Kiranda

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HolyFlamingo! wrote:
So... from a game development standpoint, what are some possible solutions? How would you make a baby wizard feel better?

Take Vancian spellcasting off life support.

The developers of Pathfinder 2e can't guarantee every party has the same number of combats per day in every AP or in every homebrew game. This will be true forever and as long as it's true you will have classes that are disproportionally affected by attrition. That is a problem that is only solved by moving from a Per Day model to a Per Encounter model.

Focus Points are a good direction for this. Here are 1-3 turns of Cool Stuff that you can do every single encounter whether you have spell slots or not. 4th Edition D&D also did this by giving everyone 3 Encounter Attack Powers with options to have more. No matter how many encounters you have per day, you can throw your Cool Stuff at them. There is much less mechanical stress on cantrips to shoulder significant weight when they're rarely if ever used. It doesn't mean that they shouldn't be cool but casters aren't living or dying by them either.

If Wizards could spend Focus Points to use curriculum spells after a fashion then lots of problems would be solved. Suddenly if you choose to play a Wafflemancer then you can be Wafflemancer'ing all day, every day. This opens up its own can of worms and would be a significant paradigm shift but is probably the right direction to go.

Until then you're always going to eventually run out of Wafflemancer power. You can bandaid the problem with scrolls, wands, or other activatable items. GMs can let your party sleep a lot which ends up creating a different set of issues. You can make cantrips that are just shy of full spell slot power so players feel less bad when they run out of Wafflemancer power. There are a lot of ways that you can rig the game to not put pressure on the fault lines but they will still exist. There will always be tensions between various classes that are fundamentally playing different games.