Lyricanna's page

Really now, you guys are seriously going there? Well, I normally don't like getting involved in conversations like this, but people saying that I am having "BadWrongFun" kinda is a pet peeve of mine.

I'm one of Colettes's players in Age of Ashes, and yes I was in the playtest. You can look at my posting history if you'd like. I've been participating in dozens RP's for what, 6 years now and personally GM'd PF1e for the past 4. And I can genuinely say, that NOT ONE PERSON IMPLEMENTS TRANSPARENCY THE SAME WAY!

Seriously, how much information the GM gives out to the players is ENTIRELY subject to the GM and party's tastes. Not one person who I've played with has ever run transparency the exact same way. Ever. Some GM's hide everything from the players, some hide nothing. I can tell of games where the GM wouldn't tell us if we were getting past an enemy's DR, and I've had a GM literally flip open the bestiary to the enemy we were fighting and stick it in front of us (For the record, said GM was NOT Colette. Colette only gives us that info on a crit).

Hell, I literally made how little or much info the players have in combat a bloody plot point in my homebrew campaign. Last session, they could see their opponents current and max HP, their exact AC, to hit, and saves. The session before that, they didn't even know how weakened an enemy was by their attacks. All cause the context fit for my setting.

So stop calling Colette's desire for transparency a bad thing, it's entirely GMing style. And we should all agree calling people out for having "BadWrongFun" is something that should be avoided.

Well, I was going to chime in and say they should probably clarify that 292 is the full rules and that the other sections are just abridgements, but then I started looking at what 292 says.

It literally is one of those paragraphs that looks worse the more you read it. Sure the RAI is pretty obvious, but wow, that RAW has the potential to get hilariously atrocious. Paizo, you should definitely rewrite this segment before going to print.

I recommend doing what I do as a programmer and listing out what takes priority first, then clarifying from there. (i.e. Nat 1 always fails, Nat 20's always succeed (unless the task is literally impossible), beating/failing the DC is a success/fail, success by +10 or a 20 that beats the DC is a critical success, failure by 10 or a 1 that fails to make the DC is a critical failure).

Just chiming in here as one of Collete's players. Something to keep in mind is that while Colette was playing the enemies as optimally as they could, that went both ways. In basically every single encounter, our group was playing as optimally as we could conceive as a group.

I can't speak for everyone I played with, but the vast majority of them were veteran roleplayers extremely familiar with Pathfinder 1e and or D&D 4e. In addition, many of them have been in sessions where Colette has GM'd for them before and from what I have gathered they have never had problems with this bad of TPK's before.

Personally, I am a veteran GM for Pathfinder 1e, having been GMing for over 3 years now and having been a player for almost double that. I am a self-declared optimizer who usually prefers to make stupid gimmick builds that have no right working. That said, I have more than my fair share of sheer munchkiniry builds in my portfolio, with gems such as an Arcanist who could one turn a Tarrasque at level 10 with several hundred negative HP left over, and a Witch who essentially obtained godhood at level 5. Finally, keep in mind I'm the kind of person who thinks of games such as XCOM: Long War as fun and easy strategy games.

Thus keep in mind what it means when regardless of how much we pushed are characters, and how much we debated our actions and worked together, a party of four players operating on a level of optimal efficiency that would get us thrown out of most tables for meta-gaming, we couldn't beat a GM playing hardball with this system.

That shows there is a serious problem with the tactical combat game.

Voss wrote:

They can just lower the pricing of higher level items (and by consequence the amount of money expected to be handed out at higher levels) without actually making it linear.

The tricky part is that they don't want to make high-level items too cheap. Getting a +2 sword for your 3rd level character in PF1 was nice but was unlikely to break anything; getting a +2 sword for your 3rd level character in PF2 is going to completely break game balance.

Of course, ditching potency and going with ABP would potentially alleviate that problem, so if that's the way Paizo ends up going I'm all for it.

