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This is the first of the preview posts I have been disappointed in. While I like some of the stuff I am seeing in here, it seems like other parts were not well thought out. The item descriptions need some serious editing for clarity, but I think others have covered that topic well enough, so I will focus on other things. I apologize in advance for the length of my post.

Many of the changes we have seen in moving from PF1 to PF2 can be attributed to two guiding principles: streamlining the rules and replacing boring necessities with interesting choices. When it comes to items, the Big Six are definitely an example of the boring necessities, so rolling them into other items allows for more interesting item choices. Which brings us to the primary topic of this blog: resonance.

There are three basic categories of magic item—permanent, rechargeable, and consumable (note that a single item can have different effects that fall under different categories). As it stands, each of these three interact with resonance. Permanent items require investment when you put them on. This allows us to toss out the old body slot system in favor of wearing whatever you want as long has you have the resonance points to invest in them. Rechargeable items require you to spend a resonance point when you activate them and then do it again when you replenish your points on the next day. This allows us to pool activation points together instead of having to track each item individually. Resonance does a great job of streamlining these two categories, reducing the bookkeeping involved (though I do find it a bit odd they draw from the same pool).

Consumable items are used up when they are activated, but now also require you to spend a resonance point. Instead of streamlining things, this change just adds another step of bookkeeping—a problem further exacerbated by multi-charge items like wands. (What even is the point of wands now? They used to be essentially a cheap way to get a scroll you can cast a bunch of times. Now it’s a scroll you want to cast a bunch of times, but can’t because you don’t have that many resonance points). Furthermore, it feels bad to have a single action depleting two resource pools at once, and from a mechanical standpoint, it makes very little sense. Since the magic item is consumed in the process of its use, it seems like the energy spent is coming from the item itself. Why does it require me to provide resonance? Why does the fact that I activated my pants of exquisite fashion a few times earlier today prevent me from drinking a health potion? Finally, for many players, consumables are emergency items; they are only to be used when rechargeable resources are insufficient. Requiring both rechargeable and consumable resources to draw from the same pool of resonance destroys this play style and seems to defeat the purpose of many items that are meant to be used as a last resort.

It is easy to see from the last 13 pages of discussion that the item that catalyzed this change is the wand of cure light wounds. It’s clear why they wanted to make a change— the wand of CLW is practically a required item in PF1, and that goes against the design guideline of reducing necessities in favor of interesting choices. Still, it seems like they chose to attack the symptom rather than the root of the problem. (As an aside, why is it even a big deal that a high level character uses a low level item? A master carpenter doesn’t stop using a pencil because it’s a lowly apprentice’s tool. A high level cavalier shouldn’t be forced to feed her hippogriff mount +4 Oats of Culinary Delight when some good ol’ hay gets the job done just fine.)

Every party needs healing. You can find other ways through locked doors, you can summon things to take hits, you can UMD the MacGuffin activation device, but there is no substitute for healing. When you are down to 2hp and there is a dragon in the room between you and the exit, you have two choices: heal or write up a new character sheet. To understand why the wand of CLW became the standard solution to this need, we need to understand the three economies of the game—character build, item, and action—and how they interact.

The character build economy determines what abilities your character can have. You can choose to boost your skills, cast all kinds of spells, or hit stuff really hard, but your character can’t do everything at once. Choosing to be good at something always has an opportunity cost. When it comes to healing, only a few PF1 classes can be good at it without significant investment that seriously hampers their ability to do other things. Since healing is an entirely reactive action, many people find it quite boring and so there is a dearth of people who will spend their character build resources on improving their healing ability. This means that many parties have to fill their healing needs with magic items.

The action economy determines what your character can do in a given amount of time. There is a limited number of actions in each turn, so each action you take has an opportunity cost. A wand of CLW will heal 1d8+1, which is an okay use of an action for a low level character, but terrible for a high level character. When it comes to actions in combat, they need to stay as level appropriate as possible. However, in PF1, it is simply better to end combat as quickly as possible and then heal up afterwards than it is to spend precious actions trying to heal your party when your enemy is still attacking you.

The item economy determines how your character uses their gold to outfit themselves with items. As earlier posters have explained, item costs have to increase faster than item power to keep the economy balanced; otherwise you get low level characters spending some extra money to get an overpowered sword or heal their entire hit point pool in a single action. This difference in progression means that for cumulative effects like healing, it is more economically efficient to spam low level healing than it is to use the more action efficient method of casting one high level heal. So, when nobody is building their character to heal and healing in combat in generally inefficient, the cheap wand of CLW becomes the easy answer.

So how does PF2 change this? Wands now require resonance to activate, meaning the item economy has another resource to track. This doesn’t do anything to encourage more interesting item choices, because it doesn’t change how important healing is; it just means that we need to decide between the gold efficient low level wands and the resonance and action efficient high level wands. It leaves us feeling like O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi—we either have money to spend on cool magic items that we are unable to activate or we have plenty of resonance without interesting items to spend it on.

I find this especially frustrating, because the other changes coming in PF2 lead me to believe that wand of CLW spam wouldn’t be as prevalent anyway. We know there are more ways to spend character build resources on healing: the medicine skill can be trained to heal hp damage, and there was apparently a barbarian build tested that functioned quite well as the party healer. Meanwhile, the new action economy means spending an action in combat no longer precludes you from taking an action to help end combat sooner. By making in-combat healing practical, higher level healing items now have a reason to be used.

TL;DR, we’ll see what happens when we playtest, but right now consumables using resonance feels like a poor solution to a problem that might not exist.