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I feel like this discussion is kind of missing the plot a bit. Lots of arguing over whether or not certain things count as focus spells but as near as I can tell whether or not Courageous Anthem is a type of focus spell both doesn't actually matter (nothing changes either way) and isn't directly related to the issue with psychics (because amps are weird).

Because they only want you to have access to it through the common "staff of providence" item.

So much for all that talk about restricting access for campaign reasons.

ars grammatica wizards get it too.

Uncommon bypassing mechanics are honestly one of the strangest things about 2e.

If neither of us can offer citations or clarify things into a logically consistent set of wording that is used universally in the rules, then that shows that the rules are ambiguous.

Not really? If you're presenting an alternative theory of how the game works you need to back that up. "We both have opinions therefore it's ambiguous" is not an articulation of the position.

Which is all that I am trying to prove at this point. So my work here is done.

by completely sidestepping the actual rules being discussed? That's not work that's just being contrarian.

The idea that the definition of Speed is meant to change in very specific contexts with no indicator text is not just quibbling over some wording quirk it's proactively defining a specific exception to how the game works normally. If references to a value are intended to mean the unmodified value then bonuses never apply ever. That's not really a position you can handwave away.

Does it say base unmodified land speed? Is there any othe precedent for something like that being in the rules without it being explicitly stated?

The Stride action says "Move up to your Speed"

The Fly spell says gain a Fly speed equal to your Speed.

I'm sorry but I feel like if you're arguing that these actually refer to completely different numbers despite using the exact same word maybe you should be offering a citation here.

Or do you think Incredible Movement doesn't apply to Strides either?

But if your flight speed is based on your land speed, do we include the bonuses or not? That's the ambiguous part.

Is it ambiguous? If your land speed is 55 and your flight speed is your land speed then your flight speed is also 55.

I'm not seeing any rule that lends credence to the idea that you should use some other number.

Pf2 really does consider "uses an action" to be the game mechanic moment just after spending the action points, and before any part of the action's text has been implemented as in-world events.

Can you provide a citation for this?

None of them, bursts are created from a corner, but all your examples are drawn from the center of the square.

Here's an area reference for burst shapes.

If I were the GM I'd probably process it like this. When you draw or pick up an item which can be used as an improvised weapon, you can decide if you're wielding it or merely holding it. If you're merely holding it, you can't attack with it or use abilities as if it were being wielded, but you can Interact to 'adjust grip' and switch to wielding. If you're wielding it, you can 'drop' your grip as a free action so that you're merely holding it.

While that addresses the issue with the OP it feels kind of counterintuitive to me given how improvised weapons work that there's a scenario where you're disallowed from making an improvised attack with an object because you didn't pick it up in weapon mode.

I feel like trying to define a hard rule here is just going to break something somewhere else and it's better to just tell a player to please not try to make something like this a thing.

tbh I'm not so much worried about the action economy of spotlight as the outputs.

The idea of being able and having the incentive to spend a lot of my time 'managing' spotlights and roles actually sounds somewhat interesting and better than the class just being a martial with a weird gimmick instead of a flavor buff.

Spotlight management feels bad right now because you're spending all that effort and mental energy for so little. I Feel like... having the spotlight on someone should feel important? Meaningful? Instead the luminary is just low payoff busywork the class.

But mostly I just think between different fixes I'd rather see the management tools that exist get significantly stronger than have the action economy streamlined down to just activating your default gimmick and then shooting a gun which is kind of how most of Starfinder feels right now.

It kind of sounds like the main issue you're facing with the mechanics is just that the class is brand new so there's no automation tool built for it yet.

I can't really agree on the flavor thing. Flavor is what you make of it and the Luminary is a tech-y buffer/debuffer. Whether it's ridiculous or not is entirely up to the GM or player... you even listed an example of another class being played in a more ridiculous fashion.

I will agree that in the current state the class is somewhat anemic, but the best way to fix that would be adding more, not stripping it down.

I am working on my own reaction to the playtest but yeah the class is very complicated, and has so many reactions and free actions... I honestly know players that would just be overwhelmed playing this class, and that would be a bad experience at the table.

