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After playtesting the new classes a fair amount, I think it's time I wrote some playtest notes. This is something I've done for other classes and elements of the Starfinder playtest, and you should be able to find the list below. I'll split my post into sections, spoiler them, and add a TL;DR just so it's all a bit easier to navigate.

TL;DR I ran the Technomancer through a series of playtest encounters from low- to fairly high level, using a variety of ancestries and party compositions. After a little over a week, I started experimenting with altering the Technomancer's features to see how that would affect their gameplay.

TL;DR Overclocking felt underbaked, and more as a means to the end that is jailbreaking than its own mechanic. Although Viper's overclock shines at high level and DPS++ at low level, the mechanic felt inconsistent in its power scaling, costly to use at low level, and ultimately really limited on what is meant to be the tech caster. I really feel this mechanic could use more love, as I think there's so many different ways to overclock, so much more tech to play with, and the current overclock focus spells could be tied into Overclock Gear better too.

TL;DR Jailbreak Spell succeeds at its goal of providing a spellshape that feels super-powerful, but at the cost of significantly complicating the Technomancer's spellshapes and amplifying their low-level resource problems. As much as I like the mechanic, I question its place as a core class feature.

TL;DR The core Technomancer in many ways felt like they had everything I always wanted from the Wizard, with a better Spell Substitution mechanic and lots of spellshapes to begin with. I think this sits well with their lower durability, and leads to a class that feels like they get a lot of control over their own magic, which is great for a caster that's being put forth as a spellhacker. However, the class has way too much pressure overall to use spell slots and poor resourceless fallback tools, which does not sit well with their 3 spell slots per rank. Additionally, the core class didn't really feel like a technomancer, at least not the view I had where they could interact with tech in plenty of different and impactful ways.

TL;DR The Technomancer's subclasses have a lot of potential, and can genuinely impact the class's playstyle, but are also incredibly janky, especially at low level. ServoShell in particular felt almost like I was playing with no subclass at all, and Viper struggled with gem costs at early levels before shooting into hyper-effectiveness at higher levels. There is a shocking lack of synergy between many of the subclasses' spellshapes and their own cache spells, particularly at low levels, and I would have much preferred to have had feats that actually benefited my subclass rather than more spellshapes.

TL;DR The Techomancer's feats offer a ton of fun spellshapes and have quite possibly some of the best feat names I've ever seen. However, there is a serious lack of feats that interact with tech of any kind, and in general it feels like there was far too much of a focus on manipulating spells, which feels more appropriate for a Pathfinder Wizard than a class that's meant to also have an affinity with tech in the same way a Druid has an affinity with nature.

The big TL;DR to all of this is that based on my experience, I think the Technomancer needs a lot more work unfortunately. They're among the weakest and least functional classes I have ever playtested at low level, and even at higher levels I never really felt the class was fully living up to their fantasy. Part of this is because I expected the class to interact much more with tech, when in practice the class hyperfocuses on spellshapes and uses its overclock mechanic more as a means to that end, rather than as its own fully-fledged aspect. There is far too much pressure on the class to use their limited spell slots on their class mechanics, and I feel this problem would still exist at low level even if the class were a 4-slot caster. My biggest recommendation would be to take at least a few eggs out of that spellshaping basket, and instead put them into the class's tech aspect, if only so that they can have more useful abilities at level 1.

If interested, here are the notes I compiled on adjustments I made to the Technomancer that worked well for me:

TL;DR In my playtesting, I experimented with making the Technomancer less of a hyperfocused spellshaper, and instead turning some of their existing features into a deck of magic hacks that could be used without needing to expend spell slots. I also gave them a scaling class DC so they could use grenades better, and swapped their subclass spellshape feats with feats more directly synergistic with their subclass features. This in my experience led to a significantly more functional class, especially at low level, that felt like it could play at least a little more with tech. This may come down to taste, but I didn't feel the reduction in their spellshaping aspect that strongly, because at lower level I did not have enough spell slots to spellshape much anyway, and at higher levels I had so many spellshapes to choose from that I could easily become a master spellshaper if I so wished. Based on this, my recommendation would be to force less of a focus on spellshapes on the base class, and instead give them the tools they need to make more use of tech and still be effective at low level when not expending spell slots. Because many bits of tech don't use daily resources, and existing feats in 2e allow the generation of daily resources for free, I think the two go hand-in-hand.

A curious detail I've noticed is that Overclock Gear doesn't exclusively work on tech items: if you wanted, you could overclock an analog weapon or armor, which in this case I think might actually be detrimental to the Techomancer's theme (and, conversely, making overclocking exclusive to tech gear could allow it to be made stronger). There's also a bunch of tech that could be overclocked but isn't touched upon at all, including grenades, missiles, upgrades, medpatches, adventuring gear, and a whole bunch of magic items, to say nothing of tech hazards and non-minion creatures. That looks like a lot of room for more interaction with tech to me.

But the more I read them, the more they remind me of things I don't enjoy about PF2e classes. The mechanic promises a cool class fantasy, but they both mostly use the flavor of creation to be a class that hits things good. The technomancer promises a cool gameplay loop, but it requires turns that are either rigid or "best case scenario" just to reliably do what your class promises you.

I'd argue this is a problem much more specific to the SF2e playtest than PF2e. Pathfinder classes tend to have a variety of things to do, and while some do have more math-y benefits, the majority have mechanics that are quite flavorful, open-ended, and conducive to cooperative play. The Starfinder playtest classes, by contrast, were chock-full of numbers boosters, and several bent over backwards to justify their key attribute, the Soldier in particular. Every SF2e class in the original playtest has a fixed rotation, which PF2e classes avoid in their design, and that in my experience made several of them quite rigid to play in practice. That this problem persists on the Technomancer especially I think is more a continuation of past errors than an emergent issue.

I think the rule of thumb in 2e, whether Pathfinder or Starfinder, is that by default you will very much want to boost Dex, Con, and Wis even if your class doesn't explicitly tell you to do so: Dexterity is responsible for your AC and your Reflex saves, Constitution is responsible for your HP and your Fortitude saves, and Wisdom is responsible for your Perception and Will saves. Unless you can substitute one stat for another, such as Strength for Dexterity if you're a heavy armor class, these attributes will have such an impact on your character in and out of encounters that you're better off boosting them along with your key attribute than not. This I think is all the more true in Starfinder, where gun-based combat will have most characters boosting Dex for their Strikes.

This is also why I don't think the Mechanic in particular being required to boost Dex on one of their subclasses is necessarily a huge deal -- that's already something they're going to be doing, because they'll want Dex to shoot anyway. There's a case to be made for using Int on the turret instead, but even so, the Mechanic will still want to boost Dex for all of the reasons mentioned. If the Mechanic had reason to boost those four scores and then Strength or Charisma, then they'd be properly MAD (and the Inventor has this problem with their Strength-based melee Strikes), but as it stands there's very little reason to build Strength in SF2e unless you're a Solarian, and the class has no special reason to go for Charisma either. There is therefore plenty of room to get exactly what you'd want from this class using your four attribute boosts every five levels.

I agree with this assessment. Overclock Gear I think is at the heart of a lot of the Technomancer's current problems right now, because it clogs up their action economy and makes them even more hungry for spell slots than their focus spellshapes already make them. That two of the subclasses can't benefit at all from the overclock effect I think ties to a slightly different issue (the Technomancer needs 1st-level feats that aren't spellshapes, and that instead cater to their subclass better), but nonetheless make overclocking feel even less relevant on what is meant to be the caster for interacting with technology.

With this in mind, I'd definitely support making the effect a focus spell without needing to cast a spell first, and in general I think the Technomancer could benefit from having this large deck of focus spells at level 1 to have more resource-free things to do, and more choice over what to commit to in an encounter. I'd also perhaps also support making each overclock effect into its own focus spell, which could open the door for more overclock spells and perhaps make it easier to poach overclock effects across subclasses.

