Michael Sayre's page

What is the difference between a Mythic Kaiju and a non-Mythic Kaiju, one wonders.

"Number of burgeoning exemplars accidentally turned into toothpaste."

"Number of people who worship it as a god."

"Number of stories told about it."

"Number of times it stole the other kaiju's lunches."

"Number of active societies existing within its digestive tract."

My money's on "number of demigods snacked on".

So will there be a way to get access to this in PFS or is this just for home games?

The degree to which mythic rules generally do or do not get integrated into PFS will be dependent of the needs of the campaign.

The rules clarifications and updates will be treated just like any other official rules clarifications and updates are generally treated for organized play.

Isn't mythic resilience really problematic? A mythic creature can get all three of them at level 13.

Imagine this. You're a party of level 11 PCs and you're a caster. You're going up against a mythic creature that is PL+2 with all three mythic resilient saves. A level 13 creature's low save is a +20, and as a level 11 caster you likely have a spell DC of 30 at this point.

It might help you to note that 30 is a pretty wrong number, because the expected DC of a mythic spell for a level 11 PC is 36 (11 [level] + 5 [stat] + 10 [mythic] +10 [standard DC baseline]). Things will definitely seem too weak if your math is off by 30%!

Please note that this product thread is not the place for rules discussions, especially not when the product's street date is still two weeks out.

I did not expect a Mighty Max reference.

I literally had the episode "The Maxnificent Seven" in the recommended media for writers on the project.

I am still in the queue for the first breakfast of Mythic, but a second helping is much appreciated! *Adds it to the buffet plate*

Nothing wrong with hitting the salad bar while the line to the prime rib is backed up!

R3st8 wrote:

What is the point? the rarity system ensures this will be collecting dust on a shelf, yeah I'm being negative because like the archetype and will never be able to use it.

All the tables I know ignore rarity rules because they are whack.

Not to mention the exemplar dedication isn't rare.

Xenocrat wrote:

Is the exemplar multiclass dedication really a warcrime against game balance? (Full ikon from the dedication, no rarity tag, only 12 dex or strength prereq, no limitation on just leaving the immanence permanently if you don't want to burn the action to restore your spark after transcending - an issue that goes away at level 12 when you can get a second ikon.)

Sounds like psychic archetype, but for martials, and much worse.

At least that part has been corrected. The dedication is Rare, just like the class.

You can see the clarification in the Alternate Mythic Rules found on the War of Immortals product site.

You missed a whole convo on the previous page of this thread (and today's blog.)

We'll have a blog talking about it in greater detail tomorrow, but please note that the web enhancement PDF "Alternate Mythic Rules" that some content creators have referred to is now available for download on this page.

Kavlor wrote:

So, if I understand correctly, we finally have more information about the geography of Casmaron and Arcadia?

We got a full (if not fully-labeled) map of Arcadia back in Guns & Gears.

Was it you who brought up awhile back that there are no simple axes in PF2?

I was thinking about that when I was putting the palstave axe in the Storied Equipment section of this book. (To be fair, it was going in regardless, but I definitely had a "Oh, this should make them happy" moment.)

I was hoping Mythic would be the point at which a kaiju fight, for example, turns from a series of hazards to a creature statblock.

It is.

The thing I'm curious to know is if Mythic Feats are a separate bin you unlock when you become mythic, or whether these are yet another thing competing for class feats.

They are a distinct bucket and category, separate from your class feats.

I love the description of how Samo bonds with the spirits. It's both evocative and a great suggestion for prospective Animist players. The art is, of course, fantastic. Thanks so much, Michael and Oleksii!

We do what we can!

I think more he means that the reason the Exemplar has light armor isn't because Nahoa wears what he does - Nahoa wears what he does because its thematically appropriate in design. I don't think he was commenting on the mechanical options of having Medium armor.

Correct.

Are avenger, bloodrager, and vincidator mythic paths? Or they are just non-mythic archetypes, and mythic paths are not revealed yet?

They are not mythic paths, they're an example of another type of character option included in War of Immortals.

I don’t see that being a flipside. While all that may be true, it doesn’t really delve into the fact that basing a mechanic-chassis around a singular Iconic, while popular may not be the best design path.

They're not built around a single iconic, the iconic and the class are made to ensure that the iconic is a fully realized version of the class, a character you can actually make using the class rules and have a satisfying experience with.

The opposite of this would be PF1 Harsk. Harsk's art was developed with the idea that a bigass crossbow looked super cool, which it did, but crossbows were simple weapons and weren't really weapons a ranger should have been using. Even with an entire ranger subpath trying to make the PF1 crossbow more satisfying, it was just mechanically hard to reach a point where Harsk as depicted felt like a good representation of what it felt like to play a ranger. When the class and iconic don't support each other, you end up with negative experiences.

In the best-case scenario when you've got enough time and planning to have a firm visual of the iconic while the design window is still open, an artist as talented as Wayne can also open the door for cool new design space (I'm pretty sure that dwarven clan daggers come from lore born from Wayne's visual imagining of dwarves.)

In that vein, the exemplar doesn't have light armor because Nahoa wears Polynesian-inspired armaments, Nahoa wears Polynesian-inspired armaments because that's an excellent thematic fit for a class inspired by Hercules, Gilgamesh, Maui, and other loincloth-clad divine brawlers.

