Kekkres's page

stuff

I mean, kinda, sorta, ish.

No rule actually exists that requires tiny races to spend extra actions to do things, the only reference to this "tiny penalty" is in the old sprite feat that removes said penalty. The rules for tiny PCs in howl of the wild makes no mention of this action tax for example.

It kind of reminds me of the pf1 feat "prone sniper" which removes the circumstance penalty to using ranged weapons while prone. A penalty that just does not exist.

By which I mean to say, that if evanescent wings has been Erratad to remove reference to this penalty, than it has basically ceased existing

I just start all my players off with two hero points and do not award additional ones most of the time

I'm skeptical that, without really significant and creative redesign, the new classes will inspire nearly as much as trust in this regard as the comparatively well-designed PH classes.

Ah well that really depends on the player, the commander is solidly a support class so if your player is the kind that wants to feel awesome on their own actions than commander will probobly not be for them. If however they enjoy the idea of being a power multiplier for the group or setting up combos with their teammates then there is a lot that can feel great.

stuff

1)So from what i have seen, the commander only really needs one ally who has a high value strike to get solid value, more gives them more flexibility sure, but so long as they have at least one full martial to give options to they should be fine.

2)For the commander, probobly not, the action economy fraud that commander allows is a pretty huge force multiplier, and each of these characters where built in isolation in an actual party the commanders would be leaning more towards options that activly aid the group and prove even more efficiant. for the guardian, eh, it varies on a fight by fight basis, although i will say the earlier encounter looked a lot more replacable than the later encounters

3) so in a party of (pulling out of my hat here) Commander, fighter, primal sorc, and investigator, i think the commander would still do well, many of its options like form up, quickin banner, or the temp hp cushion of plant banner are exeptionally useful to every class, and so long as they have one or two allies with fully runed weapons whos attacks they can cheat out they should be fine, as stated above they obviously gain more flexibility the more targets they have but even just one or two is good, (for instance in our last combat, almost all of the tactects where focused on aiding the gunslinger)

4) Commander, from what my players have told me feels pretty great right out of the box, for a completely new player i would probobly advize them toward a simpler class like fighter, barb or rogue, but i would put commander in the mid complexity teir, with things like magus or a prepared caster, but it certanly would not be something i would activly advize a new player avoid when cutting their teeth on the game like alchemist or orical.

Over the weekend I ran 3 mock battles with my group each at a different level and party comp.

Encounter 1, party level 4
Party: guardian, commander(melee), barbarian, ranger(bow)
Enemys:4 durauger 2 flaming skulls

Encounter 2, party level 8
Party: guardian, commander(ranged), barbarian, thaumaturge
Enemys:zombie dragon (elite) 2 sulpher zombies

Encounter 3, party level 15
Party: guardian, commander(melee), commander(ranged), gunslinger
Enemies: 2 beneficial worms.

Our findings: both classes feel incredibly solid, our guardian player did find that intercept attack was a much more engaging and reliable mechanic compared to taunt. Especially in the high level build where he had three reactions to intercept and had 10 feet of movement on each. Also tough cookie is a very silly feat.

Onto commander more good news both our commander testers got a lot of active use out of their abilities, stand outs being form up, plant banner, quickening banner, and fortunate blow. In our last test we had two commanders to see how they play in multiples and surprisingly they very rarely where stepping on each other's toes and managed to work around each other very cleanly.

Criticisms: our guardian found that it was actually not super common for the situation to line up where taunting actually made sense, and as such his threat methods where basically never online. Also there for the commander tactics, there are enough "generally useful" commands like strike hard or form up that preparing the more niche options like pincer attack doesn't make a lot of sense.

On the upside my guardian player and both commander players where very satisfied with gamefeeland feel both classes as they stand are very effective at filling their rolls.

So amidst everything else in this class i cannot help but notice that commander gets some of the quirkiest animal companion access among its feats.