While I haven't yet extensively playtested the Technomancer at a high level, I'm also in agreement that the overclock effects on DPS++ in particular may end up not being so valuable: not only does the class have the standard caster weapon scaling, they also lack the scaling class DC to use area weapons and grenades well, which carries its own heap of problems, and have little feat support to overcome this. Giving the class a scaling class DC, potentially even up to legendary, would address this issue, allowing the class to always use AoE weapons and grenades competently.

As I understand it, the idea is to treat guns as their own separate weapon subset from Pathfinder firearms, as guns and firearms are balanced differently: specifically, guns are balanced to be on par with other weapons (in theory, at least), whereas firearms are made intentionally underpowered in Pathfinder so that they're less likely to be used by everyone, with Gunslingers receiving extra features to bring them back up. Thus, I'd say that in this case the incompatibility may be intended.

Okay, so at least part of my assessment was correct, then. I'm going to push back once more on the criticism of the Mechanic's need for Dex, because martial classes that key off of a mental attribute don't need to use it for their attack rolls to be encouraged to build that attribute. The Investigator isn't just a minority here, they're the exception, and Devise a Stratagem is meant to be a defining mechanic of the class.

Just to break it down as much as possible:

I might write a thread about this, but I think it's fine for the Technomancer to have worse stats than the playtest Mystic and Witchwarper, and I think that reflects an evolution in Starfinder's balance where the Starfriends took critical player feedback on board. My suspicion is that the Mystic and Witchwarper will find themselves with lower stats than what we've seen in the playtest, because both classes were seriously overstatted (nearly every SF2e class was) and many players made note of that.

As for why the Technomancer is locked to Arcane, my guess is that Arcane is by far the best fit for a class that uses tech to hack into magic. Arcane is the magic of structure that gives you the cheat codes to the Universe, so it'd make sense for that to the Technomancer to embody that with their magical programming languages. Occult magic by contrast relies a lot on vibes, which I think makes it a less good fit. I agree with WatersLethe that a class needs good justification to be able to choose between traditions, and while I do think there's room for that in 2e (I do think Pathfinder's Psychic could choose between arcane and occult spellcasting), I don't think the thematic justification is strong enough on the Technomancer unless we go with a "ghost in the machine" angle that currently isn't really implemented in the playtest class.

The same world where a class' KAS does not contribute to their main "to-hit" (inteded as Attack Roll, DCs and/or Class-relevant skills).

I don't think you really understood the point here. Unless you're a Solarian, Dex is an attribute you'll always be boosting in Starfinder, because it's the attribute you use to shoot. Perhaps it could make more sense for the drone to shoot using Int, but ultimately you're using it as a ranged weapon, and will be needing Dex for Reflex saves and AC, so having to use it in some way, shape, or form isn't exactly this draconian build expectation when you have four ability boosts to spare.

A number of things: Intimidating foes into obedience, being harder to kill or remembering your deity's teachings better.

That's the beauty of Pf2e's ability boost and skill systems: your class doesn't conpletely define your role, you can branch out without shooting yourself in the foot.

And why is it necessary for the Mechanic to be able to dump their key attribute to become good at Intimidation without any meaningful tradeoff? Again, you seem to have missed the beauty of 2e's attribute boosts, which is that getting four of them at every attribute boost level lets you pick a variety of skills: just sticking to Dex, Int, and Wis, there's Acrobatics, Piloting, Stealth, Thievery, Computers, Crafting, Society, Arcana, Occultism, Lore of various kinds, Medicine, Nature, Religion, Survival... everything except Athletics and your Charisma skills, really, and Athletics is still something you can make good use of via Assurance. At it stands, the Mechanic has the opportunity to put their attribute boosts towards any of those skills, and there's more on offer than even their starting 8 trained skills would let them pick. Oh, and being able to boost Con also means you get to be harder to kill without sacrificing any of the above, too. This very much strikes me as this classic case of a kid stamping their feet because they only got most of the presents, when they wanted all of the presents.

Haven't seen a thread for this specific mechanic yet, so here goes: Jailbreak Spell is a core class feature the Technomancer gains at 3rd level, which lets you trade in your gear overclocking for an action compressor on a spellshape, plus an additional jailbreak benefit, plus an additional benefit if you use a specific spellshape granted by your subclass. This probably starts to get to one of the things I want to discuss, but just to lay out the steps, here's how you jailbreak and what you get out of it:

I agree very much with this. I'm still playtesting this class and will likely do my own write-up in a month, but so far the main criticisms for me are:

In short: the Witchwarper gets a scaling class DC up to master proficiency, presumably because their 1e version was also good with explosives, whereas the Technomancer's class DC gets stuck at trained proficiency, making the Witchwarper better at handling common bits of tech than the tech-themed caster class.

Beyond the bit of grumbling around theming, this is also mechanically relevant, because several of the Technomancer's abilities rely on grenades: the Viper subclass's Jailbreak Spellshape function has you make an Area Fire action as you treat a spell gem as an electromag grenade, and the Grenade Spell feat at 8th level also lets you infuse a burst spell into a grenade, which you throw with the Area Fire action. Because the Area Fire action uses your class DC for its Reflex save, you'd be using your trained DC both times, making both actions scale extremely poorly.

With this in mind, I think it would be to the Technomancer's benefit for them to receive a scaling class DC. Unlike the Witchwarper, I think it could even go to legendary, and I don't think this would break anything: the class is clearly good at AoE and is intended to do well with AoE weaponry, so being good at Area Fires ought to be an intended strength, and archetype or ancestry feats that rely on class DC almost always let you use your spell DC instead, so there would be no change there.

I spent a hot minute trying out a Mechanic with a drone exocortex device and 0 Int (Leshy for the attribute flaw to Intelligence), and dumping my key attribute made surprisingly little difference. I wasn't stunningly amazing at Computers checks, and my Desperate Repair mod was perhaps a little weak, but neither were really core to my character. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it as a top-tier build, because the Mechanic doesn't gain terribly much from Strength or Charisma, but the fact that it's possible to dump your key attribute and barely feel it is a little strange.

For this reason, I agree with the OP that Intelligence should perhaps factor more into the Mechanic's core kit, though I don't think the class necessarily ought to Strike with their Int modifier. Personally, I'd target mods, and so in the following way:

I'm personally of the camp that the Technomancer could definitely use a bit more techno- in their kit. It's not just that that aspect feels oddly subdued on a class whose focus in fiction generally revolves around magically interfacing with technology: right now, there are mechanical gaps as well in the Technomancer's kit, particularly with programming languages like ServoShell and Viper, that ought to be filled with magic that produces or interfaces with technology. I would also say that this need not come at the expense of their current magic hacking angle, and in fact could help round it out, especially in the form of more options. For instance:

I disagree and think this is backwards. The inventor subclasses were a direct borrowing/adaptation of the post-Character Operations Manual SF1 Mechanic subclasses. Core Mecehanic already had a drone, so none of this conceptually came from Inventor except adopting the advancement/numbers from PF2, and COM had a weapon and armor Mechanic that obviously inspired the Inventor subclasses.

I feel this is an answer to a point that was never made. The current subject of discussion isn't the genealogy of the Inventor's mechanics, but the predicament the Starfriends found themselves in when adapting the Mechanic to 2e, a process that chronologically followed years after the Inventor's release. The difficulty comes not just from the thematic closeness to the Inventor, who likely did take inspiration from 1e's Mechanic, but from the general process of changing systems and quite possibly the amount of time the developers had to decide on the mechanics. The drone could very well have followed a different model from the Inventor's, for instance, and the Mine exocortex could have instead used Starfinder's grenades. What we got was a class whose mechanics didn't always innovate when I think they should've, yet sometimes did reinvent the wheel when they could've built upon existing content instead, which to me suggests there was a level of difficulty in deciding how to implement this class in the playtest.

