SuperBidi's page

I second YuriP, Evolution Surge is excellent, definitely an asset of the Summoner. I've used it a lot and it's super handy.

I shouldn't have been snarky like that. Sorry.

Don't worry, no harm done.

I just disagree with you so much on your basic point. Kineticists are a fine class.

Well, we will certainly agree to disagree on that. Whether it's a question of expectations or experience, we didn't come to the same conclusion.

Versatility has huge value and it can often be overlooked.

Definitely. I'm a great proponent of versatility. But I find the Kineticist doesn't embody versatility at all, I consider it one of the most specialized class in the game. For me, it's literally a few-trick poney.

So I think our disagreement comes from something deep, on the very meaning of versatility in the context of PF2.
Anyway, I won't disrupt this conversation more than that. If people like the Kineticist, it's great. To each their own!

I meant more in the sense of positioning your self in a good turn order to take full advantage of it, not in the sense of delaying AFTER you use the reaction to extend it.

In the same way that you may want to delay yourself after an enemy before Demoralizing him in order for the whole party to take advantage of that.

Ha ok, I misunderstood your point. But it's hard to do it then as you need the combat to be extremely stable (and if the GM is nasty, monsters can also Delay once they understand how your power works).

Everyone cries about the fire resistances, no one gives credit for easily triggering fire weakness three times every round on one guy (blast, aura, AOE impulse) and twice on any others close enough.

The Fire Aura Junction gives a fire weakness to the enemy (equivalent to low Fire Weakness according to the GM core) and you can't combine weaknesses. So you only trigger high Fire Weaknesses and you only get half of the extra damage then.

So, you have NOT seen a kineticist using Jagged Berms then. But you still claim it is just plain bad. Interesting.

Sorry, Paul, I assume I annoyed you because our conversations tend to be more civil usually.

This conversation is, overall, about the Kineticist, not just Jagged Berms (and I have the right to find it bad from reading it ;) ). I personally consider the Kineticist to be one of the weakest class in the game, both from reading the class and seeing it played. I've seen countless people praising its versatility but I've seen the exact opposite: A class stuck with a couple of tricks desperately trying to sell them to the GM and the players.

And that is the key to a decent kineticist. You have several different tools in your bag, picking the one that meets the situation.

I've seen a lvl 1-10 Metal Kineticist, a lvl 2-10 Earth Kineticist, a lvl 6 Earth/Fire Kineticist, a lvl 1-4 Air Kineticist and a lvl 1-4 Wood Kineticist. The Wood Kineticist was a pain, as Timber Sentinel is a pain to handle (strong, but annoying from a GM perspective and even from a player perspective). The Metal, Air and Earth Kineticists were bad, the Earth/Fire one was disappointing (it's a solid build, the player seemed solid but the end result was not impressive at all).

I've also kind of played a Water Kineticist (got it from Free Archetype on a high level character) and it was worse than expected (and I wasn't expecting much).

So, maybe no one manages to be decent with a Kineticist. From my point of view, it's just bad.

In both cases, the Champion can choose to delay his turn to be more strategic and help PC 2 and PC 3 with his revealing light.

You can't Delay to extend the duration of effects. They would still end at the moment you Delay.

The Kineticist in my group who loves to use Timber Sentinel and Jagged Berms would like to disagree with you.

Yeah, Timber Sentinel again.

It looks like the class could be renamed as Timber Sentinelist.

Jagged Berms is bad even if I see how it can combo with Timber Sentinel (again).

@Easl: I think we are no more speaking about the same thing.

Lightning Dash ages badly: At level 4, a 2d12 30-feet line spell is really nice, at level 8 a 3d12 35-feet line spell is rather meh.

Similarly, when I speak about Medic, I don't speak about a Kineticist taking the Medic Archetype. I'm speaking about the fact that if the Kineticist is a healer, then everyone is because everyone can take the Medic Archetype for the same cost (a few feats) and get better at healing than a Kineticist.

Same goes with Dedications. Do you think you'll need a dozen casts of Wall of Stone? I hardly think so, walls are super nice to have but it's not a routine, it's for specific situations. Having a couple of Wall of Stones per day is all you need and Dedications can provide you with that quite efficiently.

Roughly, a lot of what is supposed to give the Kineticist its versatility is actually available to everyone for similar costs (even if I realize I made a mistake, you get Wall of Stone at level 14 with a Dedication, but still at the cost of a level 12 feat).