Command steed starts off well, a basic young companion with extra banner utility, but then battle tested war horse is next, for mature companions and without the free action upside that is normally a great bonus. But as a bonus no one can mind control your horse and make it attack you, yay?

Then we get battle hardened destrier, where we finally get that free move, yay, but then it just stops, this horse we have invested a third of our total class feats into just never gets the animal companion capstone in specialties.

Just, am I alone thinking this is all just, really weird?

So, I realize this is EXTREMELY early into the remaster, to the point that officially it hasn't even officially started yet, but I feel like the new incarnation of magic schools are unsatisfying, an objective nerf to a class that was already mid, and worst of all incredibly uninteresting.

So schools have gone from a broad swath of magic, roughly one eighth of all spells to basically worse/more restricted sorcerer bloodlines. My initial thought was to scrap "school slots" and make wizards pure four slot casters who can spontaneous cast their school spells from otherwise prepared slots. This avoids the issue of dead slots that late game wizards are currently stuck with but it makes the schools even MORE "just sorcerer bloodline" and more subjectively i feel like wizard is THE prepared caster and giving them baseline access to spontaneous casting feels like it goes against their identity.

So back to the drawing board I go, to try to find a change that gives wizards an injection of interesting while keeping and ideally enhancing their identity. Which is when I was hit with the thought that wizards are usually portrayed as surrounded by parchment, tomes and scrolls, and was hit with inspiration; prepared scrolls.

Essentially wizards loose their school slots entirely, becoming baseline 3 slot casters. HOWEVER when a wizard is doing daily prep they can choose to prepare a spell in their mind, or in the form of temporary daily scrolls. Any wizard from a school with a curriculum can use a spell slot to prepare two temp scrolls of that slots rank, inscribing them with spells from their curriculum. The unified magical theory school can only prepare a single scroll from a spell slot but it can be of any spell they know, rather than being curriculum locked.

Further more wizards gain access to the "rescribe" activity, which allows a wizard to spend ten min "correcting" one of their daily scrolls and changing the spell to any other valid option (of the same level of course)

This has a few benefits, first and foremost hauling half a library's worth of parchment around every day feels very wizard and as such i like it. Furthermore it provides interesting trade offs. Scrolls have an innate loss of action economy due to having to be drawn curriculum wizards can choose how much of their vast spell access to trade away for staying power, potentially getting 50% more spells than a sorcerer if they go all in, in exchange for half the "repertoire" and worse action economy. Umt wizards who only go 1 to 1 on scrolls are only trading away their action economy in exchange for spell flexibility making them the defacto best users of the more niche spells in the game that would rarely find their way into a repertoire or prepared list.

I am under no illusions that this is perfect or even that great out the gate but I wanted to get other peoples thoughts and input before I move to try testing it out.

Just a note that standard proficiencies each follow different increase rates according to their type and to the classes.

Not sure all proficiencies mentioned above should follow the model of Acrobatics with Acrobat for example.

I mean, so far all instances of Skill autoscaling in the game (with the sole exception of bardic lore) all follow the pattern of expert 2, master 7, legend 15, unlike weapon, armor, or spell proficiencies there is a pretty codified rate of advancement for skill proficiencies

I completely Agree though i will point out that the general feats now do Scale (but explicitly at caster rates, rather than being based on the proficiency of your own class)

My issue with the new dying rules is less the lethality they have in of themselves and more the disasterous way they interact with persistent damage. If you have wounded 1, and a source of persistent damage and get knocked to zero, the party has exactly 1 turn to bring you into the positive before your dead.

I think a Neutral deity does not care about Evil or Good, even extremes of it.

So I read it more as a "as long as you faithfully respect my edicts and anathemas, you can go play the game of Holy vs Unholy if you wish. I do not care one iota."

The way I am choosing to interoperate the sanctifications is as sides in a conflict, the great cosmic war between the upper and lower planes.