I do think there's room for a class to synergize with ambient tech without becoming completely powerless in its absence. The Druid is a good example of this, because they have lots of spells that require you to be in or near a certain natural feature to work, and yet can work perfectly fine in an urban setting. The Technomancer I suspect would have an even easier time, because you're always going to be carrying some measure of technology thanks to your weapons and gear. Thus, I'd also be in favor of bringing out the techno aspect of the Technomancer a bit more, especially as I don't think their spellhacking aspect works at its best right now when it's the only thing you can do with your Focus Points on the class at early levels.

I do think OP's request could have been addressed quite easily by having a fourth subclass that let you take on additional augmentations, and slot those in and out much more quickly and without a check (and perhaps also do this with your own gear as mod actions). You'd basically be the ultimate self-customizer. I also agree with moosher that the term "rig" would be more appropriate as the general name for your piece of tech, with the exocortex being the rig specifically built for self-augmentation. I also find it strange how there's no option to let you Hack from a distance using your rig, particularly as that's a heritage benefit you can get on the Android.

I get the impression the developers had a tough time coming up with subclasses for the Mechanic, which is why we have one that's directly lifted from the Inventor (though with actual companion options, so that's an improvement), and another that's basically another companion that doesn't move and uses your Dex to attack from range. The mine option looks interesting for area control, but as mentioned in the OP the ranged deployment looks costly, the mod options are surprisingly low on utility, and it doesn't look like you're really deploying a minefield at a time so much as just throwing grenades with lots of extra steps.

I do think the idea of explosives makes perfect sense on a Mechanic, though, so I'd be fully up for a demolitionist who can produce and throw lots of explosives on the fly. In fact, I feel this playtest could have been a good opportunity to test out delayed explosives, a player request that came about quite frequently and would likely have been great to test out on one or both tech classes. Even just having a mod that delays your grenade's explosion by 1 round in exchange for massively enhancing its effects would be great for flushing enemies out of cover, and could have added some more variety to the class. Similarly, one could easily implement a mine function by having a mod that lets grenades stick and lets you detonate them as an action or reaction later on. Really, adding more functionality to grenades instead of coming up with an isolated mechanic could likely have given the Mechanic a lot more options, plus would have given playtesters an easy way to integrate a whole range of new items in Starfinder into their playstyle.

I do think the issue isn't so much that the Technomancer is a 3-slot caster, but more that the Mystic and Witchwarper were 4-slot casters with a meaty base chassis on top. That was a majorly complained-about element of the playtest, and it looks to me like the Starfriends have tuned down the balancing to match Pathfinder's more closely, with the Technomancer being one of the results.

What I will say, however, is that being a 3-slot caster might be a problem still for the Technomancer, not so much because the class is weak (some of their mechanics look super-strong, especially Download Spell), but because their rank 1 and 3 focus spells are all spellshapes, meaning that once they run out of spell slots, their only fallback options will be cantrips, which at levels 3-4 especially would be quite a sharp drop. As much as I like the fantasy of hacking into magic and want that preserved, I do think this ought to be the opportunity to move the gear overclocking to focus spells, rather than a class feature that requires you to spend a spell slot first, so that you can then get a free-action spellshape in the fight (which, again, piles on a resource cost). Not only would this make the class less resource-hungry, it'd also put their techno aspect more to the forefront, as that's been one of the more immediate criticisms of the class right now.

I do think there's value in versatility; if we were all specialists we wouldn't have the arcane list to begin with, and Pathfinder Society play I think would be a lot less stable given how you don't know who you're going to land with.

To give an example of a skill setup: in addition to Arcana and Computers, your Technomancer could also pick Nature, Occultism, and Religion to cover their creature RK bases, then choose from a combination of Acrobatics, Athletics, Medicine, Piloting, and Thievery to make sure you can handle a variety of basic rolls competently. You won't really need Untrained Improvisation, but that's only because the feat covers the key benefit of Intelligence as an attribute, not the other way round.

I mean, you say this, but the Mechanic from the same playtest gets 8 starting trained skills, as do the Alchemist, the Commander, the Inventor, the Psychic with an Int subconscious mind, and the Witch (not counting the Investigator, who gets 10 but is meant to be a skill monkey). Because two of these classes are spellcasters, including even one that can be a prepared arcane spellcaster, casting spells clearly does not force you to have fewer trained skills. Similarly, having more trained skills via Int is not used as an excuse for these classes to have fewer trained skills, so you could very well pick some more useful skills like Medicine or Athletics, neither of which need to be boosted via skill increases to have some worthwhile uses, on top of useful knowledge skills like Nature and Religion (again, which don't need to be boosted to be useful in many circumstances).

With this in mind, it's not so much an obsession with symmetry, as it is a rejection of this underlying convention where dedicated prepared arcane casters, who also happen to be Int-based (though many Magi won't boost their Int by much), have less than the otherwise minimal number of starting trained skills. This convention does not need to exist, is the point, and the fact that it is maintained I think just makes the balancing around these classes feel pettier than intended. Certainly not a hill to die on, it's just a minor annoyance that need not exist, particular as all the arguments about how this would devalue certain feats or whatever are nonsense given all the other class who do just fine with that amount of trained skills.

I for one love the Inventor, sure it still needs more power but it is a concept that works well enough. Which is why I don't want Mechanic to end up being "that but again but space" and neither does the design team as they've said before. Mechanic should get more sauce but it shouldn't be by becoming more like Inventor.

This is my feeling as well. Even now, the Mechanic does feel like "Inventor in space", except with the ability to actually play with items more and minus the irritating unstable actions and Barbarian-style damage steroid. If the class has to move in a direction, I'd want to pick one that moves it even further away from the Inventor, so less random wackiness and a greater and more intricate range of mods. There's definitely room for it, too, as a lot of current mods are generic damage boosts that IMO could easily get replaced in the final product with more mods that alter the functionality of your gear or innovation exocortex device.

I came here to say exactly this, and am very glad I got beaten to it. Reading through the Technomancer's features and feats and seeing how many coding references I recognized was a ton of geeky fun by itself (Fortrun's probably my favorite so far), and I fully agree that the naming makes each feat both evocative and easy to immediately understand. I would go as far as to say that the Technomancer may very well have the best ability names in 2e; the Starfriends really did a fantastic job here in my opinion.

On one hand, I applaud the Starfriends for taking on board feedback from the initial phase of the playtest and tuning their balancing to match that of PF2e more closely. With perhaps one or two exceptions, I think the new playtest doc really shows that the devs aren't just using the top end of numbers each time now, and I'd feel much more comfortable having these new classes play alongside PF2e classes, despite how these two feel almost like direct upgrades to the Inventor and Wizard.

On the other hand, I also think prepared Intelligence arcane casters having less than the normal minimum of base skills in 2e is a silly convention that doesn't need to be carried over to the Technomancer. Yes, you get more trained skills from Intelligence, and the class is really flexible already by virtue of being prepared and arcane, but prepared arcane spellcasting I think is already balanced via a spellbook mechanic (or in the Technomancer's case, a spell cache), and other Intelligence classes don't get saddled with this same limitation. Giving the now-three prepared arcane casters in 2e an extra trained skill at 1st level I think is unlikely to overpower them, and would eliminate a long-standing annoyance players have had with this specific subset of classes.

As a thought, what if finishers prevented you from making attacks against the finisher's target, or targets, rather than at all? You'd still be making one final move against a target for the turn, but would at least have the chance to pivot to another opponent, which would work within the fantasy of the Swashbuckler.

