Teridax's page

What about Epic/ Legendary Heroes above Level 20?

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FLxj2mF9lp_6unLrz3KEcfrEwFA06ngroqy C-sLuQYM/edit?gid=0#gid=0
is a WOW guide up to level 40.

I really hope this helps someone build us a Lvl20+ character guide for Pathfinder
and maybe Star-finder also?

I've tried following the link, and unfortunately hit an error; I suspect it's because your link comes from the page you've opened to edit. If you right-click or the equivalent on the document you want to share, hover over "Share", and select "copy link", that should copy the sharing link to your clipboard. I look forward to seeing what you have in store!

Having playtested the Envoy, I never got the impression that they were too strong. As far as I was concerned, they were pretty much in the middle of the pack in terms of balance, and my personal desire was for Paizo to get rid of all of the unnecessary forced Charisma check results in the class features in exchange for amping up the class's skill flexibility and fleshing out their directives a lot more. If nothing else, doing what OP mentions by moving Acts of Leadership to 1st level and just adding subclass directives would've made the class feel amazing to play in my opinion.

Although I don't think the end result is bad by any stretch, I'm disappointed that directives were more or less turned into Commander tactics, and the balance between subclasses is really rough. I don't understand the rationale behind giving extremely powerful general feats to some subclasses and equally niche skill feats to others, and the usage of outdated terms like threatening enemies doesn't inspire the most confidence in me either. I look forward to errata on this that clears up the most obvious mistakes, but I suspect the core aspects of the Envoy that I wish had been done differently are going to be set in stone for the whole edition.

Something no one has mentioned is that vesk are medium and draginkin are large. Being large has its drawbacks. Large creatures have to squeeze through 5-foot-wide corridors; in a 10-foot-wide corridor, it's easy to block your own party. More opponents can engage you in melee at one time, and more opponents can flank you at one time; you're a big target.

Being Large is also a significant advantage. It means you threaten more spaces if you have Reactive Strike or some equivalent, and your auras and emanations reach out farther. It means creatures will have a harder time moving around you to get to your allies, and you'll be able to provide cover for your allies more easily too. A dragonkin Solarian or Soldier would thus likely perform better in many ways a vesk of those classes wouldn't.

Important to note as well that these benefits and drawbacks are not equivalent, because players are more likely to play to their choices' strengths than to their weaknesses: if playing a dragonkin as a squishy caster is inconvenient, the only end result is that fewer players will play squishy dragonkin casters. If playing a dragonkin provides a significant benefit to playing a tank, however, then more players will play dragonkin tanks. Thus, I would argue that being Large itself is also a net benefit, putting the dragonkin even further ahead of the vesk. While I do quite like the "cantina feel" of ancestries in Starfinder doing weird and wonderful things, which can require a greater power budget than what's given to PF2e ancestries, I do think it would be even better if that were extended to every Starfinder ancestry, so that some aren't quite so flat.

Elves have amazing movement speed, though, and dragonkin have excellent feats, including using your bonded partner to gain standard cover, being able to fly vertically at no penalty, and essentially a better Cantrip Expansion as a 1st-level ancestry feat. Vesk, meanwhile, do have some fun feats to play with, but I wouldn’t call them the best in the game by any stretch. I’m not generally a big subscriber to the notion that ancestries have their base abilities balanced by their feats, but even if I were, I don’t think there’s much of a case for it here.

I'll very much second the request for more Inventor options. I think the class could use a proper overhaul, to be honest, and not just the format-limited remaster they received, but in either case I'd like to see many more ways for them to actually invent things and let the player flex their creative muscles. Having an inbuilt method for crafting stuff in the middle of the adventuring day, much like the Scrounger's Cobble Together activity, could be a good start.

While i agree Rarity shouldn't be a power balancer, isn't teleport in the exact same category as 1st level flight from ancestry, as both "can trivialize adventures where the travel is the challenge"? The only difference i can see is the scale of travel that can be avoided, so if rarity on teleport is fine, then so to should it be fine for starfinder ancestries with 1st level flight.

This is a valid point, and I think is particularly relevant to crossover play given that cross-planetary travel is commonplace in Starfinder, while being much rarer in Pathfinder, at least in Golarion.