I am all in on everything except the dying changes/clarification, and to a lesser extent the status removal spells being changed to counteract checks (lord knows i wont be keeping track of the level of spells that caused each individual status)

Kekkres wrote:

Blave wrote:

Also Mark mentioned in the RfC stream that the armor and weapon proficiency general feats now scale to expert at evels 13 and 11 respectively, i.e. at the levels casters become expert in weapons/armor.

Ugh, that is almost worse than them having done nothing.

Why? They weren't gonna let people cross the martial/caster proficiency divide with a feat. That was never going to be on the table. BUUUUT, now casters can scale martial weapons and heavier armors without them being traps

it is perfectly serviceable for casters, however for martials they now get two more levels of functionality where they can use the weapon they want to be using before it becomes useless again. they should have tied weapon proficiency to unarmed, and armor proficiency to unarmored so that it scales at the users normal rate.

Edit: I just want to be able to use a nodachi without being either a fighter or a tengu, this does nothing to help how incredibly narrow access to advanced weapons is.

Also Mark mentioned in the RfC stream that the armor and weapon proficiency general feats now scale to expert at evels 13 and 11 respectively, i.e. at the levels casters become expert in weapons/armor.

Ugh, that is almost worse than them having done nothing.

magnuskn wrote:

Lord Fyre wrote:

I'm with you on this. I'm not sure why they are doing this.

Not everybody loves lugging around a giant brick once a week (or more). Also, D&D before Pathfinder used to have the Player's Guide and Dungeon Masters Guide.

It is odd that to "move further away from D&D" they are going to split the core into 2 books...like D&D :/

I mean, first of all. core was already two books crb and apg, those where "core rules" and "core expansion" they are just shuffling the content around between them so that the layout and content is better laid out and you have for instance, all the core ranger feats in one book rather than two.

Second, original Core rulebook was already an incredibly large book, to the point that a lot of lgs's where hesitant to carry more than a couple copies at a time due to the amount of space they took up, and this problem would have gotten much much worse if they tried to combine the two of them into one behemoth 1200 page monstrosity. by splitting one really big book and one standard book into two slightly above average books it makes stocking them much more manageable for physical stores.

honestly, the "solution" i would propose at least for my own house rules is as follows;
The flurry of blows feature for the monk class works with any unarmed or melee weapon strike they have proficiency with. Does this allow a monk to potentially flurry with a greataxe? yes. do i think that this is an especially big deal? No, i do not, given the power of the stance strikes and the opportunity cost involved in grabbing scaling proficiency with such a weapon.

Monastic Weaponry gives the monk scaling proficiency in all weapons with the monk tag.

ancestral weaponry is no longer a feat as it is no longer needed.

Monastic archer stance allows the user to flurry with all ranged weapons, rather than an al a cart list.

and most importantly, the "flurry of blows" feat from the monk archetype only allows the user to flurry with unarmed strikes, or weapon strikes with the agile, finesse or monk tags.

I would also recommend renaming the "monk" weapon tag to something else that implies a link to martial arts which has the additional benefit of encouraging other things to check for that tag

This whole thing is spiraling off topic, the question at hand is weather "targeting any defence" is actually a major benefit as it is often framed as. Getting into the minutia of all the other aspects of the martial caster 'discussion' will just turn this into a copy of the two or so dozen threads that have gone over that topic broadly

Kekkres wrote:

For comparison martial accuracy vs ac on an on level target averages around 60% and reaching 70% via off-guard is not usually a tall ask.

I personally feel there are also fallacies around martials. First, martials don't hit 60% of the time, they hit 60% of the time with their first attack. Once you take the second attack into account, it goes down to 47.5% (to be precise) which is not that high anymore.

Also, martials have a lot of situations where they can't apply their damage properly. Physical resistance is rather common and even if it's not a resistance to all physical damage but a targeted one you can end up unable to circumvent it (especially Fighters who tend to use a single type of weapon). High AC also happens regularly when low AC is rare and extremely low AC often comes with critical immunity, which partially compensates it. There are also "class specific resistances", like Precision immunity that is screwing Rogues, Swashbuckler and Investigators.