Lightning dash is interesting. While an initial read of it might think of it as a move power, it's actually more a line attack with an 'escape reactive strike' clause. The damage scales similarly to all the other 2a overflow impulses, so IMO it really should be thought of as an attack power.

I don't know why you reacted to me speaking about mobility as I agree with you that Lightning Dash is an offensive Impulse.

First, it's not either-or.

You have access to infinite number of feats and actions?

That's the main issue of the Kineticist, in my opinion. Very often, you can get equivalent abilities by just grabbing an archetype. For example, at level 12, you can cast Wall of Stone with a Kineticist. But actually, at level 12, you can cast Wall of Stone with a spellcasting Dedication.

Swipe is not degenerate, the double dip of the axe crit specialization is. Imagine two scenarios: a) there is a boss that the PC can only crit on a 20; b) there's the same boss, but they have an adjacent minion that the PC crits on a 15. This boss is weaker in the last scenario than in the first, and this is clearly not intended and a degeneration of the design that creates weird incentives.

You have tons of situations like this one. The Swashbuckler has a feat to gain Panache when flanked. Alchemist can deal splash damage to a creature by hitting a nearby one. Etc...

It's a case of turning a negative situation into a positive one through clever play. It is not a problem in and by itself unless it makes the strategy way too strong (and it isn't as you still need to score a critical hit and the resulting damage is nowhere close to high).

So... how does that work?

Rules don't cover every cases. That's a case where the GM has to come up with his own ruling.

Polymorph effects can't be combined and the game uses a counteract check when you get affected by a second Polymorph effect. So I agree with Baarogue, it's certainly the best way to handle a direct incompatibility between 2 effects.

I'm going to have to disagree with you there. Where do you get the part about not actually being a generalist from?

The Kineticist can:

Things the Kineticist can't really do:
- Single target damage. Your AoE Impulses are actually more damaging than your single target Impulses. Obviously, you can deal single target damage through AoE Impulses but they don't carry the expected damage of a single target damage dealer.
- Heal. Medic Dedication is just straight up better and accessible to everyone. The only thing you do is out of combat healing.
- Control (besides walls). The Kineticist has access to a lot of control Impulses but they are for the biggest part just plain bad.
- Skills. Worst class in the game for skills.

Another problem of the Kineticist is the cost of being a jack of all trades. First, Impulses are your main weapons and focusing more on utility than offense is not really a good choice. Also, offensive Impulses age badly so you need to use your top level Impulses for offensive options.
And then there's the "element" issue. It's great to be able to do a lot of things but each of these things are limited to a few elements. And grabbing new elements takes time (levels), and comes at an actual opportunity cost: not getting a junction.
So before very high levels, the Kineticist is nowhere close to a jack of all trades. And even at high level it hardly competes with a caster. The Kineticist is a few-trick poney.

Other than the much-lauded +1 to attack, what else makes the Bard (or indeed, any other class) a serviceable generalist?

I don't consider the Bard a Generalist. Bard is first and foremost a buffer/debuffer. There are much more versatile classes in the game.

PS: I very often see players mistaking specialized characters for versatile ones. Having the potential to do a lot of things is not enough to be versatile, you need to be able to do these things "simultaneously".

Kineticist, Animist and prepared casters are not versatile. They can, on paper, do a lot of things. But they are mutually exclusive: If you prepare a spell then you don't prepare another one, if you choose one Apparition you don't have another one, if you take an Impulse you don't have another one. The end result being that at a specific moment, your actual choices are limited. And having limited choices is not exactly the definition of versatility.

On the other hand, the Summoner is versatile. It can deal martial damage, cast spells and use skills, and these are not really exclusive, it can do all of them always. And because it has more actions than other classes it can actually do them simultaneously. Which is why the Summoner is, in my opinion, the undisputed most versatile class in the game.

The kineticist is a jack of all trades, and a master of none.

The Kineticist can hardly be called a jack of all trades. It's mostly an AoE damage dealer with martial level of tanking.

And considering all the hoops I have to go through to get it to work in the first place, (Being next to enemies, having Aura Junction and Thermal Nimbus up, having to hit multiple enemies with Flying Flame, not using Overflow impulses to not turn off my aura) I wished it was better and not just barely more than the Fighter.

In PF2, complexity is not rewarded. The game puts everyone in the same ballpark when played to their best, which tends to push towards simpler classes if all you want is effectiveness.