Tangential, at the end of the day the point of a game is to bring fun and recreation to the widest array of people possible. From that perspective, "good" is whatever inspires the largest number of people to play a given game and find enjoyment in it. It can be easy to argue that "popular/successful" are not the same as good, but...

As the director of the team that makes all the Pathfinder rulebooks and Lost Omens books, I've watched my team double in size, their wages go up, and mandatory overtime disappear. The success of PF2 has helped create a world where my new employees have not had to work long hours with no overtime like I did coming up, and where more people are talking about and playing Pathfinder than ever before. I think we always have room to keep getting better and refining our craft, but I can't really think of a better metric for "good" than a game that is giving the largest audience we've ever reached exciting and lasting memories while supporting more creatives and providing a higher quality of life than at any point in the company's history.

I feel like the value in developing the class with an idea of who the iconic is that when you do this you can ensure that the class is capable of supporting a character like the iconic. Not that the class won't be able to support completely different visions. [...]

Very much so, yeah. Making sure the character option does the thing and that the thing is something people want to do is huge. That doesn't mean it's the only thing the class or option can/should do, but if it doesn't draw people in to begin with, they'll never discover what else might be under the hood.

Michael Sayre, Director of Rules and Lore wrote:

…For characters like Droven, Nhalmika, Samo, and Nahoa, we knew who they were and who they'd become visually before the classes were through development, so that allowed us to sync those classes and those characters together very tightly.

This is illuminating. I find this a poor approach - it needlessly ties broad character concepts to singular individuals and informs the class from an incredibly narrow perspective. Look at the response to Nahoa’s class in the feedback to the Exemplar playtest - given not everyone wanted to play loincloth-Maui expies the lack of options for all kinds of different cultural “heroes” (like, medium or heavy armored) was to my mind completely a result of this design path.

Flipside-

Exemplar is one of the most popular classes we've ever created and right now ranks among the most popular classes for new characters built across almost every venue we have insight into.

Surveys, gaming platforms, and character builders both show it is more popular than even a lot of core classes. (The animist is not quite as popular but shares the distinction of being a playtest class that is more popular than several core classes.) Similarly, Guns & Gears is one of the most popular books of this edition cycle and has sold through multiple print runs faster than most books that don't have "Core" or "Advanced Player's Guide" in the title.

Conversely, a class that you'd think is popular based on the forum conversations around it, the thaumaturge, is dead-last on all those same lists. It's mechanically strong and has a whole lot of variety in its builds, but the broader audience doesn't really know what it is, the iconic doesn't help them understand that, and so only a small and very invested portion of the playerbase engages with it while the wider audience ignores it.

I'll admit that my money was on y'all using the Thaumaturge as the base, restricting the class to picking up a holy symbol or deity weapon and possibly getting more divine specific item abilities. The reasons given for picking the ranger instead make a lot of sense, so I'm sold on that choice. It's just not the one I originally would have guessed before seeing those reasons.

Thaumaturge is definitely "the other Van Helsing"and could have been the vindicator's foundation in a not-so-distant reality, though I think it would still probably have been a larger number of changes with fewer total conceptual permutations at the end.

Michael Sayre wrote:

it means you end up with much more diversity of build available because so many of the ranger feats already touch the core concept territory that Imrijka embodies (Monster Hunter, Swift Tracker, Eerie Traces, and other ranger feats fit well within her story and the needs of her conceptual space, arguably much better than most...

Does that mean you guys consider how you would go about creating that classes iconic when making classes? That's a cool tidbit if so. Might try that if I ever try making that homebrew class I keep meaning to make.

It's varied a bit over the years depending on the specific team and circumstances at play, but for pretty much all of my time designing at Paizo, concepting and executing the iconics has been a big part of our process.

The relationship between the design team and our artists has really grown and flourished over the last several years, and with the coordination of our Director of Visual Design, Sonja Morris, that's led to us getting to work much more closely with and provide more of our insights to the artists who bring our ideas to life, getting art that really fully embodies the fundamental ideas behind our classes and character options.

For characters like Droven, Nhalmika, Samo, and Nahoa, we knew who they were and who they'd become visually before the classes were through development, so that allowed us to sync those classes and those characters together very tightly. When you can look at an iconic and instantly have a good idea of what it does and how it does it, the class itself is likely to see more play, the books sell better, and you see more widespread adoption of the surrounding ideas.

With the vindicator, our process was a little different but ultimately had the same needs and solutions. Ask 5 people what the PF1 inquisitor was, you'll get 5 different answers, and 3 of them will be about the mechanics of the class rather than its concepts. It was a class that was very "of its system" in that it kind of had the mechanics that supported the book it appeared in and it carved a place in the game based on how it was different from the other content in the space, but things get a lot more nebulous when you try to take that idea out of the framework it was born in.

"It's a 2/3rds caster" okay, that means nothing in PF2.

"It was teamwork based" except it wasn't; it got teamwork feats but then its core concept was built around ignoring all the teamwork elements and just using your allies as trigger engines. But, it's useful to know that that's an element of the idea people want more of.