Well, the easy solution to that is to make the +2 sword less powerful. There is ALWAYS going to be GM's that completely ignore the WPL guidelines. Some GM's will throw a 5th level item at level 3 players as a reward for completing a really difficult session. Then there's GM's who give their level 5 players the GP a level 2 party should be getting.

I'd prefer if the game didn't punish me as a GM for wanting to play loose with the loot.

Just a minor note Colette, we retreated from the Cyclopes not because we thought we'd lose but because we couldn't see any benefits to fighting out the combat.

I'm fairly certain had we slugged it out we would have almost certainly won -- a fighter who crits on a 13 with cleave is terrifying and gets downright insane once you realize they're using a +2 Master scythe. Throw in another fighter, an optimized bear druid, and a healbot cleric and that fight probably would have been likely to go in our favor.

That said, I'm also certain the fight would have taken over 4 hours, and have been as boring as hell.

Regarding all these complex calculations to figure out what DC to use to get to a specific success chance: Why don't you just cut the Gordic Knot?

If you want the PC to have a an 63% success rate, have the player roll a d100 - and if it is less than 63, the character succeeds.

No need for complex calculations, no mandatory magic items, no figuring out where the attribute bumps are, no pondering exactly when a character has a particular skill raise. You arrive at exactly the desired result without any complexities and no unnecessary and unpredictable variations, the resolution is as detailed as you want it, and the curve is extremely smooth.

And to that, I'd like to add: Smurf. :)

Ohh, ooh, ooh. I have something even better. How often do you really need 1% changes in difficulty? Instead of muddling around with crazy golf balls or multiple dice, why don't you simplify it to increments of 5% and just roll a single die?

Thus without further ado,I WOTC present the wonderful new really old D20 System!

You want a 50% success chance? Roll a d20 and compare the result to a DC:11 (ties succeeding). Want a 65% chance? roll a d20 and compare it to the same DC:11, only this time add 3 to the roll.

If you really want to make things interesting, add the same number to both the DC and the roll bonus, and call it a Level Bonus or something.

Edit: I am not even going to question the smurf avatar change.
Edit 2: So that's a thing that happens whenever your post contains the word smurf.

Finally. The slowed condition was the single largest cause of our party wipes.

You know their is extreme opinions out there and then their is the one that wants to remove d20's from a d20 game.

Totally agree here, getting rid of the d20 roll is just plain heresy to me.

That said, they do have a point that PF2e's crit rules pretty much have to use 2d10 or some other combination of multiple dice to work. It just is fundamentally at odds with the d20 system.

Thus the reasonable and sane answer should be highly obvious. Kill the +/-10 rule. If you want an auto-crit on a high enough roll, it would have to require a success by 20 to keep the d20 system functional.

You're missing Channel Smite on the cleric Survey. This is a bit annoying, as the cleric I played was kinda built around using Negaite energy with Channel Smite.

There is a reason why Path of War and Spheres of might are the most used 3PP rulesets out there. Cause frankly, the entire martial caster divide can be summed up like so: "If spellcasters get to do all this ridiculous magic at higher levels, why cant martials do the same?"

Sure you could fix this by nerfing EVERYTHING down to the level of a Fighter or Chained Rouge, but as everyone who has ever played a completive video game knows, hitting the entire S, A, and B tiers with Nerf bats just makes a LOT of unhappy players. No, it's far better to make things fun for EVERYONE by bringing martials up to the same level of shenanigans as casters.

I'm having a very hard time believing the summary given in your post OP. Using 23 as your AC for each party member and +15 for the golem using their berserk slam attack, its 3 turns look like:

Rd1 -> hit, crit, N/A vs cleric. This result has a 3.25% chance of happening based on the given AC (0.65*0.05)
Rd2 -> hit, crit, hit vs paladin. This result has a 0.8125% chance of happening based on the given AC (0.65*0.05*0.25)
Rd3 -> crit, hit, hit vs. fighter. This result has a 1.875% chance of happening based on the given AC (0.15*0.5*0.25)

Each of these sequences of 3 attacks are exceedingly unlucky. But to have them happen sequentially is effectively impossible with fair dice (0.0005% chance). I feel very confident in saying that your GM is messing with you and inventing dice roll results.