Relative to their premaster version, the Swashbuckler has for sure been improved. In particular, they can generate panache more reliably, which was one of their bigger pain points. I personally wish there were more ways to spend panache beyond just one big attack, but also understand that a Swashbuckler that doesn't use finishers would probably have some of the worst damage output in the game.

With that said, I also am okay with the Swashbuckler not dealing too much damage overall, because I don't think damage is actually meant to be their specialty. There seems to be this misconception that as a martial class with the ability to inflict big hits, the Swashbuckler is meant to be a major damage-dealer, but in practice I think they're much more of a utility-based tank, one that shines through skills and defense and who concentrates what little damage output they have mostly (but not completely) into finishers. If the class really struggles against high-AC enemies, then perhaps Confident Finisher could deal more damage on a failure (half damage, perhaps?), but otherwise I don't think the class needs to be a damage powerhouse to excel at their intended purpose.

As a thought, what if sanctification were domain-based? You'd apply your deity's domains whenever dealing sanctified damage, while also having anathematic domains, and if one of the damage's domains is an anathematic domain to the target (for example, the freedom domain for a devil), then that would trigger their weakness. It wouldn't be as in-depth as edicts and anathema, but it would also be a bit more defined, and although you'd still require a lot of GM adjudication, there would also be room for more general templates based on which plane a NPC comes from: the perfection domain, for instance, would probably be anathematic to most demons, whereas the tyranny domain would probably be anathematic to any chaos-aligned creature, particularly azatas.

I think the key distinction here is symbolism versus values: occult magic deals with the interplay between thoughts and emotions, the conscious and the unconscious, and can play with symbols and intent without the practitioner having their entire life tied to certain ideals or concepts. By contrast, divine magic does tie your life and soul to certain metaphysical concepts, which sometimes (but not always) comes with edicts and anathema to follow, and which doesn't really require you to think about them in any conscious way so much as feel and embody them. When people want to dream up stories of Sarenrae, contact her from beyond the Universe, and consider what a world with Sarenrae would look like, that's occult magic, but when people come together to worship Sarenrae, celebrate what she stands for, and embody her values in their day-to-day life, that's divine magic. Because your universe doesn't confirm the existence of gods, it may also become much more common to have faith grow around certain ideals and more abstract concepts, and not just gods.

With that said, both types of magic touch upon the soul, and thus upon the emotions that often drive moral decisions. This can work to your advantage, in that in your Universe, the divine tradition may just be conflated with the occult: because there'd be no evidence of the divine, divine magic could just appear to others as weird occult magic. You could even play with this and have certain researchers pull at that thread to posit the hypothetical existence of a fourth tradition, while others try to explain how certain divine spells are available to some "occult" practitioners -- and perhaps some "primal" casters too -- and not others, even as those anomalous spellcasters find themselves unable to cast other spells common to those traditions.

I'd suspected you were applying an "angry atheist" template as your interpretive lens, and now you've now verified it.

This is a mischaracterization. I am specifically referring to how you refer to faith as a "placebo" and "traumatized nonsense from toxic beliefs" (your words, not mine), and explicitly mentioned you were drawing from your own experience:

Earth stuff setting aside philosophy and minced words to address traumatized nonsense from toxic beliefs. Apologies for my boldness, SDJenn, it comes from experience with shedding toxic dogma in general, obviously not insight into your particulars.

Trauma does not have to be violent, and ultimately it is clear that you're setting your own experience as the gold standard here. Similarly, your mention of faith in relation to obtaining knowledge about the world is a contextualization of it in opposition to science, i.e. the method of obtaining knowledge about the world, even if the discussion of how either relate to knowledge pertains to epistemology.

Except most tables won't bother with this stuff and at many it'd be counterproductive to try, so it's an iffy option.

This is an example I think of putting one's experience over that of others. You have no empirical evidence to support your claim that "most tables won't bother" with the layers of roleplaying featured in Pathfinder's rulebooks, and judging by the small sample size of this conversation it is clear that many players recognize edicts and anathema, and specifically those of deities, as ways of engaging with different worldviews. Furthermore, the amount of page space dedicated to these edicts and anathema in the rulebooks and its expansions, with a recent one heavily focused on this with its mega-list of deities, shows the developers value this roleplaying element enough to include a lot of it in their work, and the result is a rich diversity of perspectives to draw from and experiment with, which does happen in at least some tables. There is therefore ample room for experimentation, and I don't think engaging with game material as presented and intended is counterproductive or iffy. It does not mean anyone should have to engage with this material, but it is certainly a valid option.

-There's a limit to how much safety & distance RPing can provide, right? And when trauma or being triggered surfaces, it's time to step back from encouraging them forward. I read SDJenn's words as being in that league. IMO, such impact kinda washes away the earlier points. Time to subtract triggers from one's RPing and play on.

I fully agree, as per what I've already said:

For this reason, I will say that part of what you're looking for may not necessarily come from tabletop games, at least not completely. RPGs, while sometimes therapeutic, aren't therapy, and finding that part of yourself that you feel has been taken from you is likely something that is going to have to happen with the help of someone professionally trained to assist you in untangling that complicated and deeply personal ball of emotions, memories, and trauma. However, RPGs, and in this specific case Pathfinder, can also be a space for simulating lives you didn't or couldn't live in real life: if you want to try roleplaying a Cleric whose faith drives them to become a better, more fulfilled person, you absolutely can. It doesn't even matter that Pathfinder lets you do this out of the box with its rich world: even if that richness and diversity of faiths didn't exist, it would be in your power to create your own and break that mold. It is up to you to determine what faith means to you, whether it has a place in your life, and if so what place that might be. Pathfinder can give you roleplaying prompts for characters whose faith aligns with what you want from it, and can set the stage to express that faith through your character, but it can't tell you what that faith will look like, nor which one is the right one. In fact, it does the opposite: there is no one true faith; it is up to you to choose your own.

It feels like throughout this exchange you've been mischaracterizing me as attempting to push faith onto a person who's been hurt by it; I'm not. I don't think anyone should have to pick a Cleric or any character of faith, regardless of their upbringing. You also seem to be addressing a straw man argument wherein people are advocating roleplay as therapy, when nobody has done anything of the sort, and this has in fact been discouraged.

But ultimately, all of this discussion is about you, when that's not the center of focus here. If StarDragonJenn doesn't want to play a Cleric, that is absolutely valid.

StarDragonJenn: what you're saying makes a lot of sense. No matter the tenets being presented for any particular deity, approaching faith using the structure of organized religion may not be the best way to go about it, because these fictional religions invite us to draw parallels with real-life clergies, and the main parallel you have to draw from unfortunately is a toxic structure that has hurt you and that you've escaped from. It may therefore not be the right way for you to explore faith in roleplay, in that case, and the same would apply to the Champion class.

In this respect, I have a couple of questions, if that's okay: is faith of some description still something you're interested in exploring in a roleplaying context? If so, have you considered character classes whose faith doesn't fit the structure of a clergy? The Animist and Druid, for instance, are both characters who deal with faith and spirituality, except the Animist communes with various spirits much like one would talk to a relative (and, in fact, some apparitions are your relatives), whereas the Druidic faith answers to no god in particular, and is instead about embracing the natural world, even the entire Universe, in a variety of ways. In both cases, you needn't follow a god at all, and in the case of the Animist in particular you'd follow no rites or structures, no class-specific edicts or anathema, and would interact with apparitions entirely on your own terms. Depending on how central you want this to be to your character, you can even just play literally any class, and give them a facet of druidic or animistic beliefs, even if they're not a part of their mechanics.

