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Feat chains allow the Fighter to choose his own class features. They scale via the fighter taking the later feats.

Which means that the fighter is pigeonholed into lameness. Since his choices are still bad.

So tell us what feats(and I mean Pathfinder core feats) are so important to omit the Weapon Focus/Specialization chain?

You'll probably want to grab Precise Shot so you're not a terrible one-trick pony who gets killed by flying monsters. You'll need Power Attack (the 3.5 version, not the nerfed Pathfinder version). Improved Trip is always handy, although a little birdie told me that the CMB numbers were broken. Devastating Blow is pretty much a must-have, if they remove the part where you crit (instead giving you a flat damage multiplier). (Yes, DB is part of a feat chain. Which makes it painful to take.)

You choose the wrong example, again. Please calculate the damage for Vital Strike and especially Devastating Blow with and without the Weapon Focus -> Greater Weapon Specialization Feat chain. You'll see it makes a big difference.

I'm not sure if you understand the concept of opportunity cost. Please check Wikipedia for an explanation.

Xaaon: No, fighters are not fixed. They are, in fact, far from fixed. Please don't try to argue this. What Pathfinder has done is given the fighter bigger numbers. This is not fixing the class. Even if the fighter can hit 100% of the time, he's still going to be junk. Why? Let's see. He has no skill points. He has no real class features. (Feats? Give me a break. Non-scaling junk. A few measly bonuses on attack and damage rolls? Yawn. The rogue laughs at him right before stabbing him in the face.) He's the most equipment-dependent class in the game.

Mathematically, this is not correct.

Toughness adds 1 + 3/level hit point per level, recalculated every level. That is, it adds 4 hits points at 1st level, then replaces it with 5 hits points at 2nd level, 6 hit points at 3rd level, and so forth. It is important to note that the 3 hit point boost has a progressively diminishing return as you increase in level.
Conversely, as average damage increases, the overall average damage done by a +5% chance to hit increases. If at some point your average damage done by a melee attack is 20, then weapon focus adds an effective 1 point of damage to your attacks every round. That nearly equals the effect of Toughness. If your average damage goes to say 40, which was more than possible with 3.5 Power Attack, then weapon focus adds 2 damage to every attack, which is always greater than the effect of Toughness.

One point of damage? Per round? That certainly...is impressive.

If we were to add in the entire set of Weapon Specialization and Greater Weapon Focus and Greater Weapon Specialization to that feat, the effects would scale up even more dramatically. At 12th level, where Greater Weapon Specialization kicks in, the full effect is +10% to hit, +4 damage. This compares to Toughness now providing 1 + 3/12 = 1.25 hit points per level, or a total of 15 hit points. If you have absolutely 0 additional damage bonus from Strength, weapon, or otherwise, including the base weapon damage being 0 for some bizarre reason, the bonus damage from this single feat is 1.2 hit points per round because of iterative attacks. At 20th level, Toughness is providing you 1.05 hit points per level, while your Super Weapon Focus is doing an additional 1.6 hit points per level before Strength and magic bonuses and base weapon damage.

So you just wasted four feats to do an additional 1.6 damage. Per round. Wow.

Meanwhile, the smart fighter--well, he can't be that smart, since he's playing a fighter, but bear with me--has taken Devastating Blow and Vital Strike with those wasted feats.

Incorrect back at you.

Natural Spell has no effect if you are not in wild shape, so it has a de facto prerequisite. (And in fact it requires both a Wis 13 and the ability to Wild Shape as written prerequisites.)
Likewise Quicken Spell requires a minimum 4th level spell slot, so it also has a de facto prerequisite to be useful.
Assuming those prerequisites were removed for Natural Spell you could take it or Quicken Spell at 1st level. They would both be absolutely useless at that time, providing no benefit until you took the appropriate number of levels of druid (for Natural Spell) or any spellcaster (for Quicken Spell).

I'm sorry, I should have said meaningful prerequisites.

The reason I am "here" is because I would like to see Pathfinder do better. Pathfinder has the potential to do better, but it won't with this kind of attitude. 4e is not a good game system. It is boring. 3e is a good game system, although it is broken. Pathfinder fixes some of the larger "bugs" in the system, but it leaves the rest to be made into house rules.

Pathfinder's artwork is amazing. I would like to see a product that lives up to that standard.

NOTE: Please read this entire post before responding. This thread is not about Weapon Focus; I am merely using it for illustrative purposes.

I was reading through a thread. Somebody had made the innocuous (but poor) suggestion that Weapon Focus should add to BAB in order to qualify for iterative attacks. Then one of the designers posted.

And then I learned that Pathfinder is being sabotaged from the inside out. Unintentional though it may be, at least one designer is cutting out Pathfinder’s guts.

Here is what he posted in this thread.

Frankly, feats and abilities that fade into the background as you grow more powerful are, I think, good for the game. One of the largest problems facing high-level play is the complexity. if EVERYTHING you ever gained as you level up remains equally useful at higher level then all of a sudden at 15th or 20th level or whatever, your character is suddenly way too complex.

The problem this developer has is that high-level play is too complicated. What he is saying (specifically) is that turning Weapon Focus into a feat that starts out at a +1 bonus on attack rolls and then increasing its potency so that, in the end, it encompasses the entire Weapon Focus line (+2 on attacks, +4 damage) is too difficult. This idea is mind-boggling: Pathfinder has given fighters more to keep track of (Weapon and Armor Training), and the system has increased the number of feats characters get across the board. Which means that all the classes have become more complicated. This thought process is counter-intuitive to most of what Pathfinder has done with the 3e system. (There are, of course, some exceptions, such as CMB and the skills system.)