I'd say that the key difference within Pathfinder is that making the adventure about traveling from one place to another tends to be a much more central element to the campaign than at which point to include flight: this is something a developer could do well to explain from their own perspective, but the impression I get is that flight is a tool that's considered okay for navigating higher-level obstacles and fighting higher-level enemies, but isn't meant to be available at a time when simple things like walls, gaps in the ground, and hungry wolves are meant to be meaningful impediments to the party's progress. By contrast, teleport can set the entire tone of an adventure: its absence means a campaign can have the higher-level party go on an odyssey from one place to another, which carries its own flavor, whereas its inclusion lets a campaign send the party on a best-of tour of Golarion or another planet where they never linger in the same place for too long.

I'd say even in Starfinder it's probably justified to still make it uncommon, though: at higher ranks, teleport would sideline travel by starship, which can be an important part of certain adventures, so I'd understand a GM wanting to keep it inaccessible to a party. Beyond just conversion guides, it'd be nice to have more developer insights on why certain options are made uncommon or rare.

To you its a option to the people who don't want it its a restriction, its like wanting beef in all food when there are vegetarians in a restaurant.

Kinda, though I don't think Lia Wynn asking for sanctification feats on the Necromancer necessarily impacts the rest of us in the same way as if we were all forced to sanctify our Necromancers. Rather, I think it's as Squiggit says that it's not a great thematic fit for the Necromancer class as was presented to us, and would likely muddy the class's flavor if it were added to their feats.

I'll also say that one of the more compelling reasons to not have sanctification on the Necromancer is that it would affect literally just one spell, and that would be spiritual armament. There are no other spells in the occult list with the sanctified trait, and pretty much every other sanctified spell is expressly divine in nature, e.g. blessed boundary, divine decree, divine lance, and so on. The only sanctified spell that I can currently see being massaged across to the occult list is spiritual guardian, and I personally don't think that's terribly worth it. By contrast, there are 32 spells with the vitality or void trait that aren't on the divine list and would make perfect sense on the Necromancer, such as necromancer's generosity, necrotize, or revival, so a class feature to the effect of "you add common spells of any tradition with the vitality or void traits to your spell list, as well as spells with the vitality or void traits that you have access to of any tradition" would be a quick and simple way of giving the Necromancer many more of the spells you'd expect from such a class.

I have to partially disagree, as because Starfinder does not have jump flight as a stopgap, Pathfinder flying ancestries should be entitled to, depending on the ancestries methods of flight, either a level 1 fly speed, or a fly speed available with a greatly reduced heritage or feat cost. (A strix could fly right away, a tengu could fly with the proper heritage, and the dragonblood and nephilim can fly as soon as they get their first feats).

This I think is where multiple options would likely be a good idea, as I think there can be different takes on this particular aspect of ancestries: in my opinion, letting those ancestries fly at level 1 in Starfinder instead of relying on feats isn't strictly necessary, as those ancestries I'd say are balanced relative to others in Starfinder even without flight, including flying ancestries like the barathu or contemplative. The dragonkin in this respect I think is the exception rather than the rule, as they are straight-up better than other ancestries like the vesk.

On the flipside, Starfinder is the perfect reason to let ancestries that clearly should fly from early on do exactly that, as I think is especially the case with the strix. It'd certainly be nice to have advice on giving that to certain Pathfinder ancestries with special Speeds in a Starfinder game, and that would likely not require much text or effort to do either. In all cases, GMs would have both the tools to run balanced cross-play games at their table and the freedom to choose how they want to run things.

I don’t know how much actual play experience you have in Sf2e. But if you don’t have much, then I urge you to just try it on its own terms.

Run a few games with JUST Starfinder rules and see if it is to your taste. So far I’ve found the game fine at the very low levels I’ve played and run it.

But do NOT start with a mixed Pathfinder/Starfinder game. That is ALWAYS going to be somewhat problematic due to different assumptions. It is going to be more difficult to balance.

Start simple and then add complexity. And then make whatever house rules you need to. And wait for the first round of errata before judging TOO harshly or prematurely

As explicitly stated in the comment you're replying to, I do still play Starfinder and have playtested it extensively, having written in-depth playtest notes for every class, the Barathu ancestry, and guns. I am also a seasoned Pathfinder player and would thus say I have a good understanding of how 2e works, though in this particular case my criticism was purely within the context of Starfinder and its own content. There was therefore no reason to try to undermine my "actual" play experience in order to discredit someone you disagreed with. Thanks for the advice though!