The flipside to this is that you could also try exploring a character who doesn't operate on faith at all: if so, you might be interested in the fictional nation of Rahadoum, which was once ravaged by religious wars and swore since to live completely independently of the worship of any god. Not only did the nation prosper under this philosophy, known as the Laws of Mortality, they actually made significant advances in medicine and alchemy as a result, as other nations too often rely on Clerics to provide healing. Depending on what you're looking for, this could provide a different way of approaching certain people's way of life, while also potentially exploring how faith is more abstract than deities or religion, and can take on a variety of forms even among people who don't worship a god at all.

Did anybody comment on science?

Yes, you did, several times:

Faith serves a purpose so occurs naturally as part of the human condition, but the same could be said of other forms of shortcut-thinking/flawed thinking (plus human flaws all around). IMO faith's purpose is to help fill in the spaces that are prone to fear if left empty.

That said I did and would again disparage faith when used as self-supporting certainty or a tool for foundational knowledge of the unknown. That's faulty methodology.

It is certainly a valid criticism to be made of faith when it pits itself in conflict with science, but that is not the topic of present conversation.

I felt you didn't think the magical essences exist in a magical sense, but it seemed you were positing them as existing as part of ourselves.

I'm not. I don't believe in the existence of lifeforce, the mind, or the soul as entities distinct from our physical bodies, my point is simply that these are useful constructs that help articulate otherwise complex and abstract concepts, and the way Pathfinder incorporates them into roleplaying elements that mirror elements of our own cultures is itself a useful way to express how we can relate those concepts. I don't believe in the existence of some immortal, supernatural soul, but I do think that our belief systems and decision-making are both shaped by our feelings, perhaps even more so than our logical thinking, and these are all emergent concepts from our brain processes that we can isolate, recognize, and discuss in terms more abstract than the firing of synapses, much like how one can discuss a computer application in terms less basic than 0s and 1s. Pathfinder connects these different concepts to different life paths, and in so doing demonstrates a plurality of perspectives. This is, by the way, something you yourself endorsed:

Also, despite the philosophically rigorous** arguments trotted out by proselytizers, if you delve into their own journeys they're more often one akin to falling in love than deciding what's true with objectivity.

You mention romance and religion as capable of eliciting the same feeling, I mention Bards and Clerics. We're saying the same thing in slightly different terms.

But let's refocus: SDJenn mentioned trauma from faith. I'm operating with her lived experiences.

With all due respect, I don't think you are. I think you're operating from your own trauma, not hers, and that's where the problem is coming from. Deciding what's best for this person, ignoring the curiosity they themselves expressed and that started this very thread, and specifically telling them not to touch certain topics even in the context of a tabletop roleplaying game doesn't sound to me like listening. The way you chose to deal with your own trauma is valid, and I certainly won't dispute it; my point is that what's valid for you is not automatically valid for everyone else, and there is a plurality of valid choices to be made here. I fully agree with you that there is also a large number of unhealthy decisions that could be made, and it is beneficial to be aware of the signs of toxic communities and how to avoid those, but that still leaves room for alternatives, including in this case faith, however different that may look from the original, and as one possibility among many. Dictating a single valid course of action is dogmatic, no two ways about it, and again, I think that is quite possibly the least helpful approach for this particular context.

I'm unsure where you saw conflation between Golarion & Earth religions.

Here, specifically:

While Golarion reflects those four aspects of the self in its magical traditions, I don't think the way PF blends them correlates with reality (never mind that I also think two of them only exist as useful metaphors).

I appreciate your goals with the last paragraph, but disagree that all paths are equally valid. Many don't work, many warp one's principles, others destroy oneself or those around. And that assertion's also conman territory to assuage suspicion. As is the concept a healthy community can come from anywhere.

The last paragraph in question being this:

All of which is to say: no matter what part of your identity you're trying to connect with, there is a wide variety of paths you can take, each as valid as the last. There are multiple approaches to faith, and even spiritual approaches that don't rely on faith at all. If what you seek is a sense of community and belonging, then that too is something you can attain, and it is up to you to decide what you want your community to revolve around. I definitely agree it is important to ensure that you join a healthy community, and keep an eye out for indicators of toxicity, but that healthy community can come from anywhere.

Which in turn stemmed from this immediately preceding paragraph:

I think what can help is actually the way Pathfinder frames its magic system: its four traditions of magic rely on four types of magical essence, which when combined form the totality of a mortal being. You have physical essence for the body, vital essence for lifeforce, mental essence for the mind, and spiritual essence for the soul. Normally, the soul is the domain of religion in many cultures, but in Pathfinder it's also the domain of occult magic, which is made to emulate a lot of the spiritualism that was especially common in and around Victorian England. If you want to stir people's hearts, you can do so as a Cleric, for sure, but you can also do so as a Bard, who need not be religious to create the same kind of fervor you'd find in a church or temple through their art. In many cases, the heart of a community won't be a Cleric, but a Druid, whose faith isn't concerned with the soul at all, and instead hinges on making the most of the life you have in the Universe. Even in matters of the divine, your faith doesn't just have to be expressed in terms of a clergy, because the Animist is there to bridge the mortal world with that of spirits and apparitions.

It is quite clear that you are bringing criticism of real-life cults, harmful religions, and other toxic elements of faith into analysis of the fictional world of a tabletop game, when not only did I establish a distinction between the game and real life, I also myself addressed how plurality of approaches does not equate to literally all possible approaches being valid, nor does it exclude the existence of toxic communities one must be aware of. The simple point I was making is that Pathfinder, by inviting its players to look at life through the lens of different characters with drastically different worldviews, invites people to consider different perspectives, including different ways of reaching the same thing. Again, the intense feeling some people get from a powerful religious sermon is the same feeling some people, sometimes the very same people, get when they fall in love, or when they connect deeply with a work of art. This is something Pathfinder can help implicitly convey when the game does something like allow both divine characters like Clerics and occult characters like Bards spur someone to heroism, the spell. Different paths, same result.

All of which is to say: roleplaying games, by their very nature, allow players to not only abstract and articulate complex concepts, but embody them through roleplay and experiment with them in a safe creative space. While not literally every concept in Pathfinder ought to be taken uncritically and at face value, the game is very much designed to convey pluralism of experiences and perspectives, and does so in a variety of surprisingly smart and sometimes beautiful ways. The emotional connection one person seeks through faith, another can find by entirely different means, and what faith even looks like varies tremendously from person to person, even among people of similar beliefs. This is very much a game about finding your own path among many, and while as said before, StarDragonJenn's personal journey is one where most of the legwork will be done in real life with hopefully the help of therapy and personal support, Pathfinder and its many constituent elements can serve as useful tools to play, experiment, and connect with independently of that.

To be very clear, I am not in any way advocating for faith as an alternative to science IRL, nor as a source of objective truth. I'm fairly certain that was not even implied in my answers either, nor am I claiming that Pathfinder's four magical essences exist in real life. Rather, I am inviting a look into Pathfinder's plurality of choices for characters who are spiritual, religious, or just connected to emotions and communities, and seeing that there are many different and valid ways of connecting to one's emotions, spirituality, and sense of belonging. The topic here is personal truth, distinct from scientific truth, and personal truths tend to have more to do with emotions and feelings than anything else, which means that to many (though certainly not all) that is expressed at least in part through some element of faith or spirituality.

Similarly, I am well aware of the toxic elements of many real-life religious groups, and am not suggesting to steer anyone towards those. I am simply cautioning not to tar every remotely religious or spiritual community with the same brush, because if your intent is to help someone heal through the trauma inflicted by their own group, that approach hinges on the same dogmatism and isolationism that has hurt them and that they've distanced themselves from. It is once again possible to criticize the evils, abuses, and excesses of faith without asking people to cut all elements of faith or spirituality out of their lives, even when they have been healthy to them or have a chance to be in the future.