Keep in mind that if the first attack from the golems hit, it's not going to be using the slam (+1 to hit) and the player is prone (-2 AC).

Also as much as I hate gatekeeping, you REALLY can't call yourself a roleplayer till you've seen the dice land in ways that seem to defy all known rules of probability. (Spoilers: they aren't, real randomness has strings of numbers that seem outright impossible with how unlikely they would be.)

20th level I don't want anime.

I'm ok with iron fist, daredevil, nightwing.

or chow yun fats character in crouching tiger hidden dragon.

Why? What's so special about a daredevil character being say, Level 10 and caping the game there for max level if you want to tell a more realistic game.

8th through 10th level magic is world changing in scope. It allows characters to go so far beyond "realistic" means it isn't even funny. So why should martial characters be even remotely limited to "realism" at higher levels.

I feel like the sorts of fans who are super-super mad about the Last Jedi are the sorts of fans who are a net negative to have in your community anyway, and everything is better off if those folks are relegated to their dusty dimly lit corners and leave the rest of us alone.

Just because someone buys your game doesn't mean they aren't also actively driving people away with their awfulness. Unlike movies which are a solitary experience even if you go with other people, tabletop games need a community which is not actively unwelcoming otherwise they die.

The problem is when a lot of these fans ARE your growth. Fans who have strong feelings for a product will go to great lengths to promote the product they love.

I mean, it doesn't take an expert to realize there is a collation between one out of every 2 games the RPG Club at my college set up being Pathfinder or Starfinder and half of the officers having met at a Pathfinder game a year ago.

This is despite every single flyer advertising D&D, and a decent majority of the players having been introduced to 5e from Critical Roll.

See, I knew the fight was unwinnable if the Cleric goes down turn 1.

So I'm part of the Wednesday group that ran this exact same module with the same GM. We also wiped to the golem as well, though in far fewer rounds.

Party:
> Human Cleric of Gorum (Melee, Negative Energy build)
> Halfling Druid (Animal Companion)
> Human Wizard (Conjuration School)
> Human Sorcerer (Imperial Bloodline)

All characters optimized for maximum AC, though the Wizard and Sorcerer took a Breastplate and the Cleric took Full Plate.

Note: I'm mostly copying Dreamtime2k9's post format to make sure I didn't forget anything.
Note 2: I seem to have forgotten to export the chat log from MapTool so I am missing some of the rolls here.

Retrieving the arclords corpse:

I'm don't think we even rolled to learn more about the golem, we mostly just got the basics (i.e: Giant Lv 20 golem that moves 40ft/turn, attacks anything within 20ft if not distracted, don't let it hit you) and an idea of what actions we could take.

The general plan was for the cleric (who removed their armor for higher movement speed) and wizard (who summoned an Animated Armor) to lie in wait 40ft ahead of the golem and remove the corpse while the Sorcerer would attempt to distract the golem with Intimidate. The Druid stayed to the side ready to remove the corpse with Animal Form, or attempt a deception roll if things go south.

Suprisingly, nothing bad happened, save the Druid and Wizard making things worse once each. Also the Sorcerer ended up buring to hero Points on the third round to suceed at her distraction. The only really thing I can note here is that neither action had benefits for Critically succeeding, despite the increase on the number of successes required on a crit fail. As the Cleric, it kinda felt a bit demoralizing to only get us back to where we started on a crit after the Wizards Armor made us loose progress.

With the corpse removed, the party all rolled Medicine to begin the investigation, with a crit success from the Cleric, then a success from the Wizard on the arcana roll, and a Crit-fail from the cleric on the nature roll. The end result? Jsut enough good evedence and red herrings that we actually felt like we were running an actual investigation. Though that may have been from our group spending a lot more time roleplaying between encounters due to our terrible track record with combat.