Every class and ancestry is playable and none dominate the game.

It is perhaps wrong of me to presume given the context of your comment, but I would encourage you to play Starfinder 2e at high level and reconsider your assumption. In particular, the Witchwarper reveals itself to be the system's Magikarp as the class hits level 19, and goes from this gimmicky yet largely inoffensive class to a monstrosity that makes an utter mockery of combat encounters. It's not simply that "playable" and "dominating the game" are inherently subjective criteria that are used almost purely to make unfalsifiable claims of balance in these sorts of discussions, SF2e does I think have examples of ancestries and classes that are clearly imbalanced in a manner that is disruptive to gameplay and player choices.

We do!

Any character can take Beast Master to get an animal companion.

Any character can take Familiar Master to get a familiar.

Those options exist. I do see your point about limiting Santification, and I agree with it, but I can also see a valid reason to give more people options to get it.

As many others have pointed out, those are archetypes, not class-specific feats. I’m all for a non-multiclass divine archetype that lets you gain sanctification, but that is different from asking to give the Necromancer sanctification in their own feats. I would in fact argue that familiar and animal companion feats would be more appropriate simply because you could make both undead, and thus directly thematically relevant in a way sanctification is not.

I think there is only so much that can be explained by a different meta. As Squiggit points out, one need only compare Starfinder ancestries to one another to see that some are clearly head and shoulders above others, like dragonkin being straight-up better than vesk in terms of base ancestry abilities. Having played and run those ancestries, but also classes, guns, and monsters before and after the game's release, I feel the balance is really rough, and some bits of design are quite iffy as well.

With all of this said, 2e itself is a robust system, so it's rare that I've had to step in and house rule something that wasn't functional at all, but I don't think the system can be expected to make up for routinely inconsistent balance. One can talk about how the Starfriends have had less time to spend mastering 2e than the Pathfinder team, but PF2e was a much better-balanced game even at a time when the team had no prior experience with the system to draw from. Those years of refinement and lessons learned should have been transferred more consistently across teams, as should've the playtesting feedback that had accumulated over the course of more than a year. I don't think all is lost, either, as most of these problems could be easily fixed via errata, but I'm still hesitant to use Starfinder compared to Pathfinder because the balance is much less solid.

Why should that be the conversion default?

I understand that as a PF2E GM and player, this is your primary concern. But but why should Paizo as a company privilege PF2E-primary campaigns over SF2E-primary campaigns?
This is the problem; any 'conversion' document must take one specific perspective on how the two systems are put together, which is not necessarily the perspective of many games.

The advice for converting fly Speeds exists because flight at level 1 is fine in Starfinder, but not in Pathfinder. There doesn't need to be a two-way conversion for this particular fact, because your sprite in Starfinder will need no changes to do just fine.

I also think that the claim here is generally off-base: there are in fact elements of Pathfinder that need adjusting to fit well in Starfinder in my opinion, chiefly damage reduction mechanics of any kind, and that is something Starfinder's GM Core doesn't really cover, so it should exist somewhere else. You are correct that a conversion guide should be two-way, and that is something a conversion guide can achieve just fine. However, that does not mean every mechanic needs two-way conversion advice, because some mechanics are only problematic in one game and not the other. Flight, for instance, is one of those mechanics where the conversion would be one-way, because the problems only arise when characters can fly too well and too early in one of the two games. I don't think this is really something to complain about, either, because it means less to worry about when porting a sprite to Starfinder.

I think than ambiguity is intentional, i.e. Paizo assessing how much resources they want to spend on being specific on this issue, and deciding "not much." This allows different GMs to come up with different ways to handle it.

I think there is a difference between text that leaves options open and text that is simply vague, though. Ambiguous text lends itself to misunderstandings and rules debates such as this one, and in the case of that particular guidance can still lead to problems if someone decides to give a character always-on flight at level 5 in Pathfinder. Text that is specific avoids this, even if it allows for multiple options. I personally do think moosher12 has it right in that coversion guides are perfectly capable of laying out multiple options and even giving the GM leeway to homebrew their own solutions, so long as they clearly lay out what the different expectations are for each game. This isn't something that requires that much more effort compared to writing an equal amount of ambiguous text, and it would be much more effective at its intended goal than guidance that is difficult to interpret consistently.

Nonspecific guidance avoids the mistake of creating a single rules set which turns out to be (e.g.) good for the PF2E dragonkin game but terrible for the SF2E sprite game.