"It's the stealthy arm of the faith, the 'rogue' to the champion's fighter." Okay, that's starting to get somewhere!

So then we look at Imrijka. She's a very popular character and she's got comic books and backstory that really paint a cool and distinct picture, so when we consider how to realize Imrijka, we also start seeing how to conceptualize the most broadly agreed upon version of what the character idea she represents is, from a mechanical perspective. She also conveniently embodies the mechanical elevator pitch of "a martially-capable, skillful character with limited but useful magic and some teamwork-oriented options" in a way that puts a useful coat of cinema on the description.

What makes me scratch my head is why Ranger was chosen to make it a class archetype for. I've always counted Inquisitor among the divine classes, and so feel it'd be a better fit for Cleric or Champion, or some other as of yet unreleased divine striker. Or, if we had to go purely martial, surely Investigator makes more sense for the flavour of the class?

When you boil it down, the inquisitor in PF1 was "a martially-capable, skillful character with limited but useful spellcasting, potent magical abilities, and some teamwork-oriented options."

Clerics have significantly more spellcasting, less skills, and very few of their feats and abilities support the type of play that the new vindicator is looking to embody.

Champions are closer, but they have a lot of focus on heavy armor, defensive reactions, and feats that tend to be very specifically oriented either specifically towards certain causes or towards non-stealthy abilities.

So neither of those makes a very good chassis for a divine character who hunts monsters that hide among the faithful.

However, there is a class in the game that can already be described as "a martially-capable, skillful character with limited but useful spellcasting, potent magical abilities, and some teamwork-oriented options" in the form of the ranger.

The PF2 ranger and the PF1 inquisitor already have significant mechanical and conceptual overlap, so starting from that firmer foundation and replacing the "nature" elements of the ranger with "religious" elements is both much easier and more effective than trying to shove the square peg of the vindicator into the round hole of either the cleric or champion, and it means you end up with much more diversity of build available because so many of the ranger feats already touch the core concept territory that Imrijka embodies (Monster Hunter, Swift Tracker, Eerie Traces, and other ranger feats fit well within her story and the needs of her conceptual space, arguably much better than most champion or cleric feats, which means you can build a wider array of vindicators than you could if the only class feats that fit the concept were the ones coming from the class archetype and some shoe-horned-in additional feats.)

Investigator is maybe a bit of a closer fit than champion or cleric, but it lacks the magical elements that the concept is looking to incorporate and isn't as rough and tumble as the ranger, leaving it in an awkward space where it wouldn't have a very easy time trading the things it needs to utilize its feats and class features effectively while also incorporating all the other elements necessary to build a character that encompasses as much of the conceptual space of a popular character like Imrijka, the useful and parallel mechanical space between the PF1 inquisitor and a PF2 reimagining of the concept, etc.

We used ranger because it was far and away the thing closest to the core concept already in the game. It allowed for the fullest realization of Imrijka and a host of other characters in the most efficient manner to create the broadest array of fruitful concepts and builds.

And those who came up with and support the idea of renaming it better not read up on real-life paladins :facepalm:

As of the remaster, PF2 doesn't have paladins, either.

Looks like the start of the Vindicator blurb got cut off, it starts with just "ranger class."

I've pinged the website team about fixing that along with the copy/paste error on the bloodrager art, should be resolved shortly.

Literally in the time it took me to make this post.

A Kineticist pregen? Does that mean that going forward we can expect pregenerated sheets for non-core classes as well? That would be very exciting indeed! At least to my knowledge Yoon is the first one.

With the recent reorganizations within our departments and some opportunities presented by things like the remaster and the addition of a lead developer on the Rules & Lore team, we are finding that it may be a lot more feasible to expand our roster of iconic pregens beyond the boundaries we had previously set.

We'll likely have more to say on this front in the months ahead.

With what is confirmed about the Guns and Gears remaster, there is likely not going to be any mechs in guns and gears.

Guns and Gears has to keep current "pageification" [...]

The word is "pagination".

I would love the remastered gunslinger feats for firearms and crossbows to be expanded to work for slings.

This won't be happening but we do have sling-specific support planned for another upcoming book.

This is great! Thanks so much, Michael!

I do what I can!

I just noticed for the first time this book is the one with Paizo stock number PZO2112.

I have not examined every page in detail but oh boy will I be sorely dissapointed if there are zero references to that all-important number 2112 and its associated Canadian masters of their craft :)

I'm still looking, still hopeful, and have my fingers crossed!

I appreciate your overture but I'm afraid we have a pretty strict editorial policy about easter eggs. You can continue your journey of discovery for the temples of Syrinx all you want, but if you're expecting to find something that slipped past our editors you'll be speaking a sad soliloquy through your tears.

Obviously we can't give something for nothing but I hope you appreciate the grand finale of this book with its crafting subsystems and rare artifacts.

***

I'm gonna be honest, I can't figure out a "natural" way to work Oracle: The Dream or A Passage to Bangkok into this post so, uh, there they are.

UnArcaneElection wrote:

How many Godsrain-instigated iconics are we supposed to get?

2, probably. Unless Paizo want to get fancy and use the old iconics who got refrenced in the art shown for some of the new archtypes.