Melee combat often bears a lot of risks, with auras and reactions screwing characters. And obviously, you need to get to melee range as most melee martials are much worse when they use ranged attacks.

When there are discussions about martials vs casters, martials are often buffed (as you do by pointing out how off-guard gives them 10% extra chances to hit) but never debuffed (despite being more often debuffed and more impacted by debuffs as they don't have an effect on failure). My experience is that martials are sometimes screwed, too. And as such the "ideal martial" is as comparable to the "ideal caster" than the average martial is to the average caster.

This is all true, my reference point with martials is more to demonstrate how a the chance that a creature fails its weakest save (55%) does not really register as a strength/advantage when a martials first attack has roughly an equivalent/slightly superior success rate. My napkin math is not advanced enough to produce numbers I am confident of for more situational analysis, but anecdotally i have found that the options a team has to assist a martial struggling in a fight are more numerous and generally more reliable than those a team can employ to aid a struggling caster. Also I only brought up off guard because I have a rogue in my party and thus far off guard is almost always in play through flanking and it is something that properly feels like "having an advantage".

I mean I have always felt that "targeting the weakest save" as a strength of casters was always a bit of a fallacy. Targeting the weakest save is a borderline requirement, not a privilege. The average on level monster has a weak save that passes the save 45% of the time, a mid save that will beat the check 55-60% of the time (still functional for spells with good success effects, eg slow, but pretty poor odds for anything that relies on a failure) and one wall high save that passes the check 75-80% of the time with a 25-30% chance of getting a crit.

There are exceptions of course; oozes tend to have have truly abysmal reflexes, and humanoids tend to have saves that are all closer to mid, rather than having standout high and low saves but for 80% of enemies those base rates are within 5% of correct.

Given that is the case unless you exclusively employ strong success impact spells, targeting low saves is required to have any sort of success. You are not rewarded for exploiting a weakness, you are punished if you go for anything else.

For comparison martial accuracy vs ac on an on level target averages around 60% and reaching 70% via off-guard is not usually a tall ask. So the comparative lackluster success rate of 55% for "targeting the weakpoint" feels a bit disingenuous.

For what it's worth my personal fix for my home game is giving all "normal monsters" two low saves and one high instead of low mid high. They still need to look out for those brick wall high saves but any given foe can be reliably hit by 2/3 of the casters kit instead of 1/3, without bolstering the classes power ceiling

My vote definitely goes to Asmodeus as being the one to die, even if mostly because of meta reasons.

That being said, having Hell descend into "civil war" from the power vacuum that Asmodeus' absence would cause would be perfect for both of our tables, since one of our tables has a high level Evil Hellknight PC whom could be one of the entities trying to vie for power, and another of our tables has re-emerging Hellknights as a plot point in the setting after the overthrowing of Asmodean worship in Cheliax (which our Evil characters in that group have determined that the grandchild of Thrune has discovered a way to call Devils from Hell back into the world of the living), so even ignoring meta reasons, Asmodeus being the one to die, even if behind the scenes, would be fitting for our tables.

they mentioned in one of the reddit threads that the death(/s?) in question where put into place for purely story reasons and had nothing to do with ogl nonsense

I would have made them baseline 4 prepared slot casters and given them the ability to spontaneously cast spells from their curriculum, so they always have their thematic spells online but without otherwise containing them, also some better focus spells cause some of those wizard focus spells are kind of crap

Double post.
From what I have gathered holy/unholy seems to be "aligned or allied with the upper/lower" plains rather than a statement on your personal behavior/morals

Karmagator wrote:

Pharasma forbids both holy and unholy.