Finally, I think it is worth addressing the implicit conflation being made here between Pathfinder and real life: in real life, there is no objective basis for the existence of deities. In Pathfinder, there is, and in spades. This means that while it is irrational to rely on deities to explain natural laws in real life, it is irrational not to do so in the world of Pathfinder, where even atheists in-universe acknowledge the existence of gods as objective fact. By asking people to consider in-game faiths that spur people towards education and personal growth, I am not asking people to believe the deities involved are real or that religion is a source of scientific answers in real life, even if I am indicating that in a roleplaying scenario at the very least, certain religions can serve as sources of knowledge and freedom, rather than ignorance and oppression. I can understand the vigilance that comes from leaving an abusive or manipulative religious upbringing, and the desire to never see oneself or anyone else enter a toxic community of any kind, but I would once again caution against letting that vigilance overreach its boundaries and turn into prejudice. Inviting people to consider healthy examples of fictionalized faith in a tabletop roleplaying game does not equate to telling those people to join a religious group in real life, much less a toxic one, and given OP's curiosity towards Clerics and faith in Golarion I think it may even be to their benefit to use the safe space of a roleplaying table to experiment with characters of faith and create narratives that differ from their own.

It is worth noting that the Pirahã culture does in fact incorporate a belief in spirits, so there is still the existence of faith there, even if it is not necessarily religious. I would also be mindful not to promote alternatives to faith by disparaging faith itself, and I say this as an atheist with no spiritual leanings and a strong dislike of organized religion. It is all too common for celebration of something to be expressed as a shaming of its opposite, and I've too often seen exploration beyond heteronormativity expressed as a vilification of monogamy, body positivity turned into thin-shaming, and emancipation from repressive religious institutions get stuck in hatred for any and all religion. It can be liberating to reject the thing that once held power over you, but I also think that is an approach one needs to move on from in the long run, otherwise you just stay fixated on it in a manner that's not healthy.

I think what can help is actually the way Pathfinder frames its magic system: its four traditions of magic rely on four types of magical essence, which when combined form the totality of a mortal being. You have physical essence for the body, vital essence for lifeforce, mental essence for the mind, and spiritual essence for the soul. Normally, the soul is the domain of religion in many cultures, but in Pathfinder it's also the domain of occult magic, which is made to emulate a lot of the spiritualism that was especially common in and around Victorian England. If you want to stir people's hearts, you can do so as a Cleric, for sure, but you can also do so as a Bard, who need not be religious to create the same kind of fervor you'd find in a church or temple through their art. In many cases, the heart of a community won't be a Cleric, but a Druid, whose faith isn't concerned with the soul at all, and instead hinges on making the most of the life you have in the Universe. Even in matters of the divine, your faith doesn't just have to be expressed in terms of a clergy, because the Animist is there to bridge the mortal world with that of spirits and apparitions.

All of which is to say: no matter what part of your identity you're trying to connect with, there is a wide variety of paths you can take, each as valid as the last. There are multiple approaches to faith, and even spiritual approaches that don't rely on faith at all. If what you seek is a sense of community and belonging, then that too is something you can attain, and it is up to you to decide what you want your community to revolve around. I definitely agree it is important to ensure that you join a healthy community, and keep an eye out for indicators of toxicity, but that healthy community can come from anywhere.

Pretty sure I addressed that in the original post. Silkas does acknowledge that they're crazy extreme, but he says they're crazy extreme because they think nethys is the only god who grants divine magic, or something. He doesn't say anything about their absolute submission thing, which gives the impression that he thinks that parts perfectly normal. In conclusion, the essays the problem I guess...

I can understand where the suspicion is coming from, but this is also not quite true. Here are the first few lines of the divine treatise, which your OP quotes as well:

Perhaps the most severe, prescriptive worshippers of Nethys I encountered in all my travels are those found at the secretive Temple of Ten Doors.

Emphasis added. The sect is specifically called out as prescriptive right off the bat, and their own teachings regarding the same deity are presented with a counterpart in the Siblings of the All-Seeing Eye, mentioned in the same two-page spread. It is clear that even within worship of the same deity, there is a plurality of ways of worship, even if several of these may posit that they are the only true path. In fact, the entire point of these treatises as a collective is to show that there are many different ways to access magic, all equally valid. Plurality of viewpoints and approaches is the central purpose of this worldbuilding section of the book. I can agree with you that the religious texts featured in the section are certainly dogmatic and seem to encourage a degree of passivity, but that is not a universal rule among deities or worship in Pathfinder.

I wasn't talking about understanding faith philosophically. Rather I feel as of late like something natural to being human may have been stolen from me.

Which... Even with all these logical arguments, my brain is sitting here screaming traumatized nonsense, so this was the wrong approach apparently...

I don't know how much this will be of help, but it sounds to me like the thing you're seeking here isn't a concrete understanding or even a thought, but a feeling. This is not to discredit you: on the contrary, we generally like to think that we're creatures of pure reason, but the way in which we change our minds, grasp different perspectives, and find common ground often comes down much more to emotion than cold logic, so it is only by acknowledging our emotional sides as valid that we get to properly listen to one another. We can perhaps give examples and rational arguments of how faith in this roleplaying game can be healthy and empowering, but that doesn't necessarily speak to the trauma you've endured, the vigilance you may have built up in response to it, and the viscerally unpleasant feelings you may experience with regards to certain triggers, such as dogmatic text.

For this reason, I will say that part of what you're looking for may not necessarily come from tabletop games, at least not completely. RPGs, while sometimes therapeutic, aren't therapy, and finding that part of yourself that you feel has been taken from you is likely something that is going to have to happen with the help of someone professionally trained to assist you in untangling that complicated and deeply personal ball of emotions, memories, and trauma. However, RPGs, and in this specific case Pathfinder, can also be a space for simulating lives you didn't or couldn't live in real life: if you want to try roleplaying a Cleric whose faith drives them to become a better, more fulfilled person, you absolutely can. It doesn't even matter that Pathfinder lets you do this out of the box with its rich world: even if that richness and diversity of faiths didn't exist, it would be in your power to create your own and break that mold. It is up to you to determine what faith means to you, whether it has a place in your life, and if so what place that might be. Pathfinder can give you roleplaying prompts for characters whose faith aligns with what you want from it, and can set the stage to express that faith through your character, but it can't tell you what that faith will look like, nor which one is the right one. In fact, it does the opposite: there is no one true faith; it is up to you to choose your own.

To answer this question as well:

Sure, but is a cleric having their own agency typically seen as a bug, as the divine magic essay implies, or are there canon clerics that would scoff at that essay? I think that's the bedrock of what I'm trying to ask.

No, Clerics and other religious characters having free will is very much a feature and not a bug, and the book explicitly mentions that the sect being quoted is uncharacteristically extreme in their zealotry, so many Clerics, including other Clerics of Nethys, would decry those teachings as such. I would go as far as to say that one of the key roleplaying elements of roleplaying a Cleric or Champion is the inherent tension between following a deity's lofty ideals, and being a mortal living in a much more complex world than that deity's idealized realm, and that tension serves to heighten the choices that character makes.

For deities, their own dilemma is the fact that for all their cosmic power, they can't just force everyone to worship them; people must come to them willingly. Even Asmodeus, who sees free will as a mistake and seeks to eradicate it entirely, needs to trick, entice, and entrap people into worship, and often works to show the failings of free will by letting people come to their own poor decisions by themselves. Roleplaying a character rooted in faith should be specifically about exerting your free will at every step: whether you align yourself closer to your deity or distance yourself from them is a decision your character can make at any time, and the GM is likely to have you make this kind of decision often if your deity's edicts and anathema are an important part of your character's identity.