Every mythic destiny is represented by one of the existing iconics. I think we've shown off Feiya as an archfiend and Fumbus as an apocalypse rider.

We also mentioned during the con that in the Godsrain novel, Samo and Nahoa meet up with Kyra, Merisiel, Ezren, and Amiri, but I think that's all we've said about that...

Also, Nankou being mentioned is GREAT!

At some point it'd be kind of neat to do a story that has Samo, Nankou, T'kamo, and some of the other Varki and maybe Erutaki heroes teaming up, but Samo's got a pretty big adventure ahead that I suspect means it'll be awhile before she finds her way back to Icemark... Assuming she's destined to return home at all.

I feel like there are a ton of people taking remaster to mean a PC/PC2 style rework of the book. Those people are going to be disappointed I think. I hope people aren't upset when it comes out and few things changed.

The remastered game is still 98% the same game with tweaks for licensing, errata, and the occasional glow up. It would probably be good for folks to keep that in mind, yes.

Pricing structure was announced in this blog back in October, which should give you the information to help make your purchasing decisions.

"Pathfinder War of Immortals" in the last paragraph has a broken link.

In fact, all the links in the last paragraph are broken.

Looks like they should be working now.

Wonder if we'll learn more about Nankou in the future

You can learn more about Nankou, the Varki Linnorm King, in Lost Omens Legends!

If we already got the previous pre-remaster version via subscription, will we be getting the remaster PDF update? or is this a completely different book?

If you already have the Guns & Gears PDF, you'll get the remaster version of the download automatically just like you would when we release a new printing with errata.

Couldn't say this better myself. While I appreciate the effort that goes into a remaster I think I'd rather just have an errata. Then that effort can go into brand new material and I don't have to keep buying books I already own.

If the remaster was a wild success and a vast improvement over the original I don't think I'd feel this way. In my opinion it's been a necessary evil due to OGL and ended up being net neutral verging on negative. So, buying more remastered material does not excite me.

If you already have Guns & Gears, you don't need to rebuy it. If you have the PDF, you'll get the updated PDF just like with any errata drop.

Guns & Gears is out of print and due for a new print run, so the thousands of new customers we've picked up in the last two years can't buy it, and our 3pp and licensed partners have some licensing difficulties to navigate with it being on the OGL instead of the ORC. The remastered version allows us to put out a run with the errata, do any final clean-ups to sync language and traits with the current version of the game, move it to the new license so our partners can use it easily and confidently in their products, and get one of the best-selling books of the edition back on shelves for new customers.

I'd like to give all of the Monk weapons where the Monk trait 'costs' an actual useful trait/other feature, to give them something else to make them on par with other weapons. It just seems so unnecessary, especially when there's a Monk trait weapon that doesnt have the trait cost power budget and it didnt break anything. Like, it makes weapon using monks feel more finicky considering its already a feat cost, and it makes it so those weapons are just automatically worse for anyone liking the style of weapon for a non Monk character.

This isn't a thing. Monk is always a zero-cost trait.

Each weapon category (simple > martial > advanced) can have about a minor trait's-worth (1/3 of a die size) flex up or down within it before it changes into a different category, depending on its trait profile. This is in part because a weapon might end up having every single trait that fits its story and not quite hit the ceiling for its category or miss enough to drop into a lower category.

Because monk weapons tend to be the most story-rich and trait-heavy weapons in the game, they experience that trait flex of being a minor trait up or down within their category more often than other weapons. This has been misinterpreted as the monk trait "costing" them a trait that another weapon gets, but that's not what's happening. They just have all the traits that match their story without passing through the floor or ceiling of their category.

Michael Sayre wrote:

But well over a hundred thousand people play this game and a small percentage of them having the same conversation over and over across multiple threads is very different from a community consensus or forum consensus.

I totally agree. I also note that the forums often disagree with themselves a lot. So concensus is illusive. Besides which it is a business not a democracy. This is your job and your call to make.

If you left it to us there would be a thousand different homebrews.

It is just not going to stop me from saying what I think you got right and what I think you got wrong. We are you most engaged customers.

We are still here because we think you guys are doing the best job in the industry.

I appreciate you, Gortle. Like I said "a good idea that only a few people had can still be a good idea"!

Like, I think the reason Paizo didn't touch those classes is because they don't really agree with the forum consensus, and I find I don't, either.

I think assuming there is a "forum consensus" is itself a bit of a misconstrual of a lot of data, even if you only look at one particular forum.

We look at data from multiple communities; each with thousands, tens of thousands, even scores of thousands of members; and look at actual response numbers across a variety of topics, then contextualize that data against survey responses, play data from character builders and VTTs, and other data sources. Then we hash out what all of that actually means and how to prioritize it for things like class design and remastering through the lens of that collected data and the decades of game design experience contained within our team.

One of the anecdotes I use to frame this information is the kineticist playtest. Big survey, thousands of people chiming in. A lot of people thought that expanding the elemental damage types the kineticist had available for each element was something that there was a "forum consensus" on and everybody thought it really needed to be done. Only 13 people actually said anything about expanded element options in the survey feedback and it was clear from the way they copy-pasted their thoughts directly from their forum posts that those were the same people who had formed the bulk of the so-called "forum consensus" on the topic. It was definitionally a vocal minority. (Though note that we did expand the elemental damage types, because we had room in the class chassis to do it and a good idea that only a few people had can still be a good idea.)

