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Now that we have a very assessable Common player option with Critical Hit Resistance in the Ooze Eidolon, the fact that this is the only kind of Resistance not really explained in either the old or the new resistance rules is an issue.

In the past despite never once being mentioned in the rules for resistances it could be reasonably inferred it worked identically to Resist All and it basically overwrote any other resistance you had lower than it and applied to every instance of damage if a crit occurred. But now Resistances no longer blanket apply to all instances of a type (or every type at once with All/Resist). That’s how Foundry handled it too.

Now it’s not at all clear to me if it’s to work like a weird form of Resist All that works the same as that, but only if the damage comes from a critical hit; or if it’s supposed to apply to the doubled damage before anything else as if that was one block of damage; or to any one chunk of that doubled damage as if it were its own thing before anything else; or something else I’ve just not thought of. My guess would be the first of those, but even that’s correct and confirmed Paizo really really needs to explicitly include the rules for how it’s handled in the now very detailed errata for Resistances that covers every single permutation save for Critical Hit Resistance.

The premaster Champion feature for years was (bolding mine):

Blade Ally: A spirit of battle dwells within your armaments. Select one weapon or handwraps of mighty blows when you make your daily preparations. In your hands, the item gains the effect of a property rune and you also gain the weapon's critical specialization effect. For a champion following the tenets of good, choose disrupting, ghost touch, returning, or shifting. For a champion following the tenets of evil, choose fearsome, returning, or shifting.

In the remaster it was replaced with (bolding mine):

Blessed Armament: Select one weapon or handwraps of mighty blows. You gain that armament's critical specialization effect, and you grant the armament a property rune of your choice from the following list: fearsome, ghost touch, returning, shifting, or vitalizing. During your daily preparations, you can change the spirit to inhabit a different armament, grant a different rune, or both.

This relatively minor wording change is an absolutely massive change in how these things work and makes the new version infinitely worse to the point of being nigh useless. Whereas before it was an extra benefit any Champion could add onto their weapon regardless of what kind, now it is just saving them a bit of gold and taking up an actual Rune slot - with all the restrictions and caveats that that implies. Everyone seemed pretty sure this was 'a change for seemingly no reason/too bad to be true' on release that would be dealt with via a Day 0 errata, but none came.

Then to make matters 'clearer' a few months later the Battle Harbinger Class Archetype for the Cleric came out, which has the Harbinger's Armament feat shown here (bolding still mine) at level 8:

Your deity grants you extra power that you have learned to channel into your weapons. Select one weapon or handwraps of mighty blows when you make your daily preparations. While in your hands it gains the effect of one property rune. Choose either fearsome, ghost touch, returning, shifting, or vitalizing. This rune does not count toward your maximum rune count, and this choice lasts 24 hours or until you make your next daily preparations, whichever comes first.

This is clearly a riff on the Champion feature and it uses the aforementioned original wording.

So to quote the Rogue Resiliency errata thread: "What is it? Bug or Feature?" And either way, do any players here think the way it works now is a good change?

So, my understanding of these types of spells is that you fully turn into said creature. Shark Form? You're still you in there but you're a full on shark. T-Rex Form? You're a T-Rex. The rules also make clear that when you transform you can't speak (cause your animal physically can't), and you lose any of your strikes that animal lacks - you as a crocodile physically have no way to make and throw your Leshy seedpods. So far makes absolutely perfect sense both thematically and mechanically. You also can't modify your statistics for various balance reasons. Also makes sense. Now when you decide what creature to polymorph into you have a fair bit to base your decision on according to what creature would be best suited for a given encounter or task. Things that can fly for aerial battles, things that do slashing if the enemy is weak to that, etc.

But now we get to my rules issue. If you're in a shoreside encounter as a level 1 Nimble Elf Wildshape Druid you've got a great land speed of 35. Let's say your Elf wants to charge across a beach and strike someone at the shore, then go deeper into the water to fight something there. If you're just looking at speeds you might think your best Animal Form option would be Crocodile or Snake since those are animals that can traverse on land and also manage in the water since they've got land and swim speeds.

You'd be wrong. No, if you turn into a Crocodile your land speed will drop to 25ft which is 10 lower than you could be getting... if you turn into a Shark. Yes since Sharks don't have a listed land speed - and they're a shark(!) - you might be confused, but since nothing says you lose your speeds that aren't in the stat blocks like they say you do for your strikes, by RAW if you turn into a Shark (something with no legs!) you can run across the beach at 35ft while holding your breath, stab someone, and then hop in the water with your new 35ft swim speed. And Foundry's PF2E System, because it's RAW, implements it this way.

But the heck do these spells work this way? Surely this can't be RAI right? Cause it makes no sense thematically and also arguably hurts Form diversity mechanically.

From what I’ve seen and heard from people who got their Player Core 2 PDFs early, the Tengu and Dragonblood ancestries can now gain a permanent fly speed upon taking a level 5 feat for a pseudo-flight and then a 9th level feat for a the real thing. Which is perfectly fair and reasonable to me given how powerful flight is in the system along with the fact that, for Tengu anyways, they’re straight up crow people with giant wings and so it’s already a bit weird that they can’t fly out of the gate. I’m also aware that for the Tengu these used to be at 9 and 13, and so this is a buff to them from how things worked premaster.

Awakened animals also have those feats, but their level 5 one requires a level 1 feat tax on top of that. This means that for Awakened Animals, for whom their feat choices are their primary way of mechanically demonstrating/matching what kind of animal they are, of the Flying Heritage need to use 3 of their 5 feats(!) on a simple fly speed that others can now do with 2 if they want to be an awakened eagle or bat or something that quintessentially flies as much as a crow (or dragon I guess) would.

Does anyone know why Awakened Animal works this way, and is there any hope of future errata to make it so that Strong of Wing (5) doesn’t require Take Flight (1) as a prerequisite so it’s but more flexible and closer to how the PC2 winged ancestries work? Usually I wouldn’t care much but given that reliant Awakened Animals are on their feats for their animal fantasy it’s now even sadder that you can’t really play as (for example) an awakened owl ‘properly’ until you’re level 9, and to do so you’ve given up getting the low-light vision they should have until even later because that’s a feat too. And then they have one last feat left for anything else on top of now being an owl.

But then again maybe this kind of concern/disappointment about how Flying Heritage pans out in retrospect after seeing Tengu is just me or maybe I’m missing something big in terms of balance considerations, so I’d be interested to see what the rest of you ah e to say on the topic.