Seisuke's page

Firstly I'd like to thank everyone for their responses. I have seen some useful advice that could boost the general feeling of spell casters during an adventuring day. Especially things like working in the Psychic archetype or Wellspring Spellcasting.

I also watched some of ThrabenU and Mathfinder's videos on spell casters. But these actually just confirmed my observations. There seem to be a few fall back spells that work at least for a round, change the environment to create some disadvantage for the enemies and some feat combinations to play the system better. But it looks like the class balance is finely tuned to work with a specific encounter design. One where fighting several severe fights one after another against fewer, stronger enemies should not be the norm.

Spellcasters feeling weak or just not fun in these kind of combats, seems to be a mixture of statistical disadvantage and investment of effort. A martial swinging for 3 rounds and hitting nothing is bad luck, but nothing of importance is lost. A caster using his highest spell slots and seeing the enemy save 3 times feels real bad, because now your strongest resources barely did anything and you don’t get them back. The one thing to do in these situations are reliable buffs and heals or spells like Synesthesia or Slow that work at least for a round and be satisfied with that. Or maybe wall off half of the enemies to buy time.

So I very much understand half the advice being to not play a full spell caster in this context. I still find it to be quite a sad situation, but Paizo most probably won’t change any of that in the future. At best my GM might come to realize that his current encounter design will not work well once we play a party that is less optimized for brutal combat.

Also, I’m not really fond of the Magus or Summoner as casters. They have their own way of working spell casting into their mechanics and their class fantasy feels alright if you want something like that. But 4 serious spell slots a day does not make a real caster for me.

Anyways, thanks everyone for the insights and happy pathfinding!

I quoted this part in particular because I'm curious how you built your characters to end up feeling this way. At level 5 and 6, your Alchemist's attack bonus should have been exactly the same as your Rogues was if you were maxing out Dexterity on both characters - or even +1 higher on the Alchemist if you were using Quicksilver Mutagens.

How is that supposed to work? Alchemist get their weapon expertise at level 7. The Quicksilver Mutagen helps, but the reduced max hp got me into trouble just as often. Also melee rogue had an easy time getting enemies off guard for -2 AC.

Out of curiosity, which Sorcerer did you play, OP?

I did not play the Sorcerer. It was another player in our group. Dragon Sorcerer with a focus on doing fire damage. Worked as bad as you might imagine. But I have to admit that our GM really had a thing for rolling high on saves. We are playing online on Foundry btw. and we can see the final result of the GM rolls in combat. So no funny business there. Just a lot of bad dice rolls.

But that seems to be a general feature of PF2. If the party rolls below average and the GM rolls well in a severe fight, it feels really like you fail almost everything...

Greetings to all the Pathfinders here.

As stated in the title, I am looking for advice concerning spell casters. This is not supposed to be another "casters are/feel weak" thread. I have read enough opinions in that regard and I have come to my own conclusions concerning the state of balance between all the classes. My general conclusion still is, that casters are not really fun to play in PF2. But I really like playing casters as much as anything else. So I have been racking my brain trying to find some kind of caster that seems fun to play and I still have found nothing.

My group has switched to PF2 about 2 years ago. So far I have played the pre-rework Bombing Alchemist, the Rogue and currently I am playing a Dragon Instinct Barbarian.

Alchemist was a horrible experience. My first attacks hit maybe a third of times. At level 5 or 6 I got used to barely hitting and just expect the splash damage.

The Rogue was fun. Class fantasy fits and sneak attack feels satisfying.
The Barbarian is just as fun. Every hit deals massive damage. Lots of HP and I get a Dragon Breath basically every fight.

But everytime I look for a caster to play, I find only problem points. The success rates of spells, the limited single target damage, the focus on having to buff/debuff to be effective. None of that looks like fun. Especially after seeing another player trying to play a damage focused sorcerer for a year and seeing his spells do a pittance of damage basically 3 out of 4 times.

The actual problem might not even be the class balancing, but the encounter design our GM prefers. Our GM does not like meaningless combat. Which means fights need to be dangerous to a certain extend. Also book keeping lots of enemies is not really fun for the GM. It drags the length of combat. So in practice this often means we have 3 to 4 combats per adventuring day. Almost every combat is atleast a severe difficulty encounter with a few enemies of party level or fewer enemies above party level. Enemies of party level -1 we see rarely. Party level -2 enemies I have never seen in any serious encounter.

As far as I understand, these are exactly the conditions where casters feel weak. Spell success rates will be ~50% at best. Area spells are less impactful because of few possible targets. So maybe it's just that.

The thing is, this will not change. Our current party (Barbarian, Fighter, Chamption, Kinetist, Heal-focused Cleric) manages these kind of adventuring days quite well, as long as the cleric still has a few heal spells.

So I hope maybe the wiser Pathfinders here can point out some practical advice to play spell casters in these kind of adventuring days, that I am missing.

(Something else than casting Slow or Synesthesia please...)
(And maybe something that works in the earlier levels. Playing a class for a year until it becomes fun, is not what I am looking for.)