This is kind of disappointing. Isn't holy good for fighting undead as well as fiends? Fighting undead is a large part of what Pharasmins do.

no fighting undead is what vitality damage is for, there are no common undead with weakness/good and I very much doubt there will be any undead with weakness/holy either

so, and this is actually hilarious timing I just finished my Mummies mask campaign a couple of weeks ago as my last ongoing pf1 game, and in it, one of my players was a drow swashbuckler named Merriander whos mission statement was to find a way to wipe out the drow people on a quest born of pure spite and so in our last session knowing what was going on i gave him an artifact that was an ancient superweapon of hakoteps that would allow him to wipe the drow from every one of their cities and wipe them out systematically, and in the intermeaning years from mummies mask to modern pf2 serpentfolk have taken advantage of the power vaccume to establish themselves as a major power in the darklands

I think mesmerist could do well as a bard class-archetype, give it a unique muse, psychic casting, and some spooky feats and composition spells and you are mostly there

i kind of feel like they shouldnt have given bows deadly, like, it kind of makes it hard to be excited for guns doing crazy damage on crits as their thing when bows also do exceptional damage on crits, just a bit less so, without all the downsides that guns have, like at high level you are looking at 9d12 base damage (average 58.5) vs 11D8 base damage (average 48.5)for guns vs bows, yeah guns hit harder, especially early on (average 19.5 vs 13.5 at level 1), but bows still have awesome crits, and like, are all those downsides guns have really worth like 10 extra damage that only occurs on a crit?

edit i am ignoring property runes, specialization damage and flat damage since that is applicable to both equally

I mostly dislike guns for doing the exact same things that pf1 did with them; giving them downsides that exist for the gunslinger to solve, and upsides that only the gunslinger can really take advantage of.

i mean there are no evolutionary implications because this is an explicitly creationist setting? like the answer to most questions about why something is the way it is in the setting is because "some god wanted that way", or occasionally "some wizard messed everything up and now monsters"

One thing I've realized I need recently is for the Bullet Dancer archetype to get some errata so it's actually playable.

bullet dancer really should have been a monk-class archetype, it is clearly not designed for any other class, but the fact that another class could take it causes it to compromise its own functionality

Kekkres wrote:

Claxon wrote:

However, I'm not opposed to letting magi grab Running Reload as a level 4 feat, but it would work exactly as written.

honestly, given the lack of a generic scaling firearms archetype in the style of archer or mauler (which they really should have had in g&g but whatever) I make running reload available to any character who wants to use firearms as a level 4 feat

I think that's reasonable, if the player character has been allowed access to firearms in the first place (normally uncommon) then it's not unreasonable to allow running reload to help deal with the action tax that guns have. However, stride or stepping and reloading isn't nearly the level of benefit that recharge spellstrike + reload is for a magus.

To me it's obvious you can't have a reload benefit that good at such an early level.

Compare it also to the reload options you get from Gunslinger ways, and they're kind of mediocre benefits while also allowing the gunslinger to reload which they absolutely must do.

There's just not any amazing reload + do things options published that I found when looking.

The best one is probably reloading strike, but forces the use of one handed weapons. I'd be willing to maybe allow recharge + reload but of one handed weapons only. People would probably pickup the jezail, but be roughly equivalent to a bow, but at the cost of a feat (although you'd have fatal so minor net benefit above bow).

hmm perhaps as an alternative, perhaps some sort of free action metamagic that would allow a magus to tie a reload into the somatic components of a spell, that would let them reload on their conflux spells, as well as any normal spells they cast, but would not work on the base recharge action (not a spell) or spellstrike itself (which does not work with metamagic)

However, I'm not opposed to letting magi grab Running Reload as a level 4 feat, but it would work exactly as written.

honestly, given the lack of a generic scaling firearms archetype in the style of archer or mauler (which they really should have had in g&g but whatever) I make running reload available to any character who wants to use firearms as a level 4 feat

unicore, that sort of thinking is honestly my problem with how casters have been handled as a whole, the trepidation that some theoretical optimizer going through every bestiary memorizing every single possible benefit that any summon could have, and pulling out the optimal monster with the correct damage type for the ideal benefit, and balancing spell casting around that situation just sort of hobbles the mechanics as a whole given that, in my experience people just summon stuff that sounds cool, they don't care about optimizing or finding ideal options they just want to summon big monsters

It'd be limiting functional reload compatible with Spellstrikes to 1-2 times per fight.