The advice given is for converting flight Speeds on Starfinder ancestries to Pathfinder, not the other way round, so it wouldn't apply to sprites in the first place.

It in the section of text I quoted earlier from page 246 of the GM core:

“While some Pathfinder adventures might not mind the low-level access to these speeds, you might want to adjust by instead using the progression of movement speed–related ancestry feats presented to other ancestries in Pathfinder.”

It doesn’t really matter if you make up your own feats that are just close but maybe a little different, or use the other ancestry’s feats directly. Either way is fine if gives everyone at the table something that looks fun and fair enough for your table.

The problem with this is that what you're saying isn't actually in the text. The text does not state to use a flying ancestry, and does not state whether to give the Speed as feats or innate progression. Those are calls you made, and the implementation you decide upon does have an impact on the player whose character is being affected, so it does matter. Aside from demonstrating how the rules we have could use a bit more clarity, along with guidance on elements that aren't covered in Starfinder's GM Core at all, this also shows that the existence of rules does not prevent GMs from making decisions over their own games.

Having an option for it, for every class, doesn't hurt anyone and gives more story options for those games or concepts that need it.

By this same logic, we should give animal companion and familiar feats to every class, simply because both would give more story options and would be presumably harmless. Incidentally, I also do think giving everyone sanctification takes away from the Cleric and Champion's main shticks, so I'd rather keep it down to a select few divine classes, which for better or worse the Necromancer is not.

As for the question itself, I'm very much on board with PlantThings's suggestion to just add every spell with the vitality or void trait to the Necromancer's spell list: it would be thematically appropriate given that they're the energies of life and death, it would be simple to write down, and it would cover the most ground in a manner that would also be future-proof, since spells written after the Necromancer with either trait would also get included automatically. As they also mention, their playtest feature does treat vitality and void as equal parts of the magic the Necromancer can control, so I'd be fine with this adding vitality spells like heal, especially as vitality spells tend to be effective against undead (and you'd expect a Necromancer to be good against those).

It means if I am a GM, and a player approaches me about wanting to use a flying SF ancestry, and explains why they want this, and how it can fit in the campaign, and I don’t think it’d be appropriate to just use the ancestry as is…then I look for a relatively similar PF2 ancestry and probably choose the ancestry flight abilities(feats, heritage) and speeds that match that other ancestry.

Could you point to the bit of the text that says you'd have to choose an ancestry with flight? Would you be applying the feats directly, or would you be creating separate feats?

We have guidelines though. For example, with movement speeds, we are told (on page 246 of the Starfinder GM core) "You should also be wary of special movement speeds, such as climbing and flight, that become available at a much lower level in Starfinder. While some Pathfinder adventures might not mind the low-level access to these speeds, you might want to adjust by instead using the progression of movement speed–related ancestry feats presented to other ancestries in Pathfinder."

Would it be possible to explain, in specific and concrete terms, what this text means to you? In particular, the last sentence.

Like it's entirely possible that "the PCs can fly at low levels" is not going to matter at all in a given Pathfinder game- perhaps the entirety of the first 9 levels or so is going to take place indoors where the ceilings don't get very high.

This is wishful thinking, and very much not how balance works. If your game is only balanced in a perfect, frictionless vacuum where everything happens exactly as you want it to, and falls apart the moment those conditions are not met, then your game is not balanced. 2e aims for balance across both its flagship games, and so should ensure that it doesn’t break unless you wall the party under 10-foot-high ceilings for nearly a whole campaign, or apply similarly excessive contrivances.

As someone who regularly homebrews Pathfinder, just do what the rest of us do. Declare "I'm gonna deviate from this rule and make a home rule."

Exactly this. I don't see why we're wringing our hands over not being able to do things the way we want when players have been house ruling and homebrewing off of the official rules since long before this edition was even invented. Whether Paizo gives us multiple options to follow or just one, the power will always be in the hands of the GMs to adjust, rebalance, and veto as they see fit.

Plurality of options is also why a conversion guide would be able to sit just fine alongside whatever exists already in Starfinder's GM Core: if some conversion advice already exists in the latter, that's fine, and if it doesn't (and there really isn't as much guidance there as some people are pretending there is), then one such guide would only benefit us all the more. If that guide gives us multiple ways to tackle the same disparity, that's great, and if it just gives us one possible solution, that's still better than nothing.

