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Anyway, mention of it being present in the upcoming Gamemastery Guide got me thinking, how exactly should Alignment be removed?

The Angelic Sorcerer by Default has Divine Lance, so in order to do this we need to deal with Law, Chaos, Good AND evil damage. And that's about it, champion aside classes don't really have alignment restrictions, and even if you took out the demands of the tenants of good, each archetype we have makes it's own demands plenty clear.

So, how to reconcile away these damage types, becomes about the only issue. (And of course, subbing in other domains for the gods who do have those explicit domains.) (And I guess replacing detection of alignment with detection of outsiders?)

Now, I feel like Good and Evil damage can kind of be reconciled with another quirky mechanic, Positive and Negative energy. This doesn't do any changes to most, say, Healing and Harming spells, just rewords them a little, but it means the *aesthetic* of good and evil damage can sort of be maintained.

I'm of course talking about Radiant and Necrotic.

Heal would still heal, or deal radiant damage to undead, but Good damaging effects would instead deal Radiant damage to everyone (with Celestial creatures having resistance to it as one might expect, and fiends and vampires and such having weakness).

And necrotic works fairly well as the darker mirror to this, although in some cases maybe just using fire would work better?

However, to fully integrate such an approach you'd likely want to have a few straight up Radiant damaging spells on both the Arcane and Primal lists, not as many as the former-good spells, but enough.

And, of course... The hell would you do with Lawful and Chaotic damage?

A gimmicky approach like the one 5e took for wild-magic-ish spells just feels kinda weird, but all the same these two seem to defy any attempt to just automatically replace all instances of Lawful damage with X, so I'm very curious to see how Paizo handles that.

Signature spells is an important mechanic for spontaneous casters, helping their small Known lists not feel like quite so much of an oppressive force... However, it's technically a Class Feature, so Multiclassing Sorcerers and Bards, who would struggle under the burden of an even smaller Known list, not to mention not having the focus spells which also help alleviate the burden of the core classes on the spells known segment of their lists...

They don't get it.

So, they're left without what is basically a core mechanic of spontaneous spellcasting, since it's consistently given to both Sorc and Bard the instant they can actually make use of them at 3.

This seems like an accidental oversight, since elsewhere in the book, discussions of spontaneous casting just assume Signature Spells are present when discussing heightening. If there were cases where you were supposed to have spontaneous casting without that feature, I feel like that would have also been worded to reflect it...

First, to explain the problem.

A ton of very generic combat feats like quick draw and power attack have been class locked, including the basic lines for each weapon, and generic maneuvers which could be learned by anyone with sufficient combat training, like I mentioned above.

To solve this, my suggestion is adding a new feat pool, Combat Feats.

Characters with a martial class (Rogue, Monk, Fighter, Barbarian, Ranger, Paladin) would be able to freely spend a class feat to take any one of these combat feats. (Existing pre-requisites would remain, of course.)

Characters who multiclass into one of those classes would also gain the ability to do this as part of their Archetype Dedication feat.

This leaves the ACTUAL class feat design space for things which interface directly with the class' features or flavour.

And, most importantly, this approach doesn't arbitrarily prevent people from making a Sword & Board Ranger or an Archer Paladin, or any similar flavours which might be slightly less common than your generic dual-wielding rangers or whatever, but is no less valid despite that.

It's definitely possible to create a solid class identity for every class without randomly gating off certain playing styles just because they're not the most common.