From here, we made our way to the site of the break-in and continued our investigation. As a side note, there was some confusion between me and the GM on what my character was doing, due to the Exploration rules not exactly lining up with what I was trying to do to continue the investigation.

Our investigated proceeded as such: The Druid and Sorcerer searched the room, the Wizard Investigated the golem, and the Cleric Searched the golem. This is what we discovered before combat started:
> The golem went beserk because it was SIGNIFICANTLY DAMAGED
> The golem has several wounds from Adamintine weapons/attacks
> The golem was singed by FIRE MAGIC, to NO EFFECT
> The golem was hit from blunt attacks of stand and stone
> The golem was healed by Electricity
> A package from "Ladhlia" containded materials for making traps

In addition, the contables tolds us
> They subdued the Golem
> Golems are Immune to most magic
> This golem is Healed by Electricity
> This golem did not seem to take meaningful damage from FIRE MAGIC
> Bludgening damage worked to subdue it

If you haven't already figured it out by now, the things in ALL CAPS are contradictory to the actual fight.

From here, the golem proceeded to tie the Druid on Inititive (and thus go first due to monsters winning ties) and immedately knock down the nearest person to it: my Cleric who was searching before the transition to Encounter Mode. It then crit on it's second action to attack the Cleric, throwing her immedately to Deadly 2, before knocking the Wizard prone.

The druid proceeds to summon a Warg to hopefully help out with the fight and spent her bear's only action to move into the melee. The Wizard then spent her turn attempting a Recall Knowledge action and a Ray of Frost, both actions failing. The sorcerer goes, and whiffs his Ray of frost as well.

By this point, I had basically crunched the numbers and realized that the golem would hit at least 2 attacks worth worth on it's turn (actually in hindsight it's closer to 2.5) for a whopping 34 +/- 22 damage. So when the golem proceeded to crit the Wizard, dropping her to Dying 2 as well, then spend it's last two actions attacking us (It's a berserk golem, we all agreed it'd keep attacking anything adjacent regardless if we're moving) the party universally agreed this fight was unwinnable and decided to call the night then.

TL,DR: Any unlucky souls investigating the golem when the fight breaks out are basically screwed unless you use meta-knowledge to know that cold damage inflicts the slow condition AND can actually land at least one cold spell on it every turn. And if it's the cleric that was Investigating the golem -- which is highly likely due to them likely having the best Medicine skill -- you're just asking for a TPK.

Agreed. If the low magic, Sword and Sorcery theme was actually their design goal, I'll probably stop posting on here or participating in the playtest. Sure I'd consider it a betrayal by Paizo, but I'd get over it eventually.

Besides, someone would end up making an actual successor to Pathfinder, even if I had to wrangle cats on /tg/ and do it myself.

Like:
1. 3-Action System
2. The four magic spell lists
3. The concept of legendary skills

Hate:
1. The Crit on +/- 10
2. The overreliance on magic items
3. Turning everything into level-locked feats

I love the fact that Paizo thought we might dislike the 3-action economy when it's the most common response in the like section. Meanwhile, the +/- 10 rule for crits seems to be either the best thing ever or worse than 4e depending on who you ask.

Lyricanna wrote:

I don't really like getting dragged into yet another debate here, but I feel the need to chime in with one observation that no one seems to have pointed out yet.

Suppose you're having one of those days where you just straight up never roll above a 10. Mathematically, there is nothing stopping a streak like this from happening with a d20.

How does the game keep you from feeling irrelevant? In PF1, with a bit of tactics and some help from the friendly wizard or bard, you can hit on a 5, and still have a 50-50 chance of succeeding. In contrast, PF2 is remarkably stingy with +1 (due to their value) so you hit on an 8 if you can stack all the +1's and conditions. Thus Bad Luck Brian is whiffing on 3/4ths of his initial rolls and has no chance with his second or third attacks.

Sure the average damage is roughly the same, but the miss chance is far higher in 2e. Hence the game feeling far more random.

