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.)