While I might arrange a shorter oneshot for someone to test the class, right now I would just ban it from my games and continue my life, it is too much work for the players and GM at this point.

Do you ban buffers/debuffers more generally? The amount of engagement here seems pretty trivial and not all that distinct from what like, a bard does, except minus all the spellcasting so even less.

I agree that in its current state the role mechanic seems overly wordy but banworthy seems like... a lot for how little is actually going on there.

I remember running through an old Paizo AP where the PCs were looking for an item in a dungeon. It was hidden in the treasure room behind a somewhat difficult perception check, but the entire campaign based itself around the idea that you'd find and use the item, so failing the perception check essentially ended the whole adventure. The book didn't even really have guidance on what to do if the PCs failed.

I feel like even for people who are anti-fail forward for whatever reason they have to admit that designing adventures with single points of failure that don't even have good stakes attached to them is really lame.

Experience is a useful, mutually-agreed-upon system by which players can measure progress and keep the GM honest about how much adventuring they've done, and how rewarded they should be in player progression. It is a points-based system for rewarding the players for following along with the narrative tying things together. Ditching it for "you level when I say so to meet the needs of the story" is an option, but in my opinion makes things feel a little arbitrary.

I mean you say one is more arbitrary than the other, but who designs the pacing and rate of encounters in an adventure? The GM or adventure writer. Yeah, in milestone leveling you don't level up until you hit a specific milestone... but in an XP driven adventure you don't level up unless the GM gives you a sufficient number of encounters, which itself is essentially just an arbitrary milestone.

... Ironically I think the rest of your post kind of makes a good argument for milestones. The fact that failing to negotiate with the wizard and being forced to kill everyone is something you consider an objectively superior outcome because you get more XP is a sort of weird perverse incentive that wouldn't exist without the arbitrary rules of XP (and also maybe says something about how you view the game itself, which is fine but notable).

There is more room for optimism but I also think it's still better to temper expectations. If you go in expecting Magus and Summoner to mostly be reprints, can't really be disappointed.

I'm a little conflicted. I like the idea of focusing more on a single class for writing and space and feedback purposes but it does have the downside of really dragging out the time between releases. I think the Luminary is very cool, but I have a few friends who were really hoping for something that draws on some radically new design space and feel the Luminary too bard and envoy adjacent and now they know they won't be getting another shot at a SF class they like until late 2027 or 2028. Obviously that's always a potential problem, but the slower cadence from SF makes it more noticeable.

I also agree that PF has a problem of not revisiting old material, and I really hope SF changes tack in that regard... but I'm not sure it's fair to call it just a page count issue. There's plenty of room in the books to public more class options instead of some of the more out there archetypes or other stuff... I mean, the APG had four classes and a ton of new content for the original PF classes. It definitely feels like a conscious choice, which is why I think a single class book still might not be a guarantee we'll see more energy put into the core classes. Here's hoping though.

The class is so terrible I don't think we need to talk about finding another place to put it just give Luminary its control back. The hardlight stuff barely works at all right now.

The class is just sauceless. Hardlight props do almost nothing on their own when they should be a core feature of the class.

The first level feats should be build defining stances when they're mostly just some like okay roll benefits but in a way that just doesn't feel inspiring.

The role debuffs are about as bad as you could make them without going out of your way to give the class terrible debuffs.

And then it's basically as bad at being a martial as you can make a martial (though to be clear I don't really want it to be one).

I genuinely struggle to imagine like, what a baseline luminary's turns are supposed to look like because they're just bad at everything.

It's the core features.

You combine like, the worst possible martial chassis you can get (just like the Envoy rip) with some of the mot underwhelming debuffs you can possibly apply, then create a juggling mechanic that means you can't even keep them all up. Like if applying a role to an enemy just put that debuff on them for good it still wouldn't be very special.

... Hardlight props feel like they should be important, but baseline do almost nothing except whatever your platform gives you and a lot of platform effects feel unnecessary.

Being able to make props other people can pick up or props that make sound feels cool like, thematically.. but I don't understand why those are platform specific mechanics. Can't help but feel like it's just going to make other platform characters feel like they're missing something rather than giving the platforms that have them the power boost they need.