Also, the Kineticist doesn't compare to martials (who are best at single target damage) but to casters (who are best at AoE damage).

And being a Fire creature doesn't really solve the issue as Extract Element is mostly useless against Fire-Immune creatures (which most Fire creatures are).

Yeah, Kineticist is weak.
Pyrokineticist is fine in damage when you combine the Aura Junction and Thermal Nimbus but you need to position yourself in the thick of things (even if it becomes easier at level 10). And of course you lose all of that against Fire Immune/Resistant enemies.

But overall, the class is nowhere close to impressive, you need to find a broken ability (Fire Aura Junction, Timber Sentinel) and just focus on it to perform ok.

A spellcasting archetype can't be a trap option. For an option to be a trap option it must somehow be misleading, which spellcasting archetypes are not.

Now, it's not a strong option. It doesn't really interact with the class.

I don't really see the point in bringing 10 arguments to justify it.

Please, can we avoid badwrongfun discussions?

The issue is that at levels 1 and 2, a GM needs to apply the weakened template (or make some other kind of compensation) to achieve the same kind of game play experience for moderate encounters at higher levels.

Conversely, I could say that at levels 5+ (exact starting point may vary) you can apply the Elite adjustment or redo encounters to be Severe or Extreme to achieve the kind of difficulty you're looking for.

That's a massive overstatement. Difficulty is overall the same at level 1 and 5. The main difference is that progression is faster at level 1 creating a bigger difference when you face higher or lower level enemies. Also, combats are much faster.

To me a "random death" is one where there is nothing/little a player could do to control it. So the random crit putting you a dying 2 at level 1 that results in death...that's a random death.

I really wonder what's the actual occurrence of this so called "random crit [...] that results in death". I've seen it once and in my opinion it had more to do with a broken monster (extreme damage, extreme attack bonus and persistent damage) and setup (the monster literally appeared next to us with all its actions) than something that should happen normally. All the other deaths I have experienced have been the conclusion of a large number of hits, even at low level.

PF2 is not a deadly game. Even if going down to a crit at low level happens it very rarely ends up with a death or TPK, at least not without a lot of bad luck (on top of the crit) or bad decisions.

Could you free archetype (or just archetype) into wizard, witch, or sorcerer, take Reach Spell at L4, then go to town with your 3a, 30' ranged two-target striking amped IW? It's not great range, but it's out of melee.

You can't metamagic amp cantrips. So, nope :)

Which is werid, given that that made the remaster Oracle so much more powerful but lost a lot of its uniqueness.

My gut feeling is that those interested purely by optimization will go for a Sorcerer and then grab the good Oracle stuff through a Dedication. I think you reach higher power through this method (and also you choose your tradition).

My reason for calling this out as "a problem" is because of that observation of GMs working to erase that lethality via all means available to them, including incredibly obvious foe lobotomies.

You should really question your confirmation bia because your whole post is conspiracy theory 101.

I've played roughly 300 sessions (2/3rd played, 1/3rd GMed), got 1 character killed and killed 5 as a GM. If you consider 3 to 5 sessions per level, it means getting killed once every 20 levels roughly. That's not what I'd call "lethal".

Nothing in ghostly carrier's description would suggest that. It aught to work with multiple targets

"When you Cast a Spell that has a range of touch, you can have the carrier move within range, deliver the spell to a creature there, and return to you."

It works only on one target (even if the spell can have multiple targets, you just use the carrier for a single one of them).

...

Farmhand states: "With a strong back and an understanding of seasonal cycles, you tilled the land and tended crops. Your farm could have been razed by invaders, you could have lost the family tying you to the land, or you might have simply tired of the drudgery, but at some point you became an adventurer."

Considering that level 1 is the beginning of your adventuring career, it's very much written that peasant with a greatsword is a proper description for a level 1 character.

Most of the common backgrounds consider that you got a simple life and decided to go adventuring after that (which doesn't mean that it has to be the case for all characters, you can be a gladiator or a bounty hunter, just that it's a common occurrence).

And if you look at level 1 humanoids, a lot of them are just commoners: Barkeep, Acolyte, Local Herbalist, etc...

Level 1 is not the level supposed to represent a "well-trained combatant with field experience". Also, I'm not stating that the low hit points at level 1 is "good", just that in my opinion it embodies the "peasant with a greatsword" fantasy well, fantasy that is very much written in the book. So I understand it.

I have no point of view on the original question besides the fact that it is way above my league.