That might be okay for some players, but it's not for others, and it's CERTAINLY not okay for GMs who don't have the advantage of growing used to a specific stat block's evolution and powers over the course of years of play.

Now the argument is vaguely about backwards compatibility. Pathfinder is backwards compatible in that it keeps most of 3e’s downfalls, fixes the bigger problems in the game, and leaves the rest to house rules. The CMB alone takes a dump all over backwards compatibility, and the new skill system worsens it tenfold. Backwards compatibility is loosely maintained, but not enough that one wouldn’t have to re-configure all the monsters in a module.

Abilities, spells, and feats that fall into the background as you grow more powerful and are replaced by more powerful options help keep the game from growing unmanageably complex at high level. And if at 15th level, you're bemoaning the fact that you "wasted" a feat at 1st level for a benefit that, at the time was pretty good, but is now a drop in the bucket, I don't know what to say.

What “more powerful options”? The fighter gets few. In core 3e, his option is Power Attack. In Pathfinder, he can trade some attacks for extra damage. Fighters don’t get options.

Furthermore, this entire thinking falls apart when one considers other feats in Pathfinder—there are a huge number of feats that stay useful throughout a character’s career no matter what. They also have few prerequisites, if any. Off the top of my head: Natural Spell, Quicken Spell, Improved Initiative.

Basically, this attitude forces players to plan their characters out over the entire 20 levels. With his thinking, you can’t spontaneously decide that you’ll take Weapon Focus because it sucks. But you might need Weapon Focus to qualify for another feat, which means you have to spend your 11th-level feat on a weak choice in order to suck a little less later on.

If the problem is the conception that fighters loose their oomph... keep in mind that ALL classes have things that start to suck at higher levels, be they self-obsoleting spells like cause fear, sleep, or circle of death, or be they racial abilities (at 20th level, does a gnome's ability to speak with burrowing mammels even count anymore? How about a dwarf's stonecunning?)

Invisibility remains useful at 20th level. You’ve got a way better form of invisibility, but that 2nd-level spell can still be used. Rope trick. Mirror image. Greater magic weapon. Haste. All this stuff remains useful. Weapon Focus? It’s always weak. A +5% chance to hit is worth less than Toughness.

But [feats] don't all cost the same. Something like weapon focus costs one first level feat for some folk, but for others it costs one 2nd level feat, due to the prerequisite. Likewise, a lot of the more powerful feats have prerequisites that make it more difficult to pick.

Incorrect. Natural Spell and Quicken Spell have no prerequisites. They’re the most powerful feats in the game. Feat chains are bad game design because they put a stop to organic character creation and force players to plan out their builds. Which is bad. (See below for more details.)

The alternate, that all feats are available at 1st level and are all equally powerful would make for a pretty anemic and dull system, I think.

Strawman and false dichotomy. This is not an EITHER/OR situation. There’s a safe middle-ground.

More important than all the counter-arguments I’ve given is the fact that this sort of design philosophy hinders the entire Pathfinder game system.

To reiterate: this is more important than Weapon Focus. The Weapon Focus thing is just an example I’m using because it highlights poor design thinking.

This developer’s ideas made me realize that Pathfinder is poisoning its own well—the system rewards the players who have mastered the system while punishing the neophyte players who don’t know any better. In 3e (and Pathfinder), you either optimize or die as a fighter. (Well, you die anyway, because you’re a fighter, but you’ll die less horribly if you optimize.) If you don’t know the system, you can’t play a fighter. You will end up sucking, and you will become an active liability to your group when they are wasting resources to keep you from dying (or raising you from the dead).

To play a good fighter in 3e, you have to have splat after splat and the willingness to spend a long while picking through the feats so you can set up a one-trick pony combo that will make you combat effective…at least until the monsters wise up. In Pathfinder, little has changed.

Keeping bad feats in the game is poor game design.

Players should be able to pick up the book, whip up a character that they want to play, and get started without worrying about whether or not their character is going to be “good enough.” With non-scaling feats like Weapon Focus in the game, they do have to worry.

Furthermore, mechanically weak feats prevent “organic” character development. While a class-based system naturally hinders this to some extent, the system should encourage characters to role-play, not min/max. With “traps” like Weapon Focus, this is extremely difficult. With those feats, a character can’t say, “Hey, I think I’ll practice with my quarterstaff in the months between adventuring.” Instead, he has to say, “Hmm, I can’t take Weapon Focus now because it will delay me from picking up Power Attack and then Vital Strike. Even though my character’s background has had him training with a quarterstaff for years, I can’t take that feat because it will cripple my build.”

And that’s ridiculous. At this point, we should have learned something from the mistakes of the 3e (and 4e) developers. Encouraging system mastery is stupid, it turns away new players, and it leads to a vast power disparity between people who understand the mechanics and the people who just want to play a fighter.

It’s time to get on the bandwagon: mechanically weak choices are horrendous game design, and they should be avoided at all cost. The 3e devs purposely implemented mechanically weak choices to encourage system mastery. This was an epic failure on their behalf—but Pathfinder can fix this, if the developers change their mindsets. Just like we changed the Gygaxian "no save, you die"/"DM vs. PC" game design, Pathfinder needs to change the "weak choices" game design.

Thanks and have a nice day.

--Your friendly neighborhood Smiteasaurus rex.