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After seeing the crit-fishing nature of the Gunslinger class (and of firearms as a whole) being discussed in many places around this forum, I thought it would be a good idea to create a single place to gather all the feedback on the relationship between Gunslingers, Firearms and critical hits.

I'll give my personal thoughts on it first:

I think this is a bad idea. We have already seen a class that attempted to make critical hitting the core of its design with the playtest Magus, and it did not feel good to play as it led to a rather unfun "feast or famine" style of play where you spent a lot of time feeling miserable between the rare times you critically hit and got to roll a bucket of dice. Now Gunslinger feels like it has the exact same problem as Magus, but I feel like it is even worse in their case for one reason.

That reason is the Gunslingers have nowhere near as many options to put the odds in their favor compared to Magi: Even with their heavily diminiished spellcasting, Magi could have access to a few magical buffs and debuffs (mostly through staves or through Martial Caster), including True Strike, which is pretty much the number 1 tool for crit fishing. On top of that, most Magi fought in melee, where it is easier to get bonuses like flanking and where cover is not an issue. Gunslingers have to fight from range and have no magic, meaning they don't get all these advantages, leaving them in an even worse state than Magi were when it comes to actually tipping the odds in your favor. They do get a few improved skill actions like Pistol Twirl on top of their +2 accuracy, but does that really compensate the relative difficulty of getting enemies to be flat-footed to ranged attacks, the penalties for cover, and the lack of any natural magical support?

Besides that Gunslinger-specific point, I fear that this design for firearms will make them underpowered for every non Fighter/Gunslinger. Firearms are a class of weapons many people wish to see in the game so that they might use it as a standard weapon the same way one would use a crossbow. However, their nature as crit-fishing weapons means their wielder wants Legendary proficiency in them for them to be really worthwhile, meaning classes that might want to use a firearm (the most obvious one being Ranger, who already has support for Reload weapons) will find themselves falling behind in damage through no fault of their own simply because they wanted to use something that fit their character concept.

In other words, this makes Firearms as a whole a trap option for anyone without Legendary scaling. I thought we were supposed to be done with these 1e-style traps whose only goal seems to be arbitrarily punishing character concepts because they aren't using something the "right" way.

This issue leads into another Gunslinger-specific one: Firearm users want Legendary proficiency to be able function at a good level, which is why Gunslingers have to have that level of proficiency. However, such a level of proficiency is definitely a rather large investment for a class, meaning that a significant part of the class' power budget is spent on ensuring basic functionality for their weapon of choice instead of on interesting features.

Now, it is possible that Guns&Gears is full of non crit-fishing firearms that would function much better without critical fishing.
But so far, the only non crit-fishing firearm we have seen is the Blunderbuss, and it suffers immensely when compared to even a simple Crossbow as it trades 100 feet of range for Scatter and Versatile B, neither of which seem like they are worth the massive range trade off. Considering the Crossbow is a simple weapon while the Blunderbuss is martial, it doesn't make non crit-fishing firearms look really good.

Considering all this, I feel the same way as I did with Magus: crit-fishing is not a good core design for a class, or a group
of weapons.
Now bear in mind that I'm not saying there shouldn't be crit-fishing guns. But I think the crit-fishing guns should be an option, instead of being the only kind of gun there is. If people want to fulfill the "One shot, one kill" fantasy, they should be allowed to. But equally, people who do not care for this particular fantasy should also be allowed to have firearm-using characters.

So, what are your personal thoughts on this?

While trying to build a sword and gun Drifter Gunslinger, I realised (as many people have already noted) that the hand economy of Reloading just doesn't work with that fighting style, so I instead decided to try and make my character into more of an old-timey pirate with half a dozen pre loaded pistols he could draw from his coat as he dropped unloaded guns.

While that playstyle seems like it could actually work pretty well, I noticed it hits a big snag rather quickly: The playtest doubling rings require that both affected weapons be selected pre-emptively rather than just adapting to weapons on the fly like the current doubling rings do.

While this wouldn't be a problem for most characters, my character trying to fight with multiple pistols found himself at a disadvantage as early as level 3, as he became unable to transfer runes from his enchanted longsword main weapon to his pistols, resulting in both an accuracy loss, as well as a rather large damage loss from level 4 onwards due to missing both a +1 potency rune as well as a Striking rune.

This left me wondering as to the reason for the change in the functionality of the playtest doubling rings compared to the CRB doubling rings.

This seems even more confusing when it seems like the only purpose of this change is to discourage the idea of creating a character who uses pistols as disposable weapons, despite the fact that said idea is a core part of the gunslinger aesthetic, even in real-life accounts of early firearm use.

Am I missing something there?

While reading through the playtest document, I came across the Uncommon classes sidebar, and it made me think about something relating to the Gunslinger class:
It seems a bit wierd to make crossbow Gunslinger a core alternative so that you can reasonably play a Gunslinger that has never seen a firearm in their entire life, only to turn around and still make Gunslinger Uncommon, with the justification that many parts of Golarion aren't familiar with gunpowder weaponry.
Without gunpowder weapons, Gunslinger is just someone who mostly trained with ranged weapons, and I don't see why that particular fighting style has to be Uncommon since the problematic element (Gunpowder Weapons) is already Uncommon on its own.
2e Gunslingers don't get a free gun like 1e Gunslingers did, so it's not like Gunslinger can bypass the usual access rules either.
All this led me to wonder if Gunslinger really should be an Uncommon class.

Is Spell Parry supposed to only grant its bonuses against spells?

You gain a +1 circumstance bonus to AC and to saving throws against spells that target you until the start of your next turn as long as you continue to meet the requirements.

As written, it seems to indicate that both the AC bonus and saves bonus apply only against spells that target you.

You can parry both physical and magical assaults.

Am I misunderstanding something regarding this feat?