Medicine is still a separate skill in SF2e, and generally skills in 2e cover sweeping avenues of standard capabilities, which is why the many knowledge and crafting skills of 1e have been largely condensed into just Crafting or Lore. I will also second the notion that Lore is chronically undervalued in internet forum discussions, because at first glance it looks like the skill doesn't have much support when in practice, many APs will in fact include lower DCs for appropriate Lore skills and advise the GM to use a lower DC when a PC uses an appropriate Lore skill for a check. The playtest scenarios we received often let you make Lore checks at a significantly reduced DC, several of which include Physical Science or Life Science Lore. One scenario in particular frequently includes both science Lores in its skill checks, so I really don't think science and technology-related skills are really being sidelined in the way they're made out to be here.

I suppose you could rename Arcana to Physics and Nature to Biology, and those would carry pretty much same significance as now due to magic being part of the world's sciences, but I'm not sure that's going to necessarily detract from the central fact that, for better or worse, Starfinder's sci-fi universe is one heavy with magic. If your Starfinder scientist studies the stars, they will have to contend with the fact that every star is also an extraplanar portal to Creation's Forge, and if they're a psychologist, they will almost certainly have taken a course on the workings of mind-altering magic.

I'd also say that if you're looking for extremely specific knowledge of a particular topic, that's what the Lore skill is for in 2e. Pick a Lore subcategory or make one up, and you'll be covered. SF2e's Player Core even explicitly lists Physical Science as a subcategory of Lore you can take.

Why I don't think a Paizo brand conversion guide is a good idea:

1. Someone has to make it.

Plenty of others have already rightfully criticized this for being the non-argument that it is, but just to put it into perspective: I took the liberty of tallying the amount of text you've committed to this thread, Unicore, and got a word count of 2768. That's about five pages' worth of text in an A4 document using a standard font size, and about as much text as it took Paizo to write the section on archaic adventures. If one or more Paizo employees sat down to write a conversion guide using the internal references they doubtless have on hand, it would likely not take much more effort than what you dedicated to arguing on this thread, and so entirely for free. Something also tells me that if Paizo released such a guide, its contribution to our community would be infinitely more positive too.

I think community guides are likely a better solution. They can go into more depth than Paizo is likely to go (specific issues with each class, for instance), and players from crossover games are likely to have playtested combos Paizo hasn't thought of. And they'll arrive years before a publication.

I don't think we're necessarily talking about the same thing here. I'm not suggesting Paizo write a Gortle-style in-depth guide for every class discussing which options are best to take, I'm advocating for a reference sheet that is easy to pick up and read, outlines the fundamental differences between the two games, and gives clear, straightforward indications for how to convert certain bits of content from one edition to the other. For instance, how to break down a flying ancestry's fly Speed in Pathfinder with clearly-defined milestones, or a formula for reducing resistance or Hardness on Pathfinder options and monsters to avoid making creatures nigh-invincible in Starfinder. One could even establish a difference between "must-have" and "nice-to-have" conversions here, where must-haves avoid breaking certain scenarios like in OP's example, and nice-to-haves equalize options that are balanced somewhat differently across both games, but are unlikely to break anything if left untouched.

Pathfinder and Starfinder are certainly different games that run on different assumptions, but the differences in my opinion are not actually all that large and stem only from a few key factors: if Paizo were to list these differences explicitly, and give straightforward conversions for each in the way they probably already used for their internal balancing, it would be unlikely to take up all that much space. I also don't think there needs to be much concern over how such a document would evolve over time, because errata exists and has been used prolifically to update content post-remaster: if the addition of a new sourcebook like the upcoming tech rulebook adds extra considerations, that's fine, and that can just be added in as the expansion releases.

The players and GMs who don't want to have knock-down battles within their group because that guy insists that an official conversion guide = Paizo says I can play it.

I think you might be attaching too much importance to the power of arguing until the cows come home. Outside of Society play, a GM can always veto what they're not comfortable with, no matter what, and an argumentative player looking for ammunition will already have found it in the actual Society example listed in the OP. I also just find the general notion of not doing something useful just because some random person might make a fuss out of it so ridiculous as to hardly be worth considering.

The GMs who want to decide for themselves how to adjudicate these issues, without a competing Paizo version.

"How dare Paizo contradict my broken homebrew with official rules" does not come across to me as a terribly convincing argument.