To answer this question immediately:

I'm left wondering if there's space for a cleric that thinks like an individual at least a little bit. I mean there's the splinter faith feat, but even that doesn't quite seem to contradict the 'unthinking zealot' portrayal in the essay. If there's space for a Nietzschean-lite cleric who deliberately seeks out situations where their faith will be tested and deliberately pushes the limits of their deity's without breaking them, and with intent to refine them. Or just someone who sees their deity as a friend and confidant rather than a stompy master...

There absolutely is room for this; your Cleric very much does not need to be a zealot, and many deities very much go against the "perpetually angry tyrant" archetype and can even be quite friendly with their worshipers. Clerics in particular are meant to be the people other worshipers come to whenever they seek answers or guidance regarding their faith, so it is also often in their interest to be able to articulate the merits of their deity from a place of genuine understanding, rather than blind devotion. Becoming a Cleric or Champion of a deity does require devoting yourself to their faith, but that faith doesn't mean debasing yourself or shutting down your critical thinking, so much as embodying those deities' principles to the fullest. This does usually mean taking on those principles far beyond the extent most other mortals would, but depending on the deity those principles can be in service of personal agency and greater understanding, rather than repression and ignorance.

For specific deities, I would particularly look towards deities that have both freedom and knowledge as their domains, like so:

I agree, it's great that the pages afterwards list options for swapping deities on other NPCs, but only part of those guidelines apply to the Deific Vessel, and a lot of its abilities seem quite specific to Urgathoa. Here's how I'd go about modifying the template:

I support starting from existing models whenever possible, particularly as some ancestries do exist closely enough to work. I agree with steelhead that the centaur ancestry would cover your bariaur needs (they even have the same attribute boosts you're looking for), and if you wanted you could implement a bariaur heritage, using the Elfbane hobgoblin heritage as the model for their magic resistance (and you could have the extra resistance apply to divine magic rather than arcane magic).

In addition to what steelhead suggests for the rogue modron ancestry, I would consider the conrasu, who are aeons (the equivalent of modrons in Pathfinder) and have an inorganic appearance due to their living wood bodies (and also have Con+Wis+a free boost, which should align pretty closely with what you're looking for). Gith I think would be a bit more difficult to find a reskin for, as they're quite specific to D&D, but even so you could still mix and match existing ancestries, heritages, and feats that would work well for them. I'd probably implement the githzerai and githyanki as separate heritages to the same ancestry, and you could even take the lashunta ancestry from the Starfinder 2e playtest rules as inspiration for how to do divergent ancestry boosts as well.

To begin: this thread is an offshoot of this homebrew thread from A Butter Idea, whose concept serves as a starting point for this one. I very much recommend reading their post first, as they cover several issues with detection and senses in Pathfinder 2e really well, and that thread gives context to what's being presented here. I initially thought of posting this concept on their thread, but didn't want to crowd out their work with my own divergent homebrew, so I decided to post it here instead. With that established, let's go over a few points of criticism I have for senses and detection in PF2e:

In short: detection and senses sit in this little island of highly complex, overlapping, yet also sometimes confusing and ambiguous rules mostly separate from the rest of the game's mechanics. There's a lot to take in, but even then the question of whether or not one can detect a creature or Hide from them isn't super-clear, particularly when senses other than sight get involved. A Butter Idea addresses the bias towards sight in their brew, and I think we can go even further and streamline these rules even further.

Before listing specifics, I think it's worth listing the general roadmap of what I'd like out of an ideal detection subsystem in a game like Pathfinder, which could take on a variety of implementations:

I like this approach and have thought about the issues behind the way detection and senses are so visual-centric in Pathfinder, though haven't come up with any kind of solution like this. I think the idea of setting detection-based conditions apart as these things automatically generated by environmental factors is a good idea, because targets becoming observed, concealed, and so on often happens automatically from other stuff that's happening, and not just from specific things a creature does.

For me, the issues with senses and detection become apparent when listing out all the mechanics that tie into them:

Melee magi who want to use their Int mod can absolutely bump out of Strength - Finesse weapons exist. My 0-Str. Aloof Firmament magus does this.

More power to you, but that’s not something a Twisting Tree Magus can opt into without abandoning their subclass. It’s not something a Resurgent Maelstrom can consistently rely on either, and it’s clearly not something an Inexorable Iron Magus is intended to focus on when their flavor text describes how they “transform the mass of an enormous weapon into an unstoppable force”. Even on subclasses that can decently use finesse weapons, without being explicitly pushed towards them like Laughing Shadow and Unfurling Brocade, you’re asking players to limit themselves to about half the builds available to them and pick weapons with much lower damage dice just to be less inaccurate at a thing their core class mechanic normally lets them bypass. This is why when melee Magi boost Int to access Psychic Dedication, those boosts typically come out of their defenses instead.

Hmmm. If I wanted to keep it close to its current iteration just for simplicity's sake, I guess I'd... keep it a single action if they just Cast a Spell, but make it a free action if they specifically Spellstrike or use a Conflux Spell, maybe? That way it'd incentivize you actually using the magus's own special things to their advantage, but not completely lock you out if you need to just raw-dog a spell every now and then?

I really do think just making Arcane Cascade work like a regular stance and let you change the damage type with every damaging spell you cast while in it is the simplest solution here. It doesn’t reduce the number of actions the Magus spends, which I guess is what some people want to change but is something I think is worth not disrupting without strong supporting arguments, but instead it just makes the stance much less inconvenient, as you wouldn’t specifically have to use it after spending at least one other action. If it’s okay for it to be a free action, then all the better, but I think the stance can be improved without directly reducing the Magus’s intentionally congested action requirements.

Magus only lags behind in save DC proficiency compared to a legendary caster for 6 levels total from 1-20: from 7-8, 15-16, and 19-20.

Proficiency is only part of the formula; your spellcasting modifier will also be lower even if you start with a +3 Int mod, a costly investment for any Magus. For a Starlit Span Magus, boosting Int isn't too big an issue, but a melee Magus will want to put points into Strength, Dex, Con, and Wis, so boosting Int will come at the expense of those stats and make the class MAD, no matter which way you slice it. Cutting Strength when making Strength-based attacks means sacrificing not only damage, but accuracy, which is not something you want to give up when your signature ability rides on one attack roll, and is counter-productive when the intent is to improve accuracy.

I also maintain that a free-action Arcane Cascade would be a far more significant buff than removing its requirement of casting a spell or making a Spellstrike. Again, a free-action Arcane Cascade means you can just cast shield in lieu of entering the stance and get the benefits of both the stance and the cantrip for a single action. Not only that, but the damage type for the stance would be force, making it a direct upgrade to just activating the stance with no requirement of casting a spell prior. The stance is valuable for its theme of cycling spell power, but I do think that is something better-achieved by having the stance's damage type dynamically adjust to whichever spell you just cast, rather than basing it on a prior requirement.

There seem to be a bunch of implicit assumptions being made here that I think are worth questioning: the first is the assumption that the Fighter being equally proficient in all weapons would mean they'd be equally effective with all weapons all the time, when as mentioned already, this is untrue by the simple fact that their attributes and feat choices will have them favoring certain weapons over others, and their runes will make one or a small subset of their weapons more effective than others. Even with equal proficiency, relative differences in effectiveness would be maintained, and a Fighter would be more effective with a subgroup of weapons than with others. For instance, a Strength-heavy Fighter who's opted into two-handed melee weapon feats is going to be much more effective with a maul than with a bow, even with legendary proficiency in both weapons.

The second assumption is that becoming equally proficient is what will cause the Fighter to want to pack more than one weapon, when that's something they already do: any martial will want a backup weapon, for the simple reason that some monsters will be particularly effective against certain weapon traits, damage types, materials, and runes, and particularly vulnerable to others. Therefore, such a change would not induce switch-hitting, even if it would make Fighters more likely to pick backup weapons of a different group, or make backup weapons from another group more effective.