But well over a hundred thousand people play this game and a small percentage of them having the same conversation over and over across multiple threads is very different from a community consensus or forum consensus.

If you do give the Commander a mascot, I hope the option remains to have the mascot be a mount. I found that part really useful and thematic.

The idea is that it doesn't really need to be specifically limited to a mount. It could be, but also like, why not a falcon that carries your squad's pennant or a hunting hound that helps your River Kingdoms commander hunt bandits through the forest?

The quote is about how the existing casters, in particular the spell lists, weren't designed in such a way that spells single element can represent a complete, self-sufficient kit, and that the Kineticist is good for that use case.

But not all specialization is mono-elemental specialization, a specialized storm themed blaster is still hitting for multiple saves and damage types, despite being specialized both elementally and in terms of their party role.

The way you define "specialist" definitely has bearing on the topic. Like, if you think "war mage" is a specialist, you can probably just do that, especially with a little archetyping. There are all kinds of spells that fit the broad bucket of "war" that could work.

Similarly, "elementalist" is pretty achievable in a way that "pyrokineticist using the wizard chassis" probably isn't, because spells with the fire trait have a narrower theme; you could scrounge up a few of them that target Fort and Will and a few more that also debuff, but you'd have a hard time filling out a complement of spells from rank 1 to 10 in a way that feels satisfying and on-theme at every level of play and doesn't run into some performance valleys. The main class bucket starts too broad to easily drill down to something that narrow without replacement architecture and content specifically designed to reinforce that purpose. But broadly you can probably get what you want from a bigger bucket of elements if you just want to focus on "elemental magic" via something like the elementalist archetype because that's a big enough bucket you probably have some version of pretty much all the tools you need.

Necromancy is another one where the spells skew towards Fort and Will with not a lot of Reflex, especially for some spell ranks, and there's a lot of different versions of what a "necromancer" might be, so moving away from "it's specifically a specialty wizard" to "it's a trope-specific bucket" could allow you to safely drop all the wizard stuff that is not necessary for the trope to make room for more necromancer stuff that checks all the various boxes you want to have checked to fully realize the concept in a more narrow and fully realized way. (Tangentially, necromancer has always been a weird one in d20 TTRPGs since a lot of the time the best necromancers have actually been divine casters but the wizard is the bucket people think of; another reason I see it as a flavor of specialist that can benefit from being freed from the wizard chassis and allowed to have its own, more tightly-customized, bucket o' goodies.)

But there are a lot of ways to get all the tools you need within a framework that might be considered a "specialist", so it's going to be difficult to have a conversation about specialists and how achievable/unachievable they are without drawing a line somewhere and being clear about what's on each side of it.

I have been looking to preorder this but the online store I normally purchase from has indicated that they haven’t received solicitation for it yet. Does anyone have an idea how long in advance of release that solicitation goes out to stores?

Solicitations for this book are already out.

It's possible that there's a delay between the storefront and their distributor.

The tendency of people to take a conversation and then move it three steps from its original location and context to construct long arguments by picking out single nuggets to respond to while completely missing the point of the original conversation is one of those reasons I often think about just forswearing the internet entirely. The flipside is that I've met so many wonderful people who have become colleagues and had so many freelancers and 3pp friends who've been improved by these conversations that I feel a bit of a responsibility to keep going even when threads like this make me lose all faith in humanity.

So let's talk about the context of my original post and what I was actually saying.

At the time I made that post, one of the hottest conversations in the community was about wizards not being able to be mono-themed effectively (e.g. blasters suck / why can't I just play a wizard who shoots fire all day / etc.) An incredibly common response to this request from other community members at the time was "You can, just play a kineticist." And, of course, this thread was in the context of designing for the game.

Now, let's go back to what I actually said (note that this was only a portion of the conversation and that the link towards the top of this thread was itself an out of context repost) -

So bringing it back to balance and customization: if a character has the potential to do anything and a goal of your game is balance, it must be assumed that the character will do all those things they're capable of. Since a wizard very much can have a spell for every situation that targets every possible defense, the game has to assume they do, otherwise you cannot meet the goal of balance. Customization, on the other side, demands that the player be allowed to make other choices and not prepare to the degree that the game assumes they must, which creates striations in the player base where classes are interpreted based on a given person's preferences and ability/desire to engage with the meta of the game. It's ultimately not possible to have the same class provide both endless possibilities and a balanced experience without assuming that those possibilities are capitalized on.

So if you want the fantasy of a wizard, and want a balanced game, but also don't want to have the game force you into having to use particular strategies to succeed, how do you square the circle? I suspect the best answer is "change your idea of what the wizard must be." D20 fantasy TTRPG wizards are heavily influenced by the dominating presence of D&D and, to a significantly lesser degree, the works of Jack Vance. But Vance hasn't been a particularly popular fantasy author for several generations now, and many popular fantasy wizards don't have massively diverse bags of tricks and fire and forget spells. They often have a smaller bag of focused abilities that they get increasingly competent with, with maybe some expansions into specific new themes and abilities as they grow in power. The PF2 kineticist is an example of how limiting the theme and degree of customization of a character can lead to a more overall satisfying and accessible play experience. Modernizing the idea of what a wizard is and can do, and rebuilding to that spec, could make the class more satisfying to those who find it inaccessible.