Doing Spellstrike + conflux, then Spellstrike + reload, then recharge + Spellstrike is still 3 straight rounds of Spellstrike plus the Stride (or whatever the conflux spell ends up giving you), which is about as much as what the bow magus can expect (Stride + Spellstrike, recharge + Spellstrike, recharge + Spellstrike).

If you're opening with a True Strike Spellstrike, then you only get two full rounds before things break down (True Strike + Spellstrike, conflux + Spellstrike), but you'd get the free Stride over the Starlit Span magus (True Strike + Spellstrike, recharge + Spellstrike).

After both these points the gun magus has a harder time, but it's using stronger weapons and Starlit Span is already pretty high up on the power curve; I think it's fair to ask for something in exchange for the higher weapon damage. You're still not that much worse off than a melee magus, who doesn't get the baseline expectation of turreting with Spellstrike every round.

but... only like 4 guns actually have higher than short bow damage and only one has higher than longbow damage, and given that composite bows give the option of adding str to damage, a normal hit from a 0 reload gun will still be less damage than the normal hit with a bow, the only advantage guns have is comes from crits, in 90% of combats if you are spell striking with a gun, you will either not crit so its exactly the same, or you will crit on something that would have died anyway... so its exactly the same, the only situation where the gun is actually better in practice is when you crit against a foe who would not have died to a crit bow spell strike anyway which is already an absurd amount of damage.

on a semi related note, can we please just... lose the reload feature on slings? Like, I know that contractually every RPG that is dnd adjacent is obligated to make slings pure garbage, but like, you don't reload a sling anymore than you reload a bow.

What about a conflux spell that allows you to Interact to reload and then maybe do another minor thing like Stride? Should limit the issue of Spellstrike + recharge that would come up with a non-conflux recharge + reload action.

I mean... limiting functional reload to 1-2 times per fight seems like pretty unfun design to me, I think a baseline reload option of some kind is better, if you want it to be more restrictive maybe make arcane cascade a prerequisite to using the reload action or something

the thing is, for spell strike currently bows are viable and guns are completely not, if we improved guns, guns would become viable, and better than bows are currently, but bows would still be completely viable, a better option existing (which is only actually better when you crit) does not make your option bad, especially when, like I said, bows would still have all the advantage whenever using your entire turn for one big hit and a recharge is not the play.

Karmagator wrote:

I really need a 1st or 2nd level Magus class feat that makes reload weapons viable for spellstriking. Recharge + Interact to reload as a single action for example.

The thing is, that would make guns objectively better than bows for starlit span maguses. That would effectively get rid of the reload that guns have, and the d10 of the Harmona gun or the d8 with fatal aim d12 of the Jezail is better than the d8 with deadly d10 of the long bow, and they lack the long bows volley trait. I agree there should be more support for guns in general, but it would kinda suck if guns became the objective meta choice

I mean.... so? right now bows are objectively better, I don't see how switching it to be the other way around is a problem, especially given that bows would still have all of the additional versatility for whenever spell strike isn't the awnser

As I said in my previous post, looking at the math for summons I was surprised at how bad they actually are. I hadn't really looked before, because I was never a huge fan of summons. In PF1 they were broken (too good) for classes that could summon many or long lasting summons because they had the same attack and damage as a (non-optimized) martial. If someone focused on it strongly, you could increase it even further. It was definitely too good. In PF2, they're also broken but in the opposite direction. They are bad, at least for making strikes. Special abilities can add utility and maybe some special attacks can remain useful, but it doesn't fit the narrative space I expected after I looked into it.

Even looking at creatures some levels higher, the attack rolls still seem a bit low, but at least they're not "only succeed on a nat 20" bad.