That's also a problem with the d20 and its uniform distribution. For those who fear bad roll streaks in any d20 system, I recommend trying out rolling 2d10s instead. You get a distribution of results that favour the average a lot more than extremes, leading to your bonuses being more relevant.

In 2e, there are various ways to get stacking bonuses and penalties as well. Flat-footed gives you an effective +2 to hit, Frightened, Sick, Enervated X on an enemy gives you a +X to hit (with the errata coming next Monday), and you can get a +1 to hit with Bless, Inspire Courage and the like.

Even something as simple as flanking and enemy and an ally succeeding on the Assist action grants you a +4 to hit (-2 penalty to enemy AC and +2 bonus to your attack roll), so getting to the point where you hit on a 5 is pretty reasonable to get.

Here's the thing, the d20 system itself is decently self-correcting about this. A fighter or barbarian on an unlucky streak can quite effectively stack their to-hit till they hit on a 3 or even a 2. This seems like a bad thing, with them only being able to fail on a nat 1, but its intentionally a way of mitigating the effects of bad streaks.

In contrast, PF2 practically mandates rolling 2d10 instead of 1d20 due to the increased crit and fail ranges making streaks deadly.

I don't really like getting dragged into yet another debate here, but I feel the need to chime in with one observation that no one seems to have pointed out yet.

Suppose you're having one of those days where you just straight up never roll above a 10. Mathematically, there is nothing stopping a streak like this from happening with a d20.

How does the game keep you from feeling irrelevant? In PF1, with a bit of tactics and some help from the friendly wizard or bard, you can hit on a 5, and still have a 50-50 chance of succeeding. In contrast, PF2 is remarkably stingy with +1 (due to their value) so you hit on an 8 if you can stack all the +1's and conditions. Thus Bad Luck Brian is whiffing on 3/4ths of his initial rolls and has no chance with his second or third attacks.

Sure the average damage is roughly the same, but the miss chance is far higher in 2e. Hence the game feeling far more random.

For me, I literally canceled the 2e game I had been planning for several months on August 2nd when I got my hands on a copy of the rulebook. In the span of 72 hours I went from one of the largest defenders of 2e, to worried and skeptical of the system (Aug 1st, /tg/ was leaking the rules), to literally canceling all plans to run the system (Aug 2nd).

Since then, I basically rearranged my schedule to be able to playtest the game once a week with one of Colette's groups. Why? Because I want Paizo to rebuild their game from the ground up, and I feel like forcing myself trough TPK after TPK is the best way I can do this.

Tomorrow I am going to be standing in front of 50+ students --many of whom are first-time roleplayers -- and helping most of them find games of D&D 5e or Pathfinder. As it currently stands, I can not think of a single reason why I would ever recommend PF2e over these two other games.

Easy to write adventure paths for Sword and Sorcery style games? Yeah, I'm pretty lost with where they're going here as the Pathfinder name is already heavily connected to High Fantasy. Remember, the two big selling points Pathfinder right now has over 5e is that there are more fantastical elements and it's sheer flexibility in character customization.

2e has neither of these.

I went into more detail on the S&S theme of 2e here:
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs42974?Sword-and-Sorcery-is-2e-not-a-sucessor-to #1

1) Flanking
> Can be impossible depending on battlefield/terrain.
2) Daze cantrip
> Caster spends 2 actions (basically their turn) for a 50-50 shot at this
3) Barbarians raging that crit with a sword
> So a 5% chance. Not even remotely reliable.
4) fighters specialized in swords that roll a crit
> Okay, since it's a fighter, I'll be optimistic and presume you hit on a 9. 10% chance. Still not reliable.
5) Color spray and invisibility spells
> Invisibility is a one-shot thing. Color Spray is actually decent here, except it's a 15ft cone. Basically flanking+, except even more issues lining it up.

It does have healers, that is true, but they are not absolutely required as part of play. Healing has been a part of the fantasy RPG experience forever. I am all for challenging dogma for the sake of dogma, but I am not sure this is it. Magical healing is a fantasy trope, and I feel that walking away from that trope might do a fair bit of damage to peoples view of the game.