If you dislike the changes and don't play in PFS: Why not just ignore them?

Unfortunately, my Oracles were PFS characters.

Also, even outside PFS some GMs use PFS rulings (I know I do).

The psychic is an extremely disappointing class in play. It reads nice on paper, but it lacks much punch in play other than a bit at the early levels.

The focus point system isn't very good unless the DM is going to ensure a sufficient rest between every fight. Even then, many of the abilities are too weak, too situational, or downright useless.

While I overall agree, it's not really answering OPs question. And I think the Silent Whisper Psychic is a nasty damage dealer. At least this one does good damage.

One could argue that the lethality of low-level play is intended to contribute to the feel of lower level play, but I don't think we see that reflected in the stories produced by paizo - few of the APs I've run or prepped seem like they want you to feel like you're a peasant thrown into an incredibly dangerous situation, about to die at any moment. They mostly feel to me like pretty classic heroic fantasy, starting at a pretty good power level

You need to wait for level 2 to get your Full Plate or even sometimes your weapon (some firearms are really expensive). That's peasant's concerns.

Feelings being what they are we have all the right in the world to disagree. But I do think the feeling of playing a peasant with a greatsword is there.
I've played games where you start at a "pretty good power level" and it's not at all the same feeling: You start with all your equipment, you have most of your powers, you don't wait for higher levels for your build to go online, etc...

The only Psychic build with good DPR is the Silent Whisper one. And you have an entire spell list for fights against mental immune enemies (7.5% of the creature base, you won't face that many of them unless you play the Slithering).

Oscillating Wave has a big issue as its main damaging spells, namely Fireball and Howling Blizzard, have to be used during round 1 and as such don't benefit from any of your damage enhancement abilities (Unleash Psyche and Entropic Wheel). It leads to a kind of lose-lose gameplay where you either target a lot of creatures or deal a lot of damage to each of them but never both simultaneously.

I agree that Tangible Dream is suicidal. You need a very specific build to get the most out of it (and especially an extremely tanky build).

Any tangible dream psychic that wants to use imaginary weapon is not going to do melee. It's going to use ghostly carrier for it which turns it into a 120 foot ranged spell that hits 2 targets. As long as you can keep the ghostly carrier alive anyways

The Ghostly Carrier can only target a single creature. If you want to target 2 creatures you need one of them to be at melee range from your Psychic. Still, it's certainly the safest way to play a Tangible Dream Psychic.

You're presenting it as if people that were playing the class [...] are innately more important than any people that counted problems as significant enough to talk them out of playing the class despite their interest in it.

Of course they are. It's basic respect.

Stripping PCs of their gear will have a different effect depending on their classes, with the end result being a significant imbalance. I'd not do that personally from a mechanical point of view.

For players such as myself who were playing Oracle characters that were spellcaster types of characters roughly equivalent to a Divine tradition Sorcerer, the Remaster changes were mostly good - sometimes really good.

I was playing spellcaster Oracles, namely a Life Oracle and a Tempest Oracle. The Life Oracle lost its healing abilities and became the worst healer among all Mysteries. While the Tempest Oracle lost all its flavor, which was important to me.

Also, it's not just about being broken, it's about trading a mechanically interesting class with a bland and boring one. I already have a divine Sorcerer (my main character), getting 2 new ones is not what I wanted for my Oracles.

You're basically arguing semantics here.

When other people say "handled" they are talking about the same things you are when you say "can be annoying". The difference is not that you know how things were and the people that don't agree with you don't know, it's that you think the situation we're all accurately aware of was fine and other people don't.

There doesn't have to be some insurmountable level of difficulty in making an oracle work well in order for someone to be unhappy with the feeling that oracle takes extra effort and, because it'd be unbalanced otherwise, doesn't really get extra cool stuff compared to "I could just play a sorcerer" or "I could just play a cleric."

Sorry, but I don't get what you're trying to convey.

It looks like you are disagreeing with me while also agreeing with me and ultimately I'm lost.

Regardless, That was one of my experiences, with the final outcome being that the oracle died a preventable death because of his curse as none of the others could heal him from a nasty source of persistent damage. Something that could've been prevented with better communication or preparation for such a moment, Something that the oracle himself handled with stride as a player. The same could not be said for a few others at the table.

Sad experience. But you can be healed while unconscious as a Life Oracle, just not above 1 hp (but then the Oracle can heal themselves). So I feel it has more to do with a player who played badly than with the Oracle itself.