I do think there needs to be some adjustments. Summons shouldn't approach martial levels of attack bonus and accuracy, but they shouldn't need to roll a 20 to hit either.

I think the sweet spot would be somewhere around 1 to 2 points lower in potential attack bonus that a barbarian, ranger, or champion.

what if we took a page out of illusionary creature, and had summons attack with the summoners spell attack bonus? that would make them sub-par compared to martials but not abysmal throughout progression

Someone more familiar with the lore than I am can correct me on this - but isn't that also something that was changed in PF2: that summoning spells are no longer the teleportation of an existing actual creature, but are a construction of a temporary entity out of magic and understanding of how that creature is supposed to be.

so per my understanding, the "summon creature" spells all create a temporary magical construct, a generic member of that kind of being. there is no original, and the summoned creature disolves into magic at the end of the spell weather it is killed or the spell simply ends. Contrasting this, spells/rituals like planer binding/planer ally summon a specific individual who is pulled from... wherever they are and is personally brought to wherever the spell/ritual was cast. Once the rituals hold on them ends, they are returned to their home plane, if they die while "called" however, they are just dead and stay where they are.

Lucerious wrote:

So one says it’s a bad rule and another days the designers allow you to change the rule when it’s bad. This comes off as some circular talking. It doesn’t deal with the statistical downside of summons and how they don’t keep up at all to what the PCs encounter in combats.

I'm not arguing for the Ambiguous Rules rule for the Summoned creature's stats. That is very much not ambiguous even if it is a problem for what a lot of people are wanting to do with summoned creatures.

My Ambiguous Rules argument is only for GMs saying that you can summon a creature, but can't directly control it like a minion.

its not ambiguous though, there is nothing unclear or potentially unintentional here. the rule says "summoned creatures fight your enemies to the best of their abilities, and you can only attempt to command them if you can effectively communicate with creatures of that type, and even then that the dm has final say on if it feels like listening" saying that this can be disregarded due to a rule that refers to "Sometimes a rule could be interpreted multiple ways." makes no sense

Summoned creatures gain the minion trait, so I'd say minion is the specific here. Since it is the modifier

if minion was more specific than summoned, than those summoned rules would not exist in the first place no? all summoned monsters are minions so why would they write rules for summoned monsters that do not apply to any of the monsters pcs summon?

against any solo encounter, the point of a summon is to be a distracting, magical not-actual meat bag to waste an action or two and maybe do some special trick that is useful in this specific encounter. The ability of the monster to attack on top of potentially wasting actions from the solo creature, either by attacking the summon or having to move around the summon in potentially restricted terrain is all bonus options.

This is the same spell you can use to summon an creature (eagle/fey/dragon/etc) to fly above and caw for every creature it sees on the other side of a wall, or on the roof of a building. Or use to potentially cast lower level spells that are not even on your spell list. Or get extra AoE attacks against multiple lower level enemies. Or just use to be able to say hello to a Unicorn and make a little boy's dreams come true.

The point being, "This spell that can do a ton of things doesn't also do good attacking!!!" is a difficult position to argue. If you want a spell that is spiritual weapon, consider memorizing spiritual weapon. Or flaming sphere. Or Summon Draconic Legion.

your first example is explicitly non raw, summoned creatures attack your foes but otherwise just act as a creature of that kind, i know this isnt how most folks play but raw most utility uses of summoned creatures dont function unless they can speak and you can talk them into doing X.

I completely disagree. While the chosen balance point is arbitrary, building the entire system upon that choice makes the interactions of the system with itself significantly less arbitrary. The real arbitrary aspect is the feelings. This is embodied in the fact that, in the same situation, you experience 'feelsbad' and I do not. As the 'feelsbad' is not unanimously felt, it diminishes it as an overly relevant data point.

my man, this is a game that people play to have fun, if it feels bad, that is the most important thing, arguably the only thing that matters. You are correct that what feels bad will vary between person to person, but acting like, not having fun is somehow a non issue is like... you know what games are for right?

