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This ability was one of my two main mechanical concerns about the class before the playtest document dropped. I think this deserves its own thread since the quarry mechanic is such a big part of the class.

Mark Quarry relies on three conditions:

1. You must be facing at least one enemy whose level is equal to or higher than yours.
2. You must find signs of the enemy in advance.
3. You must be in a situation where you can take 10 minutes to use Mark Quarry.

This works just fine for monster hunting quests, which makes sense for a monster hunter class. In other situations though, these conditions might not always get fulfilled. This makes it such that the slayer can't reliably use all of its features in all campaigns.

The first condition will probably be met fairly frequently. However, combats where every enemy is lower level than the party can still be serious threats and such will be encountered decently often. Even if the reason there are no enemies of at least PL is that the fight is supposed to be a cake walk (e.g. to show how far the party has come or for environmental storytelling), that just means that the slayer doesn't get to use all of its fun toys in that encounter.

Conditions 2 and 3 are an issue more consistently. In my experience, it is very common to be ambushed or otherwise have very little information going into a quest. A pretty common quest premise in all of our campaigns has been that we have to go to a place and fetch something. We know that there is likely to be danger but don't know the exact nature of it. In this case, it's really a coin flip whether or not it's realistic to find the necessary information before something attacks. If you either find out about the enemy when you're already too near to take 10 minutes to mark it or it finds you before you find it, you might have to enter a fight without having a quarry. You might even be tracking a quarry only to run into a different enemy eligible for Mark Quarry before you see your actual quarry.

If I had to guess, I'd say that one reason why 2 and 3 exist is to reward preparation. This is a good idea in principle, but it's not necessary in practice. This is because that is something the reinforcing mechanic is already doing. If you're able to prepare in advance, you can, for example, get a bonus to saves against certain enemies, proc a weakness, or resist a key damage type. The reward for preparation should not be the freedom to use abilities tied to Mark Quarry, it should be a chance to benefit from carefully choosing which trophies to use.

There's also currently the awkward case where you know you will eventually want to track and possibly RK about a specific creature that has plot relevance, but have more pressing matters to attend to first. If the creature is the same level as you, you could become worse at both of these things by leveling up, since the +2 from Mark Quarry is replaced by a +1 to proficiency from the level up. This is kind of an edge case, but I do think leveling up should make you better at things, not worse.

I'm sure that in some campaigns Mark Quarry would work just fine as it is, but I think reducing the effect of table variance on an ability that so many feats and all of the primary tools rely on would be a good idea. I'm just spitballing here, but here are some ideas:

1. Remove the level requirement from Mark Quarry. This would allow a slayer to operate normally no matter what kind of enemies the GM throws at the party. A reasonable compromise would be to limit trophies to only creatures of your level or higher. This would keep the trophy acquisition process as it is, while making the slayer's abilities less situational. Then again, you can already use a trophy gained from a level 1 enemy at level 20, provided that you claimed it at level 1. Because of that, I think it would be fine to allow trohies to be claimed from lower level enemies.

2. Make Instant + Endless Enmity a part of the chassis. This would allow you to still gain a quarry if you get ambushed. You would still have to spend your reaction, so no going On the Hunt, and you have to delay to go after the enemy or only get the benefits starting on your second turn. I know that Endless Enmity is currently a mid-level feat, but it honestly doesn't seem too strong. (These should be available at level 1. I can imagine paizo deciding to give these at like level 3, for some reason.)

These solutions might not be the correct ones, but I think something needs to be done. Also worth noting that there are already feats to address these issues. I just don't think they do enough, and chassis issues should not be solved with feats.

I've been wondering about this for a while, and the final release doesn't seem to have changed auto-fire, so here we are. Either I've misunderstood the mechanics or I just don't get the flavor.

Auto-fire is very similar to cone area fire (It probably doesn't even deserve to be a separate mechanic, but that's beside the point.), but area fire is a lot easier to understand flavor-wise. You fire a shotgun blast, a volley, or whatever in an area. Because you aren't aiming precisely, it's a save instead of an attack roll. You expend an amount of ammunition that does not depend on the amount of targets because you aren't firing at individual targets, you are firing at the entire area. Everything makes sense from an in-world perspective.

If you use the same flavor of shooting indiscriminately for auto-fire, everything makes sense. Except for the expend cost. Why does the expend cost scale with the amount of targets? Maybe you simply turn on full-auto and shoot so fast you can hit multiple targets. But then, if you're aiming at each target separately, shouldn't you be able to exclude targets from the area? What if there's an invisible target you're completely unaware of? Currently, a PC can look at the magazine (assuming it's trivial to check how much ammo you have left) and realize that there must have been one more creature in the cone than he was able to see because the auto-fire expended two more ammo than he expected. I guess the targets are picked by the gun then. There must be a device that scans an area, locks onto targets, and starts firing. If such a device is a common part of weapons, you'd think most automatic weapons would have a small monitor that can show invisible creatures to the user. There's already a part that scans for them, so it seems easy to implement.

Point is, every in-character explanation I can think of for auto-fire seems flawed in some way. What am I missing?