But I'm talking about someone playing a premaster life-oracle in a group without non-magical incombat healing or otherwise being overly hindered by Ash's Concealment/difficult terrain aura.

Having played a Life Oracle in PFS I can state by experience that it had no impact on the parties tactics.

However just as SuperBidi said, It absolutely feels like a brand new class .

For me it's the core of the grudge: A lot of characters became incompatible with the new class. When you change a class, you can't just throw characters with the bathwater, at least not without experiencing a significant backlash by those who played these characters.

We learn to love these little things...

A GM shouldn't have to learn that the system doesn't work the same at low levels as it does at high levels.

Again, why?

The fact that low, mid and high level experience is different is in my opinion a conscious design choice. At low level, you really have the feeling of playing a peasant with a greatsword considering how fights are fast, deadly and random. I think it's the expected low level experience.

I'm in a game with my kid right now. Guess what approach we're using.

You haven't understood my previous post. Difficulty is not related to learning curve: If you increase or decrease the game difficulty you don't change the learning curve.

Tiers of play being different is the default rather than the exception in TTRPGs.

That. So common that there isn't even a sidebar.

Games with consistency between the early game and the end game don't give at all the feeling of playing a peasant who rises to godhood. It's just all samey (I don't say it's bad, just that it's not Pathfinder at all).

Slowly and explicitly introducing new mechanics (and I'm putting emphasis on explicitly for a reason) is a time-honored way of teaching complex games.

But I don't expect the adventure to do that. The beginner box, why not. But most importantly the GM. I personally don't GM beginners the same way I GM experienced players: I help them more, give them advice in real time, I sometimes remove some punishing mechanics (like critical failures on Trip/Grapple) to encourage them using the abilities, and so on.

Having low level adventures structure in such a way that they always spend time teaching concepts will feel like playing the same tutorial all over again: An awful experience for experienced players.

an oracle rolled up to a group not built to handle them

What does that mean? What has to be "handled" when an Oracle walks into a bar... sorry, group?

But I dont think its entirely unfounded to say that people that would never touch the oracle is now willing to do so.

I fully agree with you on that. The remaster and preremaster Oracle are so different they don't target the same players. It's actually a brand new class.

How much time does it take, and how much does it cost to copy a spellbook? I can't find any rules on it. I can find rules for learning new spells, but not copying spells. I want to know how to make a backup spellbook in case I lose my primary spellbook. Pathfinder 1e had rules on it.

Nothing.

Grimoires use a 1-minute ritual to copy your entire spellbook within them. It gives a good idea of how easy and cheap it is to copy an entire spellbook. If you really want some rules to support your spellbook copy, just grab a low level Grimoire (the cheapest one costs 90 gold coins) and you're set. 90 gp

So a GM actually understand the level of challenge they're sending to the players.

You mean that the GM has less things to learn. Because it's a question of experience, not something you can't control ever.

I also think there's a bit of exaggeration. Level +2 solo bosses are not that deadly at level 1, I've been through many such encounters without any character death. The only ones that are really deadly are level +3 solo bosses which are qualified as "Severe- or extreme-threat boss" and I'm not sure I've ever faced one at level 1.

From a simple search on the Internet it looks like we learn faster when we are challenged. I don't know if it's true or not (Google is not omniscient) but I know for sure it applies to me.

So challenging first levels may actually be a very conscious choice to quickly get beginners up to par and avoid massive discrepancies in game mastery between players.

I know a lot of games who adopt this difficulty curve, with challenging early game, easy mid game and very hard end game.

But the victims here are the people that fell in love with the old oracle, not the oracle class itself

That's a very weird statement.

The old oracle had quite a bit of friction that made it a problem if the group couldnt handle it. And I personally dreaded the sight of an oracle at public tables.

Is it an overstatement? Because your experience is nowhere close to mine. I've had much more issues with Barbarians and Paladins than with Oracles.

Instead it seems like more people are actually playing an enjoying oracles

I don't say it's wrong, but I think it's unfounded and also doesn't change the fact that those who played preremaster Oracles have a real reason to feel screwed.

It's better to have a game with consistent challenges

Why?

You've got some folks saying make L1 encounters survivable without knowing all the tactics (i.e. allows for incremental learning).

There's factually no link between incremental learning curve and L1 survivability. You are reaching a conclusion based on a ton of untold assumptions.