And then... that's the whole class baseline. The worst martial in the game but you can give someone -1 to will checks sometimes. What even??

... I like the first level feats conceptually, putting roles on yourself to gain benefits is cool, but the existing feats are extraordinarily lame. Like, okay, Perform instead of Acrobatics to tumble is fine I guess but I just cannot bring myself to be excited about that even a little.

I think the inspiration should be monk stances: powerful and unique options that are potentially build defining in how they help shape your gameplay.

I've complained in the past about Paizo making classes that feel too rote because they have such an obviously correct gameplay loop but Luminary is hitting the opposite direction where like... I can't even imagine a correct choice for my turns.

... The focus spells are neat. Don't hate them.

I don't want whimsical

Why did you buy the adventure with the goofy game show host on the cover then?

I'm not sure what you find more wonky about recasting Courageous Anthem as opposed to sustaining it. There's very little functional difference between the two behaviors.

... It seems like the only practical thing you're talking about here is buffing fortissimo, but then I'm not sure why you're burying the lead so much.

In this case, by restating that only one action be executed at a time, that helps us understand that the trigger action has to "wait" until the reaction executes, then it gets to resume after the "interrupting" reaction completes. (if it's still valid to perform)

Not really though, because the simultaneous actions rule

A) refers to your own actions, not anyone else's
B) omits reactions from its stated restriction.

It's just genuinely not relevant to the discussion at all.

It would be helpful if you could cite a rule that serves as a core basis for your interpretation, it'd clean up the confusion pretty instantly. You keep saying it's black and white and clearly stated so it should be easy to dispel anyone's confusion by pointing to the rule, right?

Alright, my "can't act maybe doesn't disrupt" argument is admittedly flimsy. After all, immobilizing someone mid-Stride should probably stop the Stride.

I mean, move actions specifically have their own language for handling reactions, you get a trigger every time the moving party exits a square (per p.421 of player core), so the questions of timing for other types of actions aren't really relevant, the timing is explicitly defined for movement.

This probably does come down to the Simultaneous Actions rule.

It doesn't. The simultaneous action rule says you can't use an action in the middle of another action. You can't open a door in the middle of a stride. It has nothing to do with reactions (it even seems written explicitly to not cover reactions).

Goofy antagonistic title. No one's "designed to be deaf" (except for characters that explicitly are) but in a game that somewhat values careful and coherent encounter design, discrete fights are designed to be just that, discrete.

At the same time no one's stopping you from running the game that way if you want. It's just might not be a very good experience because having everything in a dungeon dogpile on the party all at once is going to make things a slog (or a death sentence)... unless the encounters are designed with the idea of them getting chained together in mind, then there's no problem (except that might also be offensive to the sensibilities somehow idk).

As mentioned before, it's well established that "[creature] uses [action]" triggers pause right after the action points are spent, and before any of the text is performed.

Well established where?

Gee, if only the game had some kind of system to enshrine in the rules what gets included in the game only at the GM's discretion?

But we're not talking about rules elements. We're talking about the baggage you're bringing to the table. No subsystem can deal with that.

I also feel it's rather silly to conflate the class's mechanical balance with rarity here

Agreed in general, but when you talk about a class having undue narrative weight, how much that weight actually exists in practice has to be part of the conversation.

And it's just factually true the exemplar has exactly as much narrative weight as the GM is willing to give it, which can be said of sorcerers and paladins and fighters and rogues too.

The phrasing being used by some posters here suggests that it's somehow impossible to have an exemplar in a party without them fundamentally altering the narrative of the game and that's just... not true. Nothing about the class demands that. You can play an exemplar the same way you'd play a champion or rogue and nothing bad happens, nothing breaks, nothing gets contradicted. This whole dilemma is invented. so it's important to point out that the issues being described here literally only exist if the GM wants them to, irrespective of whether or not anyone is playing an exemplar.

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While there are certainly examples of stories where a legendary figure can still fit as part of a more grounded ensemble cast, as with Sun Wukong in Journey to the West, that's a delicate narrative balance that not every GM might be able to deal with, nor want to.