That said, stamina might still be an option we look at, but I am not sure that we would ever put it in a position to replace healing.

Thanks for the feedback.

As a guy who absolutely loves playing healers to the point my nickname among two separate RPG groups is Oracle, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE! don't build encounters or systems presuming there is a healer.

It literally sucks all the fun out of being a healer. There is a reason why I am so vocal about making sure parties have a wand of Cure Light Wounds. Healing magic is for IN COMBAT healing. Because burning your limited resources outside of combat just feels awful. As is being forced to play a healer "cause no one else will" or having to deal with all the other players demanding healing.

So, I've been spending a lot of time reading about what people think about Pathfinder Second Edition. I've playtested... I believe it's 6 modules now (Edit: actually my GMtells me it's been 5, they're kinda blurring together at this point), as one of those few players crazy enough to stick with Colette after the frankly insane number of TPK's (here's to hopeing Level 7 is the lucky number). And as you'd expect, I have quite a lot of complaints, recommended changes, and views on controversial elements of the game, both as a player and as someone who regularly GM's Pathfinder 1e.

But that's not what this thread is about. What this thread is about is a comment I read a couple days ago on Giant in the Playground's Forums (complements to Rhyden for bringing this up there) is the fact that the very first proper page to the rulebook -- the introduction to the playtest itself -- describes Pathfinder as a Sword and Sorcery game.

Using these playtest rules, you can build any kind of sword and sorcery story imaginable to explore with your friends, family, and acquaintances whose love for imagination and camaraderie matches your own.

At first, I thought it was just a hilarious mistake, I mean I can totally understand a page like this being rewritten a couple dozen times to make it sound right, only for them to realize about a month later that they accidentally referred to their game by the wrong genre. But now, looking back on this page and the problems I keep seeing crop up in the playtest I am no longer convinced this was a mistake.

Pathfinder was never a Sword and Sorcery game. Dungeons & Dragons stopped being an S&S long before 3rd Edition dropped. Both of these games, while still pulling some inspiration from S&S have been quite clearly High Fantasy games even with 5e's lower power level.

There was always this aura of awe and fantasy to Pathfinder. A halfling rogue sneaking into the Dragon's hoard and stealing the crown jewel of the pile without being detected. A barbarian being caught unarmed and fighting off a small army with only a jawbone he picked up off the ground. These stories were not just common in Pathfinder, they were basically inevitable. A party of level 20 characters WOULD change the world. Not might, not could, but would.

Even Paizo's own Adventure Paths for 2e lie firmly closer to High Fantasy then S&S. Even having failed the modules before the story could really unfold, it's obvious that the main conflict in Doomsday Dawn is far beyond the normal reaches of S&S. Archlord's Envy was set in a place that can only be described as High Magic, High Fantasy. Even Raiders of Shrieking Peak and The Rose Street Revenge had more fantastical elements to them than you would expect in a traditional Sword and Sorcery setting.

Yet just about every change to the rules themselves reflects this decision to make 2e a Swords and Sorcery game. The fact that a perfectly optimized character has barely above a 50% success chance at their best skill before modifiers. The complete decimation of the spell list compared to 1e. The fact that enemys "At Level" are considered difficult encounters. The increased impact of chance on just about everything. The removal of fun, iconic abilities from just about all classes. The increased grittiness of combat (we once had a character nearly die due to a single point of bleed damage becasue we couldn't get rid of it).

All of these things work if your goal is to create low stakes, low power Sword and Sorcery game. However, I like most of the gamers I know at my college would rather play Pathfinder, a High Fantasy game.

To get back to the OP, I feel like chiming in with a couple words of wisdom I learned from Video Game design.

Balance for Balance's Sake is NEVER a good idea. Ever.

Now, this does not mean I'm advocating for no balance whatsoever. On the contrary, a broken game needs fixing. What I am saying is that the overall goal of balancing a game is to make the unfun parts of the game fun, and to reduce the impact of the things that reduce everyone else's fun.

