| Stratege |
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Disclaimer: My PF2 experience comes from playing through AoA as a player from lvl 1-20 as well as GMing a number of one shots at various levels with various content and a short open-world-ish sorta-campaign.
PF2 seems to generally be built around providing a level appropriate challenging to the PCs at all times.
Pros:
- Making a character is so much easier (and feels more versatile at levelup than picking up the same math enhancers every time)
- GMing Combat is so much easier (CR sorta works, creatures are a lot simpler thanks to no huge feat lists on them, but still fairly evocative with their special abilities)
- Much much better support for "Combat as Sport" thanks to the numbers being close
- when the system asks you to roll a d20 it means roll a d20 and not "hope for a 20 or for not getting a 1 depending on if it is your speciality"
- martials are really really fun to play, with lots more they can do thanks to the change of feats and class design being more about going broad for martials
Cons:
- support for "Combat as War" is drastically cut
- the game suffers from what I like to call "the Tyranny of Strike". There's lots of fancy options one can do, but usually Strike (or an action that amounts to better-strike like e.g. double slice) is the best by RAW in most situations. And if Strike isn't best, then something that improves it, preferably via Buff (e.g. at lvl 1 the best thing a caster can do period is cast Magic Weapon on a martial's weapon)
- if you're a caster and not a cleric or a bard you are sort of in a world of pain the first many levels, especially without high system mastery
- the rules won't support you in running a world. e.g. the perception DC table of pf1 is simply gone, as are similiar things and in fact the game encourages you to when in doubt just set an appropriate DC for the PC's level
Very much depending on taste wether it's pro or con:
- the entire subgame of aquiring immunities and finding and targetting the enemies weakpoints in their defense is pretty much straight gone. The creature building rules ensure that if you simply Strike enough you'll be fine and say an incorporeal creature is only mildly harder without specialized tools than a normal creature.
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ultimately I like PF2 but I find it has a lot of missed potential. It is too much of an attempt to fix what was broken in PF1 and not enough its own thing in my opinion and I hope (however unrealistic that is) to somewhere down the line see a fusion of both games