But if a GM doesn't want to do that they can just... not? Because the exemplar isn't that anyways. Like a GM can certainly decide to give a unique ability to influence the narrative, but that's a specific choice being made by the people at the table and has nothing to do with the class... which is basically just an okay utility martial mechanically and a martial analog to a divine sorcerer in terms of flavor and origin.

The whole notion that there's an either-or choice between 'delicately balancing' the exemplar's narrative weight or banning it is nonsense because the exemplar only has as much of that as the GM decides to give them, same as literally every other character.

I feel like the rarity ends up being kind of a weird self fulfilling prophecy that doesn't need to exist. It's rare because it's "Grandiose" but it's not really any more grandiose than anything else that exists in the game in any intrinsic way.

If the class wasn't rare we could just say "It's basically a divine sorcerer but martial instead of spellcaster" and that pretty much encapsulates its thematic presence perfectly and nobody would care.

Instead we kind of get this self reinforcing loop where people psych themselves up over the class' themes and flavor that ... doesn't need to happen. It's like we're ad hoc coming up with reasons to justify the rare tag almost retroactively. It's rare so it must be special becomes it's special so it must be rare but really what we're talking about is some dude who can slightly upgrade their weapon with divine power on par with literally everyone else in their power bracket, lmao.

There's no actual sauce here.

In some visions of the fantasy genre, every single magic item is precious

Yeah but not in Pathfinder.

But why is the exemplar a "chosen one" but not clerics, oracles, divine sorcerers, divine summoners, or divine witches (common classes) which are also empowered by divine beings? That's my whole point here.

The irony here is that a champion or cleric actually is chosen. Like they're explicitly directly blessed by an explicit divine force.

The iconic exemplar got splashed with some weird goop that gave him powers which is honestly like pretty damn mundane.

Your very existence as an Exemplar already starts to shape the culture of the world around you, and that incurs farther-reaching narrative ramifications than "I'm a priest of Sarenrae" or "I got caught in a storm once and now I can shoot lightning from my hands".

"Got caught in a storm and now has magic powers" is literally how the iconic exemplar became an exemplar. And that's like- the end of it.

"Your very existence starts to shape the culture of the world" is just being a PC in a high powered fantasy game. Fighters do that too.

This is what I mean by no sauce. There's so much "what if we just describe the normal narrative of an AP but pretend it's a special toxic trait of this one class" that doesn't actually link to anything.

Exemplars aren't even particularly good at warping the narrative like a wizard or cleric can with the right spells.

This is why the Investigator class gets such a bad reputation

No, the investigator has a bad reputation because it's really bad, pays penalties no other class does, and requires very specific behaviors from the GM to contribute even in the areas it's supposed to excel at.

Nothing to do with the topic here.

I'll agree with you that keeping the forward looking and backward looking bit consistent is a thing sort of buried in my hot take that I didn't really explicitly say.

It's another reason buried in my evaluation for why backward looking abilities don't work with containers.

... This is an argument I don't really get because next action and previous action are asking different questions. Like, by definition the next thing you do after you take an action and the last thing that happened before your next action are completely different.

If anything it feels like that definition reduces consistency, because it changes the definition of "last action" to not actually refer to the last action you performed, whereas "next action" always refers to the next thing you do. They now no longer mean the same thing. That's not building consistency.

Like if you want to argue that activities are discrete containers that's one thing, but there's no 'enhanced consistency' here in arguing one way or the other because you're changing your reference point either way.

... Ultimately it's not that important, but the whole "consistency" angle feels like a way to try to elevate an argument in a somewhat nonsensical way. "My version is correct because it makes more sense" when there's nothing substantial there is just kind of a circular appeal to your own subjective value judgement. Especially when the argument ultimately has nothing to do with playing the game (since we've seen here being overly strict makes certain archetypes absolutely terrible to play for no reason or outright breaks some abilities).

It is annoying in books to have a generic class feat section but also have each class have unique ones that are listed elsewhere where. Choosing class feats without being able to see all of them in one place is less than ideal.

If I make a druid right now they already have feats printed across like 8 different books, which is way harder than knowing there's a universal feat section. I don't think this is a super strong reason to throw out the idea entirely.

A lot of times that doesn't happen though. Widen Spell has been printed verbatim like... five times? There's no reason other than developer brainrot that we couldn't just have it be a universal class feat.