Of course, the other side of that equation is that a notable number of people like the wizard exactly as the current trope presents it, a fact that's further complicated by people's tendency to want a specific name on the tin for their character. A kineticist isn't a satisfying "elemental wizard" to some people simply because it isn't called a wizard, and that speaks to psychology in a way that you often can't design around. You can create the field of options to give everyone what they want, but it does require drawing lines in places where some people will just never want to see the line, and that's difficult to do anything about without revisiting your core assumptions regarding balance, depth, and customization.

See how what I'm actually doing here is talking about a variety of nuanced factors?

My first assertion (at this point) is that for a game to be balanced, you need to balance it against what a reasonably skilled player can do. So taking a wizard and having them memorize nothing but fire spells is going to be below the ceiling because memorizing some things that aren't fire spells is inherently more powerful in the framework of the game. A wizard who uses the totality of their skillset will be a massively effective blaster as they debuff and annihilate enemies who never make it into range to retaliate. Juicing up the baseline to make the characters who don't use those tools more effective will lead to the characters who do use those tools being too effective, and then we're spiraling right back into problems that limited the reach of other d20 fantasy games.

So, as I said previously, how do you square that circle?

Well, from a design perspective (you know, the context of that entire thread) one way to do it is to change the internal idea of what a wizard is. You know which wizards in media don't match the framework of D&D-lineage wizards? Harry Dresden, Gandalf, John Constantine, Allanon, Richard Cypher, any Malazan wizard, Belgarath, Harry Potter, Jafar, and pretty much any other wizard I could name who isn't directly part of the D&D lineage tracing back to mechanics inspired by Jack Vance's Dying Earth. Most of the characters we cited internally as inspirations for the thaumaturge class were wizards in their own canon.

Working from that point, one possibility to making "specialist" wizards more appealing is to fundamentally change the baseline of wizards being able to do almost anything. When you change that assumption about the breadth of the toolbox, you can make things like the kineticist, who gets gate attenuators, almost no daily resource limitations, and can mono-theme the way people were asking for. This is a pretty obvious conclusion, and why "just play a kineticist if you want an elemental blaster" was such an obvious response to people making that request.

But, as I actually said "the other side of that equation is that a notable number of people like the wizard exactly as the current trope presents it". You can't give the one without taking the other away. This is further complicated by the fact that there are other people who won't be a happy with a concept until they have a class with a name on the tin. You can't give some people who want an elemental blaster wizard something that isn't called "wizard" and have them ever be happy, because they want something that has the prestige and architecture of a class with the name they want tied to the mechanics they want.

This is why we have things like a swashbuckler, gunslinger, ranger, etc. People love those classes and they want to be able to say "I'm a wizard/gunslinger/swashbuckler/etc." without needing to quote a parathetical or the name of a feat.

So changing the wizard to answer group A (I want a wizard who can blast well without having to be tactical or memorize multiple types of spells), inherently conflicts with group B (I like the wizard just the way it is), and making a new class that does exactly what group A wants but has a different label on the tin conflicts with group C (it has to be a wizard, no other name will do).

Making the kineticist solved for part of the Venn Diagram (the folks who fall into group A that don't fall into groups B or C), but it doesn't solve for the whole picture.

It may not be possible to solve for the whole picture (a reality of game design where your goal inevitably must default to "pleasing the widest number of people possible while knowing that the ones we don't please will be the most vocal"), but in many ways, the remaster opens the door to a world where maybe we can get closer.

One of the issues with the D&D-wizard has always been that "specialists" are really folks who give up their rubber mallet and step stool in exchange for adding enough room to their garage for an adjustable extension ladder, a ratchet set, and a backup toolbox. They've pretty much always been able to give up less for more, and, especially in recent iterations, often times they're not really giving up anything at all because dipping into the "forbidden fruit" just sets them back to the same baseline as the non-specialist. So an "evoker" still couldn't have new tools that fundamentally change the math like a kineticist gets, because they already still have all the tools they need to change the math.

With a bunch of highly thematic and overly-broad concepts carved off of the wizard (evoker, necromancer, diviner, abjurer, etc.), it does open up room to explore those concepts as more robust and well-rounded archetypes or even classes, coloring in more of the aforementioned Venn diagram. There will still be people who won't be happy with anything other than a class that says "wizard" on the tin and has the exact combination of mechanics they want, but people who can be happy with "diviner" or "war mage" have more room for the kinds of specialized mechanics that might give them the thing that will allow them to express their character in a way they can be satisfied by.

As far as the community comment I made. It was lazy.

Instead providing a statement that was more accurate with some specificity I casually said community.
I don't mind that you corrected me, but disinformation nor negativity even was not my intention.

You're fine and it happens. I don't think anyone had malicious intentions, but forum speak has a tendency to spiral into hyperbole, over-generalization, etc.

