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One of the pleasant surprises from reading the wizard blog yesterday was finding out that Paizo is trying to make Counterspell much more useful. Turning it into a reaction is a big improvement over PF1. But the fact that it requires you to have the same spell that you want to counter already prepared (and prepared at the same level) feels overly restrictive. And while Mark has pointed out that trading one reaction to negate most of your opponent's turn is a VERY powerful ability his point is rather moot if you are almost never in a position to actually use Counterspell on an opponent.
With all of that in mind, I thought it might be interesting collect some ideas about how counterspell could be changed to make it a little more flexible without making it too powerful. So without further ado, here are a few ideas:
1. Dispell Magic as a Crutch: In the thread for the wizard blog post Excaliburproxy pointed out the possibility that preparing Dispell Magic in a spell slot of the correct level may allow you to Counterspell by casting it as a reaction.
This sounds rather plausible since PF1 allowed you to do just that and Dispell Magic isn't a guaranteed way to negate an opposing spell so it should be fairly easy to balance. If Paizo did take this approach it would alleviate a lot of my concerns about how Counterspell works.
2. The Fuzzypaws Approach: In the same thread Fuzzypaws proposed making it so that if you had a spell of the same school prepared that was one level higher than the spell your opponent was casting then you could have the option of sacrificing the higher level spell in order to Counterspell it.
Since wizards now have a much tighter limit on how many spells they can cast per day that should prevent this use of Counterspell from being too powerful. Also, this approach isn't mutually exclusive in regards to option one. It could even be a feat if option one is the default.
3. Action economy shenanigans: The first idea that came to mind when I started writing this post was making it so that if you had a spell of the same school and same level prepared you could spend it as a part of a Counterspell [[R]] in order to increase the number of actions required for your opponent to cast their spell. If the intended target did not have any actions left to sacrifice then they would have to sacrifice their [[R]] instead.
This approach adds a little complexity in order to expand what Counterspell can do instead of making it easier to disrupt another spell. I like the flavor that goes with this idea (your opponent has to spend the normal number of actions to cast a spell plus one additional [[A]]/[[R]] because you are meddling with their spell). But without a visceral "feel" for what the new action economy is like I'm not sure how well this would balance out; although I suspect forcing an opponent to sacrifice an [[A]] would usually have a much bigger impact than forcing them to give up a [[R]].
Any thoughts on these approaches? What other alternatives do people have in mind?