All of which is to say: I don't think it's really a case of spoiling the Fighter rotten by giving them better switch-hitting, whether through feats or core class changes. Again, this is something well worth testing, rather than purely debating online based on principles that may or may not have any basis in reality. Perhaps this is versatility the Fighter may not need, but perhaps this is the sort of versatility that would open up builds that are currently not so strong and make them a bit better.

The thing is, even if the Fighter were legendary in every weapon at level 13, they'd still favor certain weapons, because that's what their feats push them to do. The entire point of the Fighter's feat selection is to let you build around a specific weapon or weapon set and do really cool techniques with those, so the Fighter is already encouraged to specialize, on top of the broader consideration of runes favoring the use of one particular weapon over a plurality. In this respect, allowing the Fighter to apply their improved proficiency to a larger variety of weapons would be a horizontal power-up rather than a vertical one, and one that would be going up against both the class's push towards specialization and players' inherent instinct to specialize. Effectively, you'd have fewer obstacles to becoming a switch-hitter, even if those obstacles wouldn't be removed entirely.

Again, I think playtesting is what will reveal exactly how powerful this is, but my perspective is that this is probably not as big a deal as it's made out to be here by some. Switch-hitting is not a dominant Fighter playstyle and is unlikely to become one even with the change being discussed, and in my opinion the only downside is that, again, the Fighter wouldn't have a real class feature at level 19, which all things considered is a fairly minor concern (you could just let them swap out their temporary feats as a 10-minute activity or something). If this makes the Fighter too good at switch-hitting, then it's something to roll back and stick to the vanilla class progression, but if this gives the Fighter a bit more versatility without giving them excessive power, that to me sounds like it could be a good thing overall.

If I had to make three changes to the Magus, they'd be the following:

I can partially agree with the OP’s criticism — the Magus is generally going to lag behind in save DC accuracy, even with the effects on a successful save, and melee builds are generally too MAD to comfortably accommodate boosting Int — but I think the proposal may also need a bit of refinement. You wouldn’t want enemies crit failing often on crowd-control spells like slow, for instance, and being able to do so would give the Magus the added strength of having the best accuracy for any spell, which I don’t think should be the case. It may be better to limit this to basic saves only, and if you want to get fancy, perhaps you could even add a mechanic that decouples damage from other spell effects, so that a creature takes damage based on the attack roll but still makes a save against other effects.

Beyond that, I do agree the Magus could use some more adjustments. Melee Magi really don’t need to be vulnerable to Reactive Strike IMO when Channel Smite removes the manipulate trait from its spell, Arcane Cascade could stand to be made less clunky, and the class could be pushed to be less MAD overall, so that it’s not just Starlit Span that can easily opt into Int for better spellcasting. It doesn’t have to be an overhaul, just a few targeted changes that could bring some easy, but significant wins.

Thematically, it's a pretty cool subclass, but mechanically it has the fundamental issue of action-taxing what is already one of the most heavily action-taxed classes in the game, so it's fairly impractical to put to use. It doesn't help that the conflux spell, which is meant to set you up easily for a Spellstrike on your next turn, breaks your improvised weapon and therefore forces you to spend even more actions picking up a new one.

The other big problem as I see it is that this subclass looks like they could play better just by using a regular weapon: a d6, versatile B/P/S forceful weapon isn't terribly impressive next to a glaive, for instance, nor is a d4 versatile B/P/S agile backstabber weapon next to a war razor. It's not just that regular weapons are still stronger despite all the buffs the subclass gives to improvised weapons, they're a lot more diverse too, so you get to choose from hundreds of weapons instead of essentially just two. You wouldn't be able to use your conflux spell properly, but then all the more reason to swap to a subclass that'd build upon what you already have, instead of one that spends a lot of text bringing something that's normally crap up to still below par.

And not to get on my soapbox, but I do think this subclass highlights how rigid the Magus can sometimes be as a class, and how difficult that makes it to enable new playstyles. When your class already prescribes a lot of action taxes to the point of implicitly expecting a two-turn rotation, it's difficult to enable playstyles on the class that require more actions to enable. Because the class relies so hard on dealing big bursts of damage in a single attack on about half their turns, it makes otherwise meaningful boosts to damage, like backstabber's +1/2 precision damage (or even 2/4 from the subclass), or forceful's own bonus damage, feel quite small in comparison. There's certainly ways to implement interesting Magus subclasses, as we've seen with the previous two new additions, and even then, the inherent difficulty of turning on Arcane Cascade limits their ability to express their own unique contributions.

I'm not sure any class can really survive being hard-focused by a GM out for blood. Even a tank like the Champion can't take damage for literally their entire team, so if the issue is that the GM is bending over backwards to direct any and all harm towards the party's spellcasters, even when doing so would be unreasonable, I think that's probably the priority issue to tackle.

As for the Summoner being MAD, one of the nifty aspects of the class is that you get two sets of attributes to play with. Although you'll likely be boosting Dex, Con, and Wis on both bodies, the Summoner will obviously have very good Charisma, whereas your eidolon is likely to have pretty good Strength, even on a Dex-focused build, and if their build is Dex-focused then their Dex mod will be higher than yours. This means you can pick skill increases in such a way that your eidolon will be able to make up for what you lack, and it's not uncommon to pick Intimidation and Athletics thanks to this, for instance. The Dual Studies feat builds on this and gives you and your eidolon separate proficiencies, making it easier to have a wider distribution of skills.

I've always wanted to try a summoner as my first PF2e character with a specific build that isn't possible in that other d20 fantasy game in that I'd like to have dual characters that play (whether naturally or artifically) differently using the eidolon mechanic similar to "twinned" characters in pop culture like Wily Kit and Wily Kat in the Thundercats or the Wonder Power Twins in the old Justice League cartoons.

This is such a fun concept that I've gone and homebrewed an eidolon for it! Although it's unlikely that you'd get to use homebrew at your table, let alone for your first character, hopefully this could give an idea of how the Summoner could work as a pair of twins.

"Two halves of a whole" I think is definitely the philosophy for playing a Summoner. The caster body on its own is surprisingly decent for its spell DC, but not great for spell output, and the martial body on its own is bare-bones, but together and with their superior action economy they become more than the sum of their parts. Simply being able to cast a cantrip and make a melee Strike each turn, even two sometimes, makes for decent baseline damage output, and that's without counting the utility you can produce from spell slots or Athletics maneuvers, in a game where most characters are generally good at only one or the other. The Summoner gets to have the best of both worlds, and their power specifically comes from leveraging the full ability range of a martial and caster class, adapting to the situation as needed. Often, you'll want your summoner to use Act Together on a two- or three-action activity, but sometimes you'll want your eidolon to move in and make a Furious Strike instead while your summoner Demoralizes, and that's the kind of flexibility you can't get out of an animal companion.

I think the assumption is that an adventurer would simply have a prosthesis equipped that they'd use to wield a shield. I do think there is room to have more equipment built into prostheses (that's the basis of the immovable arm, for instance), but with shields I think it gets slightly tricky, because shields by default are meant to take damage and even get destroyed. The question here is: if the shield arm gets destroyed, does this destroy the prosthesis as well? If so, then an adventurer may be hard-pressed to pick this shield arm when they could just wield a shield with their regular prosthetic and not lose their hand if their shield gets destroyed. If the shield itself can't get destroyed, then you have effectively an 18th-level rare item built into your prosthesis, which would make it either difficult to access or potentially build-warpingly strong at lower level. A compromise there could be to let the shield in the arm get destroyed without affecting the prosthesis, and this is something the foldaway trait could help with very nicely by letting you integrate a retractable shield into your arm.