That's to be expected but when you start to have a cluster of that piling up in close proximity on a forum we host, I think clarifying / addressing notable inaccuracies is fair and proper.

The missuse of literally is so common that it is now accepted by the Oxford English Dictionary. When I notice it, it bugs me too.

The sentence I replied to was-

"Literally the only thing that changed about the class was Crossbow Ace, everything else was left as is."

Even with a misuse of "literally" that's clearly an incorrect and untrue statement.

As to the rest of the responses-

There's over 117k subscribers on the most active PF2 subReddit. You'll struggle to find any threads on the ranger that have interactions from even a fraction of a percent of that number.

The threads and posts about the ranger also have a pretty standard spread of negative, neutral, and positive inclinations, and general upvoting of positive comments aligns towards at least counterbalancing unique negative comments (and often you'll find that some of the highest upvoted comments in a negatively skewed thread are counters to the negative assertion that often have more upvotes than the main thread.) The internet in general and gaming forums in particular skew heavily towards negative commentary, so a net positive or even a net neutral in such forums is often indicative of an overall positive reception.

More to the point, there are enough visible numbers there to know what the community size is and what the general engagement is, and those make it clear that numbers like "90%" or "75%" in regards to the community inclinations aren't eyeballs or estimates; even going off readily available public data there's nothing to remotely support such a claim.

Normally, I don't bother getting involved in a thread like this because various segments of the community can and should make their own evaluations and decisions. Our job is generally to watch those conversations and not get overly involved so we can make wise and profitable decisions about how to steer our own standards and content for maximum enjoyment across the widest possible audience.

The reason I chimed in here was because this thread had reached a point of negativity cycling where active disinformation that went beyond the realm of opinion was being spread, to make it clear that that was disinformation.

By specific subset of the community you mean 90% of individuals in this community and maybe 75% of the much larger Reddit think Outwit is under done.

Those are completely made up and entirely hyperbolic numbers. Most ranger threads on the Reddit don't even have 5% community engagement, and they're not universally negative. Even in this much smaller and generally more critical community those numbers don't wash with actual post engagements from unique posters.

You are right in that what people play with and buy is objective reality for a company selling a game, rather than opinions on the net. Have you looked at the differential? Is the popularity of Flurry and Precision staying the same relative to Outwit? Is Outwit driving repeat business or is it just dissapointing customers? Is the implementation living up to the popularity of the concept? Do you have data that can tell you that?

What we can see is that ranger is one of the more popular classes in the game and Outwit is showing up in builds about as often as Flurry or Precision.

Those numbers hold pretty consistent month after month as the game's total player base, engagement, and rulebook sales and subscriptions continue to grow, so we can infer pretty safely that it's not discouraging business and the edge isn't decreasing in popularity. There's even some indicators that it actually becomes more appealing to players the more familiar they become with the system (as its actually more popular and widely used now than it was in some earlier data metrics.)

And note that none of what I'm saying here is a value judgement one way or another on whether Outwit is good or bad, or even if ranger is good or bad; I haven't made any statements in that regard because it's entirely subjective.

The main thrust of my original post was to note that there were a lot of indefensible or incorrect statements being made. That "literally" only one change had been made to the ranger (untrue) or that "the community" felt a certain way (unproven and statistically unlikely based on the actual data available.)

Any monk can become a Super Saiyan at lvl 18 with Ki Form! All the DBZ stuff being a la carte feats that you can put ON TOP of whatever else you're doing with your build was a major selling point of PF2E for me. Monk and ranger being competent martials is just awesome in general

(My usual quiet note that I was actually inspired by Bui's battle aura from Yu Yu Hakusho when I wrote the original draft of Ki Form and then Mark saiyaned it up a bit, lol!)

On the main subject, the rogue's Impossible Striker making it so that you basically just get full sneak attack damage all the time at 20th is pretty bonkers, and it's sneakily an action economy enhancer because you don't have to jump through the hoops (easy as they tend to be) of making your target off-guard.

Outwit does need more to be effective in combat, but im guessing that is not what its for and the designers value what it does offer even if the community doesnt.

It's worth noting here that "the community" is something most people don't actually have a very good read on. When a person says "the community" it's often, knowingly or not, shorthand for "the specific subsection of the community I pay the most attention to and which usually agrees with me." We have access to thousands upon thousands of character builds and tons of specific feedback from a variety of surveys and data sources. One of those bits of feedback is that all the hunter's edges (hunters' edge?) are almost equally popular in how often they're used and selected. There is a specific subset of the community that thinks Outwit is maybe undertuned from a combat perspective, but its total popularity is on par with any of the other hunters' edge when you widen your lens and look at what players are doing across community feedback derived from many thousands of data points as opposed to the trends in smaller and more insular groups that might not see engagement from more than a couple hundred individuals at the high end (and for a venue like the forums on this website, usually much lower.)

Literally the only thing that changed about the class was Crossbow Ace, everything else was left as is.