Your goal is to not make all characters equal or to force them to stay within this small box of tightly bound math. The goal of an RPG is to let everyone at the table have a good time.

If you think that the average adult can hide and still move as fast as he walks then yes, you live in a different universe than me.

This just seems to be one of those things that you haven't met the right kind of people. I've had friends of mine startle me on a decently regular basis. Now while I am far from the most perceptive person I have a decently faster walking speed than the average person. Despite this, I can even think of a time I've been tailed at a full parkour run.

At the end of the day, while tailing someone successfully requires a certain amount of skill, it's far easier than picking a lock or pickpocketing.

So, the GM has to dumpster dive to challenge a dumpster-dived PC. High level PF1 basically becomes a battle of who reads more splatbooks faster :)

And the problem with that is? People still play Legacy MTG despite the game being absolutely, game-breakingly, broken in several dozen different ways. Different people have different views on what is fun.

Personally, I'm more of a "Johnny" player like Davor here who just cares about making crazy and fun builds work. That said, I do have fun breaking the game at times with high-level play (or more commonly, with low-level characters fighting APL+6 or higher.)

Keep in mind we're discussing the merits of optimized play, NOT high-level play. High-level play is not inherently broken (though it definitely needs some tuning) whereas the whole point of Optimized play is throwing yourselves at ridiculous challenges with just as ridiculous characters.

I've personally broken the game with infinite wishes at level 5, in a party where I could easily argue that I wasn't the most overpowered/ridiculous character in the group.

Oh, and to add to it: Almost no one has power fantasies about healing, there are no major super heroes or anime protagonists with healing powers of any note, so most new players naturally stay away from those classes, healing magic also messes with fiction and world-building, like quests to find the antidote.

One of the major dm:s in my group tries to peer pressure people into playing healers, and i do sometimes, but it is seriously not fun. As a dm i have sometimes just added npcs for that purpose, or allowed leadership for a cleric/oracle cohort, which is all they want anyway.

As a dedicated healer main in several MMO's as well as a roleplayer whose favorite class is hands down the Oracle, I take offense to the notion that we don't have power fantasies about being a healer. They're just a bit different from most people's.

One, a lot of hearer mains aren't pacifists unless they're in the medical field in real life. I'd even go out on a limb and say most of us tend towards the opposite, we really like whacking the enemy in the face. Because of this, we don't like wasting our time healing our allies, buffing them is fine as we all know the only reason that fighter got the last hit on the BBEG was from the haste spell we cast on them. This also ties into point two, healers like to make themselves and their allies as excruciatingly painful to kill as possible. This goes double for ourselves, healers are probably the only other group of people besides "tanks" who actually enjoy the thought of getting hit with a weapon. It's just that the healers usually has them either reducing the damage to practically nothing with defensive wards and armor and/or heals it faster than they tan take damage. (One of my favorite video game stories was the time I soloed a field boss by just chipping away at it with my basic attack and spells cast from HP, cause I could literally heal myself faster than it could damage me.)

This is why Paladins, Oracles, and Clerics are still quite popular even with things such as CLW spam. Cause unlike just about every single video game ever -- excluding Warframe -- all of the primary healers in D&D/Pathfinder are in the thick of it alongside the other martials. Paladins are right there, in the thickest parts of the fighting as one of the hardest classes to kill in PF1e. Add in the ability to heal themselves as a swift action, and you can see why healers flock to it. Clerics and Oracles might not have the same martial prowess or action economy the Paladin has, but Clerics get Channel energy (AOE heal everyone nearby is a decent use of a turn) and instead get a massive 9th level spell list filled with all sorts of buffing and support spells. The fact you can hit yourself with many of them as well and go to town on some unlucky heretic is just an extra level of sweet that most games with healer classes don't give.

