target damage by a good margin than martials. It's a bit short range too for most levels.

And your table is representative of… the entire PF2E audience?

How popular was the Kineticist? So popular that a game that usually releases 2 classes per year was okay with focusing on the Kineticist as the one and only class for its year. Page space dedicated to bespoke magical systems is a problem Sayre has mentioned multiple times, and yet the Kineticist was worth it.

It’s okay that you like the Vancian casting system. I like it too! But it’s incredibly weird that you’re just trying to shut down the possibility of other subsystems existing by saying “this is how it’s always been and it’s popular”. By your logic Pathfinder doesn’t even need to exist since 5E is more popular lol.

[All classes just doing their things as they should all the time just makes way more sense to me. I could be wrong though, maybe the 35 and younger crowd really resonate with spell slots and couldn't live without them, I have no data. In my defense, paizo and WOTC are the only developers I see using spell slots, most everyone else uses different bespoke magic systems

I wonder how the wider gaming community feels about spell slots in Baldur’s Gate 3? The game is, by far, the best representation of what “mainstream” understanding of d20 games ends up looking like.

From my own limited experience interacting with BG3 communities online, I feel like people definitely don’t really care about with spell slots one way or the other, it’s mainly the already invested tabletop players who have strong opinions on the system. I will say that given that the fact that people seem to love Sorcerer, Paladin, and Warlock more than the rest of the magic using classes does potentially indicate that bespoke, narrowly themed abilities are more appealing to players than the versatility spell slots represent (and it’s not a power thing because spell slots are objectively pretty damn powerful). It’s just hard to draw that conclusion that it’s entirely possible people are just in love with the Charisma classes lol.

As an academic, the idea that academics specialize in one area of knowledge to the point that they are incapable of using useful ideas from other disciplines is a comically bad representation of academia.

Agreed. If anything, the bad academics are like that, the kind of professor you hope to never get during your own academic career because they have no idea how to teach anything that’s not their narrow specialty and they’re so deep into their own specialty that they don’t know how to approach beginners with it anyways.

A good academic still knows a ton about many different tangentially related fields. A physics academic will have an extremely in-depth understanding of math and physics, and still have more understanding of computer science and chemistry than like 95% of the world, and there’ll probably be a ton of university-level biology and sociology stuff buried in the back of their head somewhere or the other.

The idea that Wizards must be able to narrowly reflect their school specialization feels almost like trying to force a fantasy that has… never existed? It’s fine if someone wants that fantasy to exist, of course, but I’m confused when it’s treated like the default when most popular media showcases wizards as having at least some tricks that aren’t their signature tricks. Gandalf clearly has a lean towards fire and light magic but they’re far from the only spells we see him use, and Gandalf is actually narrower than many other popular characters that are called “wizards” (the fact that his specific Feats fit better as a Cleric of Sarenrae in this system is a separate topic). If I had to pick a Pathfinder Wizard in fantasy media I’d probably pick Moiraine from Wheel of Time, and that very clearly showcases how having a preferred way of solving problems doesn’t mean being incapable of solving problems in other ways.

People who just want to play a blaster wizard that does nothing but damage really should be playing a Psychic instead of trying to crowbar the Everything Caster into something it's not.

Or they can just refer to the many guides on how to make a competent blaster as a Wizard!

In 2019 I’d have said it’s really hard to built a single target damage focused Wizard, but with the Remaster and Rage of Elements it’s gotten a lot easier. If you commit to narrowing your skill set to focus on damage (just like damage-optimized martials do), you will do very good and consistent damage (and you’ll have that consistency without support unlike the martials and you’d have the ability to front load damage into Severe/Extreme encounters and a lot of your damage will just have free riders).

Idk, kineticist has been wildly successful as a class. I think the general population of gamers (and their average age range) is so far removed from the foundational inspirations of DND that we can do the feat based casters in a new edition and not repeat the grognard teeth knashing of old (provided a pf3e doesnt repeat the OTHER shortcomings of DnD4e). It really seems like the easiest most readily believable alternative to the spell slots system. The generalist will suffer the most in a paradigm where casters only have access to 15-20 abilities but *shrug* focused themes are cooler than toolboxes. Wizard specifically is the only character concept that is greatly hindered, a small price to pay for all casters functioning smoother

I agree that if they were to make most magical classes use a bespoke way of doing their magic rather than all looping through the spellcasting subsystem, it wouldn’t be nearly as unpopular as it was back with 4E. PF1E was at least as popular as 4E, if not more so, and we have multiple confirmations from Paizo that PF2E reaches an audience that’s leaps and bounds bigger. They don’t need to cater to the old guard nearly as much for a hypothetical PF3E.

Personally I’d really like it if toolbox strategies at least remained viable even if they’re not the default assumption like they are in PF2E. That sort of gameplay is just extremely appealing to me (not just in Pathfinder and other tabletops, it bleeds into other games I play too, like Magic the Gathering), and I’d be sad to see it gone.

I also think that while the new crowd will not mourn the loss of spell slots specifically, they will be sad if all spellcasters lose their option to be explosive within limits. An at-will magic system that doesn’t use toolboxes necessarily requires that your magic can’t punch way above your weight, but to many players (myself included) punching way above your weight a limited number of times is literally the whole point of playing a spellcaster! Now that’s not to say it has to be done via Vancian casting (Kineticists’ Overflow and Psychics’ Unleash Psyche are two great ways to do it without tying it to a resource), but it’s something that I hope they’d preserve in a hypothetical move to more freeform. at will casting in the future.