You are an adult with strong experience in board and ttrp games. As I said before, you probably think this level's about you. But it isn't. It's about my kid's junior high role playing club, which has a massive 40+ kid membership and organizes 8-10 tables of low-level play every Wednesday. Those are Paizo's 2030 customers, the people who will buy their content long after you and I stop. As a direct competitor to that other game PF2E is, yes, going after the "played once, or haven't yet played but interested" market. Not just folks like you or I with decades of experience and a 'seen it, done that' equilibrium towards tpks. Paizo does make lots of content for us. But not 100% of it. Having the early level content to be for folks like that club rather than folks like you or I simply makes a lot of sense. At least, to me.

But not necessarily to Paizo. We need to get information about their marketing goals, which population they target and such.

Neither Ford nor Mercedes sell bikes and still they manage to sell their cars.

If Paizo really wants to design the game to teach itself, it needs to make a VTT module with pregen characters that plays like a choose-your-own-adventure novel. Extremely on rails, but with choice at certain branching paths, simple AI scripts for the enemies, and full rules automation. Anything less can be failed by a new GM very easily.

What you're describing is a tutorial. And tutorials can't explain more than the basics of a game. PF2 is too complex to be taught that way. To learn PF2 you need to play it.

I dont even want to call oracles victims, I think they are just better outright in pretty much every single way.

There have been long discussions about that. Those who love the preremaster Oracle loathe the new one and vice versa.

I also have 2 Oracle victims but I'll speak about my Barbarian:

Czav is... well, was, a Dhampir from Ustalav. He spent his youth bullied because of his blood, mostly by divine servants who were seeing in him an undead abomination. It fueled his rage, rage he fully embraced once he reached Rahadoum and called it home. After decades fighting divine casters and developing specific anti-divine abilities (Superstition Barbarian) he decided to become a Pathfinder. He realized that his anti-divine abilities were actually effective against all traditions of magic and he became a mix of clericide, witch hunter and mage slayer.

Unfortunately, the new Superstition Barbarian is just an idiot who's frightened by magic and can't even accept to wield it while my character was actually extremely knowledgeable about magic with even some magic abilities (Arcane Sense feat to be able to Detect Magic as it's rather useful for a mage slayer). Overall, the new Superstition Barbarian is different enough that my character stopped making much sense.

I may speak later of my Oracles. I've been able to turn one into an Animist, I find that the Animist embodies quite well what the preremaster Oracle was. But for the other one... well, it's currently in retirement.

There's just been a couple hundred posts with one set of folks suggesting that some adjustment be made to early levels to reduce single-bad-roll character death likelihood, but not necessarily objecting or saying anything about later level play. The above split is thus, IMO, a very inapt description of the discussion going on here, since neither side of this debate fits either of your two categories.

I was only answering the previous post. I've just skimed through the discussion and I don't think it's really interesting.

"Teaching", as it's the core of the discussion, is a complex job. I'd quote Wikipedia: "Small effects or lack of statistically significant effects have been found when evaluating many teaching methods rigorously with randomized controlled trials."

So the answer to the original (implied) question is certainly that there's no way to do a good or bad job at teaching new players how to play.

There's nothing inherently bad with different difficulties. Some like it hard, some like it easy, everyone has fun. It seems good to me.

I find there are 2 kinds of players/GMs when it comes to difficulty: Those who consider that character death should always be on the table and those who consider that character death should only happen for a reason. And in general they can't play together without a lot of frustration on one side or the other.

Side note: I also have the feeling from reading here and on Reddit that Reddit users are less about crunch, optimization and difficulty than the official forum users. But I may be wrong about that, I know more this community than the Reddit one.

Again, the gameplay experience is a completely different thing than the actual under the hood math. Player skill growth can easily outpace dev expectation and the cranking of the "math difficulty" to provide the perception of easy.

I remember of Bard's Tales where all encounters were fully random, with low level groups having a 20-30% chance of gaining a fight because of that. That was literal reverse difficulty curve. And it's been, at that time, a great hit.

Now, I don't advocate for reverse difficulty curve as that's ridiculous. But many games have exceptionally hard moments during low levels, a tendency to get rather easy at mid levels and then a tough endgame experience. Which is PF2 difficulty curve and why I'm not surprised it is that way.

They really, really, do not. It may feel that way to noobies, especially those new to the genre, but games with actual in-the-math reverse difficulty curves are absurdly rare because of how much of a fun-killer they can be.

That's not my experience.