The premise of the OP kind of confuses me. Fighter mechanics and Guardian mechanics are pretty meaningfully distinct in the kind of characters they create. The two classes don't really do the same thing (outside both being martials so obviously having similarities on that front). The fighter doesn't do guardian things, so why would the Guardian existing invalidate the Fighter?

There's no duration described in Reflow Elements. You don't swap them until your next daily preparations or for an hour or whatever, the text just says you swap them.

What I am basing this on is things like if a modification to a land speed also affects your fly speed. If your fly speed is based on your land speed (Fly speed equal to half your Speed, or Fly speed equal to your Speed), then yes - increasing your land speed is going to also increase your fly speed. But if you have a Fly speed that sets its own speed, then that is what you get. You don't also get to have things that increase your Land speed increase your Fly speed arbitrarily.

I think this is a less than perfect analogy because in the "static fly speed" example, your land speed is never referenced, while Leap is always being referenced here.

I've never encountered a single poison centric build that didn't involve picking up a feat to apply poisons faster, and I've never run into a player without those options even engaging with poisons at all in combat (outside pre-poisoning).

Which suggests that such feats are taxes that effectively wall off those mechanics.

... The comparison seems a little over the top. Flying characters completely redefine how you have to approach a variety of encounters. Charge is... a small amount of damage on a two action adrenaline activity.

Those are some fun ideas but also kind of complicated.

I feel like a more likely solution is just explicitly allowing trophies to be described as hunting notes or the result of some ritual (literal or not) associated with victory and to just allow trophies from nonlethal 'kills' with some caveats to prevent trophy farming (even then trophies aren't really impactful enough to make that feel like a huge problem even its most exploitative state).

You're seriously underestimating the power of flexibility. Let's take that group at low level (10 at most)

I see two glaring problems with your example.

A) You're weaving between a bunch of semi-exclusive options. A druid might be able to do some of those things on any given day but they're never going to cover all or even most of those bases. The druid isn't a blaster, secondary martial, healer, and support all at once. They may be any of those one things, but never more than one of them. You're completely glossing over the commitment there. But the druid who prepares support spells and focuses on shapeshifting is not 'almost as good of a blaster', they're terrible at it because they don't have those spells.

Sometime in the future, on a completely different day in a different encounter they might be an okay blaster, but then they aren't doing their support things. At any given time only one of those things is true. The fact that you can change is worth something, but it's not a decision you can necessarily make on the fly which feels really glossed over by this example.

B) The entire scenario is predicated on the player engaging with the class in a very specific way, which feels somewhat untenable. "Tomorrow or next week you could stop playing the character you want and instead play a completely different character" is not really a choice a lot of players are interested in engaging with. They're playing a character in a certain way because that's the thing they want to do... and again, they're often committing to that role. The druid who does not prepare blasting spells isn't a blaster for any of those encounters, the fact that they could have been doesn't mean much when you're in an encounter and you don't have those tools.

... The PF1 Medium really kind of exemplified this problem. It was a "versatile" class that could choose to be a fake mage, a fake rogue, a fake cleric, etc. on any given day... but because the default medium had to decide at the start of the day the versatility tax the designers baked into their features mostly meant that they got to pick which thing they were terrible at. Just like the kineticist, the best medium builds were ones that went all in on something with manageable math.

... I don't think anyone is underestimating versatility here. If anything the opposite, time and time again we see "versatile" become just a polite way to call something bad.

I guess I just don't see those concerns as particularly different from a lot of other classes. +4/+3 is not an uncommon starting statline, and even medium armor classes are still looking at +4/+2 which is barely better and often need investment somewhere else anyways.

Monks are often running +4/+3 too (especially if they're picking weapons or something like gorilla stance). And then you have magi, inventors, investigators, etc. that can credibly be chasing 5 or 6 attributes at once.

Daredevils wanting two stats puts them kind of low down on the list here in terms of wild stat requirements. I'm not saying it wouldn't be nice to have more stat increases, but almost everyone in the game is wishing they had more, other than maybe Wis casters and thief rogues.