After thinking about it for a while, i think the best solution for casters as a whole would be to drop the mid save of most enemies to be on par with a standard low save, that way the existing math of the game is not broken, the numbers are all within the existing bounds, and enemies still keep their brick wall high saves that force casters to pack a plan B, it would just allow much more freedom in spell usage and targeting, allowing a preferred spell to be viable against 2/3 of enemies instead of 1/3 also allows for thematic casters to have a lot less feel-bad situations

i mean part of that is that situatuational abilities seem to be balanced with no regard to the fact that they are situational, as seen by the lastwell book that had various anti undead tech that would be pretty ok if it worked all the time, but instead are borderline useless because they have a "balanced" effect that only turns on in certain situations and is just a feat thrown in the trash the rest of the time.

Don't darkvision make everything show up in black and white without any colors? In which case, there's still no need for coloration.

so some context on this tradition; originally in ADND darkvision was infravision and lowlight was ultravision. beings with infravison could see other creatures and navigate their surroundings based on body and ambient heat, which is also why they where completely unable to differentiate color or read using this sight. beings with lowlight vision could glean information from the faintest amount of background radiation and as such could see pretty clearly anywhere that had access to the open sky. obviously dnd and pf have dropped the pseudo scientific technobabble in favor of magic people with magic eyes, but I thing its still a good point of reference for describing things

I think this and people being salty that they can't build their spell list the way the want to focus on thematic spells as opposed to taking a variety of things to respond to various situations probably covers about 80% of the issues people have.

more or less, casters who play like god casters, in prior editions combing books for good spells, memorizing the bestiary and only targeting the enemy's weakness numbers, using battlefield control and debuffs to reduce complex problems to cakewalks, those casters who tore pf1e and 3.5 apart have been brought down to acceptably powerful, they are still good, game-changing even, but they are balanced enough. the issue is that when you bring "making use of every possible advantage" down to average, you toss casual play into the dirt, the guy who builds a sorcerer skims the spell list for spells that sound neat and just wants to cast some neat spells and go on an adventure with their buddies on an adventure and find their spells don't seem to stick and they run out too quickly.

then they come online and ask about it and are bombarded with, "you need to only target weak saves" "make sure your dm is using the right house rules so that rk gives you the info you need" "make sure you buy wands and staves or you will just run out of spells in the later game" "completely ignore crit fail effects on spells and focus on the success effect most of the time" "don't use spell attacks without set up they won't work" which is... mostly good advice but its a ton of information that the game just does not tell you, that is allegedly mandatory to play a caster "right" a huge amount of mental overhead that martials just don't have to deal with, and accomplishing nothing but making this worse some amount of people will simply be responding with "your wrong, your lying, you just want to be op" which isn't helping anyone

my issue with population is that all the core non human ancestories are treated as sort of omnipresent minorities that are found, to some degree almost everywhere, but in numbers so small that they cannot possibly be a stable population there, like, do half of all elves and dwarves just decide do nomad throughout golarion until they find a human city to settle down in or something?

I mean the reason the witch is like that is not a mystery, it wasn't some intentional decision to make the witch what it is currently, the person in charge of writing the class left midway through its development, and the rest of the team working on the book had to cobble a functional class together from leftover notes, ideas, and half-finished work, all while keeping up with their own parts of the book. That's why the class is so all over the place with no real mechanical identity.

I hate it... because of heightening...

While it doesn't apply to cantrips and focus spells, it's pretty taxing to use a higher spell solt to heighten a spell now.

I wish there was a way to spend 1 action / 1 heightened level instead, with Concentration checks to avoid losing your casting.

I agree with this, between cantrips and focus spells the total number of spells in general stops being a problem by level 5, you have more than enough room to never want for more options, with the important exception of spells that demand heightening, such as damage spells, summons, and incapacitation spells all of which have a hard per-day limit of between 3 and 8, that other kinds of spells just don't need to deal with.