You may have noticed I mentioned Warframe earlier. Well, that's because I consider the game to be the best implementation of what a healer main wants out of their power fantasy, period. Three of the Warframes or classes in the game can be described as pure healer/support frames: Trinity, Oberon, and Harrow -- each representing the concepts of light, medium, and heavily armed supports in the exact opposite order you'd expect. I could go into way more detail about the three, but I think I will just go over my personal favorite: Trinity. Despite appearing to be the classic white robe healer with the lowest armor in the game and sub-par health and shields, she's actually the the hardest of the three to kill, surviving things that would kill some of the dedicated tank frames. How? well, despite the fact she has no real damaging abilities, she can still use every weapon in the game, like all frames. One of her generates more energy (MP) than it costs to cast and another redirects most damage and status effects to nearby enemies. But the ability that makes her the healer's dream is her "ult" (which can be used whenever you want so long as your infinite effectively infinite energy pool can pay the cost) which fully restores all party members to full HP and Shields instantly even at long range. Oh and gives everyone 75% damage reduction. The end result: a frame who gets into melee almsot as much as Valkyr (a barbarian themed frame who is literally invincible while "raged" ) with over 95% damage reduction at all times who can still prevent someone from dying with a single button.

So how does this apply to Pathfinder 2e? Well, let's look at what healers want:
> Healers like being proactive about preventing people from dying.
> Healers like killing enemies, cause a dead enemy can't harm the party.
> Healers like not dying.
> Healers like attacks to target the guy least likely to die, which may be themselves.
> Healers don't like healing unless it's the difference between life-and death or it can be combined with the first two things listed here.

Part of the problem is with the way heavy armor works and how easy it is to boost ability scores in PF2. By the second ability boost even characters with dex as fourth most important stat might consider just switching to medium armor since the penalties for heavy armor are large and the benefits small. Definitely by lvl 10 where a 16 dex easy to have even for a paladin focusing on Str, Con, and Cha. Without heavy armor specific boosts like this and the fighters ability most characters, and most paladins and fighters, would switch to medium armor and heavy armor would get very little use.

Isn't that a better indication that Heavy Armor should be reworked to not suck?

If Medium armor is better in every way at higher levels, the way to fix that isn't to five bonuses out to certain classes to force them to use heavy armor. You should, I don't know, drop the movement speed and armor check penalties?

False. There is a clear order and priority to how to the "Beginning of the Turn" portion of a turn takes effect. Regaining actions comes last, after the roll to stabilize. It actually does become a yo-yo effect with a slowed condition. For reference, this is located on pages 304 and 305.

I won't argue that it does not penalize those who become unconscious, but I personally prefer that to "heal" "full-attack" "knock back down" "heal" "full-attack" ... I simply feel there should be some real consequence to being knocked out (I don't consider becoming prone and dropping weapons to be enough), the idea of a character probably not effectively contributing to the rest of the fight is perfectly fine with me (this is of course assuming a regular, 2-3 round, fight, said character would still be able to contribute effectively to a longer fight).

You do realize dropping your weapon and being prone is effectively -2 actions? Even without any sort of slow or stagger penalty, it is literally impossible to full attack after getting healed from unconsciousness. Heck, you can't even attack the same turn you get healed unless you are using a ranged weapon or are already adjacent to your opponent.

There's wanting to make getting knocked out meaningful, and there is just straight up cruelty to your players.

Evening Colette, Pathfinder community. Since Colette and I have basically been debating this topic for a while on /tg/ I figured I would chime in over here some of what we were discussing.

Basically, the way I see a classic sword-and-board fighter in 2e is as a two-weapon fighter who is sacrificing damage in exchange for better survivability for themselves and potentially their party. There honestly does not seem to be any penalty to using Double Slice or a second agile strike with a light shield and using the third action to raise the shield. Thus a fighter is basically left with the ability to strike the enemy if they try to move away with their AoO or block the attack should they stay and attack.

Now there is the possibility of the opponent striking then retreating, but both the AoO fighter and the Shield Block fighter will have to spend an action moving afterward, and I am skeptical at believing that negating an attack is of lesser worth than the damage dealt from an AoO.