... In a way the suggestion is kind of fitting for the worst reason. It's a class level fix for a system level problem (low level attribute scores being extremely tight on a lot of classes), which is kind of a criticism of the daredevil in general right now.

Plus even in this thread we've had people talk about Str primary and Dex primary daredevils that solve their problems elsewhere. Probably not the best or easiest thing to pull off, but if you go that route you end up kind of SAD. There's just nothing really out there about the daredevil's attribute needs that make this make sense when compared to so many other classes.

2. Self-Contained, Classic Dungeons.

This and more tbh-

I think a set of like ... cheap mostly modular micro adventures could be really fun and sold as things you could slot into an existing campaign or run as a short one shot without a lot of baggage. I know there have been one shots but they've been tailor made around specific stories and something in the opposite direction that's just kind of a thing you can throw anywhere or dredge ideas from would be cool.

Though for my personal tastes they don't necessarily have to be dungeons per se, a small semi-randomizable murder mystery would be cool, or like, a town festival with events build into it... dungeons are cool too though.

... As a permanently online GM a version of this that's like, a cheap pdf pamphlet with some map PNGs I can throw into my tabletop simulator of choice or maybe like a quick and simple foundry package with maps and npcs and a tiny journal would be really neat.

$5-7 micro adventure, shorter and without the pregens so they're cheaper to develop than the pathfinder one shots (which are $10)... and then like, after a season of them you can bundle them like 5 for 20-30 dollars instead.

Could also be a good way to experiment with unconventional mechanical or theme directions because they're a lot less committal as a product.

It would definitely make the class better, and they definitely need to be better... but Daredevils are far from the first class to have attribute issues and aren't anywhere near the top of the list either, so it feels kind of weird to push it as one of their special unique benefits.

Like if I'm building a normal Daredevil and pumping str an dex and extra attribute from a class feature would probably just mean slightly higher starting Wis or maybe throwing it in int for a skill increase if I had a gimmick in mind. Free power, but it doesn't necessarily feel thematic or like it's shoring up a critical weakness. It doesn't give Dex-focused daredevils more to do or address their lack of martial steroid and mediocre core gimmicks or anything like that.

Daredevils aren't even that MAD. Like there are a dozen classes a bonus attribute would make more sense on before them. I just don't really get it.

The best example of this in the current game is probably the kineticist

I'd argue the kineticist is maybe the worst example possible here.

The strongest kineticist builds are the ones that focus on a narrow range of abilities with exploitable math, and generally speaking the more versatile you try to make the character the worse they become at everything. It turns out being able to do choose between five different directions doesn't matter much if you're limited on how often you can pivot and the effects aren't that impressive to begin with. The most versatile kineticists builds pretty much just suck at everything.

The only takeaway you can get from the Kineticist is that versatility is something the designers wildly overrate... and maybe that the relationship between versatility and commitment is sometimes not fully appreciated.

So like... one thing about the Druid is that right now you're basically skipping your first turn (one reason I think untamed should come with a free stride or something) and locking yourself out of the ability to cast spells for the duration. You still have spells, and that's cool, but the trade and investment you're making has to be worth doing too... because if it's not like, actually mechanically a good idea then you shouldn't do it at all, at which point it's not versatility it's just a build trap.

Ofc it's a lot more granular than that, but that goes the other way too.

Unicore wrote:

I think the mistake was forgetting bombs are a thrown weapon, not a ranged weapon. I suspect that one will get fixed.

In what universe is a thrown weapon not also a ranged weapon?

I'm SO confused!

So every thrown weapon is ranged when thrown, but a thrown weapon can also be a melee weapon (i.e. a melee weapon with the thrown trait like a dagger) or entirely a ranged weapon (like a boomerang or bomb).

It's a distinction that never really matters except for this particular edge case which we know is a typo so it's normally not a super important distinction.

Doesn't the change also eliminate using any ranged weapons from Devise a Stratagem? The new sentence doesn't state that Attack Stratagem is usable with ranged weapons at all. Or are we interpreting it to work with all weapons, and then the sentence places a condition on melee, melee unarmed and thrown weapons?

Normal ranged weapons still work fine. The sentence that's changed is a restriction.

If they had said melee thrown weapons, that might fix it?