"Literally", of course, meaning "figuratively" in this case. Because the ranger also got an upgrade to Nature's Edge letting it work in all difficult terrain, a boost to their spell DC scaling allowing it to scale up to master now if they have warden spells, the adjustment to Crossbow Ace (alongside general related adjustments to crossbows), improvements to several warden spells that include things like better scaling or earlier access to certain effects, Deadly Aim is now a flourish instead of an open making it generally more flexible, the free action for your companion from Mature Animal Companion isn't specifically limited to Striding towards or Striking only your prey so it's more tactically flexible, the ranger's specialized companion now can be taken multiple times to gain multiple specializations, Warden's Reload was added an option, and Impossible Volley no longer has the flourish trait (limited use cases there, but it is still a change).

For what it's worth, Zoken, I've wished for (I think?) a similar thing to what you're proposing. Something similar to a monk in style, but instead of punching things they hurl ki blasts and such. Monk having a bunch of (really cool) focus spells based off of qi is great, but I would love to have a class that is closer to a caster with Qi as it's focus, though maybe not with actual spells (a la kineticist/thaum as you say). That concept doesn't really work with a monk, Qi spells supplement the rest of what the class can do but even if your sole focus of your build is Qi stuff, you're still going to need to do other monk stuff.

That being said I can see where others are coming from in that it's a pretty niche desire, even if I agree with you that there are too many people here that tend to shoot down ideas too quickly.

I wrote at least two 3pp classes for PF1 that were kind of "monk but more magical" for 3pp books, and they both sold quite well. The guru was "what if monk but Incarnum" and the sage was "what if monk but less punchy and more 'shonen anime'-inspired."

They 100% are the kinds of concepts that people would say "that's just a flavor of monk", but there's still an audience out there who are going to love them and prefer to have a class that targets the flavor and mechanics more specifically; they might not be the audience that justifies Paizo doing it in a class format, but there's a whole lot of ground between "Paizo would publish this as a class in a hardcover" and "this isn't worth doing at all". Both of those are kind of the slimmest slivers of what is possible in a TTRPG; Paizo because there's a fixed schedule and very high sales goals that need to be met, the "not worth doing" bucket because there's fans for all kinds of ideas and "not worth doing" is highly subjective and contextual.

I've also written a 3pp luchador class for both editions of Pathfinder (another "isn't that just a monk/archetype" class that still sold well in both editions), and a book for Rogue Genius Games that was literally just all 8 of the classic wizard specialties spun off into standalone classes.

There are a lot of ideas that are good and fun ideas that don't meet the stringent requirements of being a hardcover Paizo rulebook class but still have a passionate audience out there.

Not much I can say after that. I guess my idea is terrible.

I don't think so.

Sanityfaerie and shroudb make some reasonable and educated points about how likely a given concept is to be created as a 1pp class that goes in one of our books, but our books have a lot of significant requirements; our audience is many thousands of people who we are hoping to get to spend around $65 on a book, and we know we'll probably only ever get to make around 30ish classes in a given edition cycle.

But programs like Pathfinder Infinite exist because there are a lot of cool class concepts that many people will really enjoy that just don't fit inside our product and economic model. I've written tons of really popular 3pp classes that I love and which sold well for their market niche that would never get published by Paizo. That doesn't mean they're terrible classes or ideas, it just means that the audience for them was not the same audience being targeted by a Paizo hardcover.

And as for "No one wants that class" was anyone asking for the Inventor? The Thaumaterge? The Animist? the Exemplar?

(The answer to this is "yes"; those classes all had some element of addressing frequent requests in the way we felt was the best execution for PF2.)

The commander has been mentioned by Mike Sayre to be inspired by the 4e warlord.

What I've actually said is that the conceptual space predates the warlord; the first "commander" class I really liked was the 3E marshal (which was neat but not good). The 4E warlord was a neat class but it's also one I haven't even looked at in over a decade.

The commander's primary inspiration point is the best parts of the PF1 cavalier; you might notice the banner, the teamwork orientation, the built-in mount option...

I wrote a fairly long thread about how one of the interesting aspects of the commander is that the evolution of a concept like the cavalier into the mechanical framework of PF2 naturally mirrors the 4E warlord in a lot of ways because of the shared evolutionary paths. PF1 was a very individualistic and basic addition oriented framework while PF2 and 4E are both more tactical and teamwork-oriented games. So when you look at the best parts of e.g. teamwork feats from PF1 that make good fits for PF2, you're not looking at math fixers (because PF2 has tighter math) but rather potent combination actions and tactical maneuvers like Coordinated Charge, Target of Opportunity, Escape Route, Pack Flanking, etc. (and you'll see that the commander has equivalents to pretty much all of that functionality.)

4E probably did a lot to popularize the concept of a warlord-type class, particularly in the realm of popularizing the word "warlord" to refer to the concept, but it's not the originator of the archetype. The idea that PF2 is "borrowing from 4E" is, IMO, a kind of flawed comparison based on a limited data set that ignores the fact that 4E's ideas were all drawn from the same 50-year gaming traditions as PF2 and while there were iterations of ideas that were more popular or had a particular spin, they're all concepts derived from fantasy tropes that are even older than the gaming genre. There's obvious parallels in the systems sharing the same lineage and looking to solve the same problems, but PF2 isn't trying to be 4E, or 5E, or any edition of D&D. It's the evolution of PF1 retaining crunch, depth, and breadth while streamlining out unnecessary complexity and evolving to appeal to a much larger modern audience.