Yes, the problem seems to be that "melee thrown weapon" was replaced with "thrown weapon" which means ranged thrown weapons (i.e. bombs, boomerangs, etc.) are now subject to restrictions that they weren't previously.

... Ironically, this is basically the problem the errata was made to fix: the old version restricted ranged unarmed attacks and the errata added a 'melee' qualify to allow ranged unarmed attacks to be unrestricted like other ranged attacks... and then removed the 'melee' specification from thrown weapons thus moving the problem elsewhere.

Given that the errata specifically ends by saying that the same weapons as before should work it's definitely an editing mistake.

Regardless of who's in charge, though, changes to fundamental mechanics should probably wait for the next edition, imho.

lmao that's so dumb though. Like if something isn't working right change it.

If there's an aspect of the change you don't like that's fair game but the idea that errata is somehow inherently bad is something I can't even wrap my head around.

It’s also important to remember that, despite the criticism some players have for 3.5, Pathfinder 1e was built on that foundation—and PF1 was generally more popular than PF2e. A major reason for that popularity was the wider range of playstyles it supported.

?

In my experience, good range weapons have dominated encounters, but required the whole party to play to using range and not getting in each other’s way or moving fights out of the kill zone the ranged characters were trying to establish. Gunslinger crits have consistently been the most impressive hits we have seen, but maybe only because no one has played a ranged magus for more than a one off.

This seems completely backwards to my own experience and just the math of the game.

Ranged weapons do noticeably less for the most part than their melee counterparts, especially when you start adding on martial damage bonuses. That's not even really like a matter of taste or playstyle you can just look at the numbers. Ranged weapons do well via consistency, not power.

... They also tend to be more teamwork agnostic than other weapon types. Not that teamwork isn't always important, but you're not worrying about flanking positioning or making sure allies aren't inside your spell aoes or anything like that. Your ideal gameplay loop is standing in one spot shooting a bunch and you have less pressures against that than your melee allies will.

Overall not bad. Resist all change is huge but I don't necessarily hate it, there were definitely scenarios where resist all's value gets kind of insane.

I wonder if it's a rule at Paizo that every errata has to contain some odd minor nerf to something that was never really an issue.

Who was complaining about flame oracles? Or Investigators using boomerangs?

I think that one of the key skills a wild shaping druid has to learn is when they should shift and when they should stay a spell caster.

In a broad sense I agree but I'd like that to be more an issue of moment to moment tactical choices. The action economy problem feels more game-y to me and therefore more frustrating.

By and large I think the game should encourage people to do the things they want to do. Pushing someone outside their preferred comfort zone is something that should happen for specific reasons, and like... the action economy just sucking and encounters being undertuned so you don't have time doesn't really end up feeling like that to me.

re: "make sacrifices to be good in melee"

... A full untamed order druid is spending up to half their feats and devoting a big chunk of their ASIs and buying extra gear other druids wouldn't, and essentially giving up their ability to cast spells in encounters whenever they shift. ... That's not even counting any extra feat expenditure they might go through for other martial augmenting abilities.

... Now they're still full casters, and that has to count for something but most people aren't saying they should be as good as barbarians out of the box.

But it's clearly not correct to suggest they aren't paying for their melee abilities. They generally pay about as much as anyone could possibly hope to without some bespoke penalty.

... At the same time I do kind of think the handwringing is a bit overblown. Untamed is imo one of the better orders (with some non-hostile GM adjudication at leat. Some people seem to want to make it bad for some reason). I'd much rather have Untamed Form and Shift than... Rising Surf or Heal Animal.

I would really like to see Untamed Form dropped to one action though. Having a two action setup makes turn one essentially dead and Paizo has a lot of APs littered with extremely short encounters, which means you end up with a lot of fights where you don't even get to do your thing.

Fittingly I think this whole thing just kind of highlights that Paizo's historically been kind of bad at judging risk/reward. Options with narrow utility or that encourage you to make objectively bad decisions rarely give enough benefit for them to actually make sense (see: every spellcaster with a feat that gives them melee combat benefits).

So you get two classes that want fairly specific things but don't even get to punch that far above their weight class when those things are true.

Not much else to add but the OP is spot on here.