So I understand you want a 'how to', but recognize that a canon 'how to' implies (to some people, at least) a canon 'can do' and a 'do this way.' It's very difficult to send the first message without sending the other two.

It may surprise you to know that clear, consistent rules on how to play a game are in fact the very reason why most of us here get to enjoy Pathfinder, and Starfinder too for that matter. If people want to do things their way at their table, they are free to do so and would remain free to do so even with a conversion guide running around, but those of us wanting a balanced cross-play experience would at least have a solid reference to work with. I really don't see how anyone can credibly argue for less clarity on balance in 2e, out of all possible TTRPG systems.

No not at all, and you're denigrating the critics of your idea. A conversion guide codifies game-to-game transfers. It's a perfectly understandable and reasonable position for a GM to say "I'd rather do that myself, thanks, and I don't want Paizo to tell me how to do it."

I would say that it is the people talking down to everyone else for supposedly not reading Starfinder's GM Core or playing the game who are doing the denigrating here, but I'll fully admit that I'm not terribly impressed by those kinds of posts either and see no reason to pretend otherwise. Similarly, I don't find this false dichotomy very sensible either, because Paizo posting an official conversion guide doesn't mean they're going to break into your house and force you at staff-point to port content across games their way. A GM wanting to do things their way will always have the option to do so, guide or no guide, so this isn't going to stifle their options unless they're sticklers for following the rules, in which case they'd probably be the kind of GM who would want clear official rules in the first place.

I don't think anyone on this fora has disagreed with the idea of a community guide...or even multiple guides.

I think this is one of the cases where it is genuinely appropriate to recommend reading a bit more on the subject matter, because several people argued against Paizo creating a conversion guide on this very thread, often with the claim that it is unnecessary and covered already in a rulebook, and sometimes with a claim similar to the one you've made of how this could somehow allow litigious players to override their own GMs. It is very much a subject of dispute.

This is probably another thread that would be better off in the homebrew section, but I do think Dragonchess Player did the right thing to bring up the E(X) paradigm, as I think there are potentially two things going on here:

What I don't get is why some people are still desperately insisting that we shouldn't have a conversion guide, when there is clearly demand for it in this very thread alone. Like, if Paizo does actually go and release one, how does this hurt you? The people loudly professing that it's not needed can just pretend it doesn't exist, while the rest of us who want to actually try porting over content from one game to the other without breaking our campaign in half can do so with the proper tools.

In the same vein, I fail to see what a lot of the argumentation here aims to achieve: we can claim all we want that Paizo did warn us that the compatibility didn't include balance (in a select few posts deep inside social media conversations), that technically we're already being told to adjust our content (in extremely vague terms on page two-hundred-and-whatever of a rulebook that covers only a fraction of the content to watch out for), or that Paizo isn't contractually obligated to tell us how to balance for cross-play (in a game system where balance and consistency are key selling points), but at the end of the day, to whose benefit is any of this? Ultimately, these arguments are vacuous, and seem to be made for the express purpose of coming across as morally or intellectually superior to anyone who dared to post critical feedback on this thread. Arguing this way isn't going to help a GM balance a feat like Nephilim Resistance for Starfinder, nor even alert them to the underlying risk of leaving such a game element untouched, nor is it going to convince people who have experienced actual instances of cross-game incompatibility in spite of what little existing guidance exists. Rather than make false accusations of ignorance or expect prospective GMs to psychically divine the mental gymnastics one has developed to excuse away the gap between both games (or is it the Gap?), it would likely be more helpful for us all as a community to at least try to see what can be identified as something to watch out for, or at the very least stop talking down to people who have valid reasons to ask for more clarity.

I think that a lot of people haven’t read the the SF2 GM core and heard PFS let in flying ancestries and just kind of extrapolated and panicked. It will pass as folks get familiar with the system.

That’s interesting, because several people in this thread have pointed to Starfinder’s GM Core and its section on archaic adventures as evidence that the guidance is lacking, as well as argued off of playtesting experience. I for one have done both, and had to specifically cite the bits of the rulebook you’re referring to because for all the implicit self-attributions of game knowledge and claims of the facts being on one’s side, your arguments appear to be quite short on specifics.

Just so that we’re all on literally the same page, here is a link to the guidelines for anachronistic adventures, and here is a link to the guidelines for anachronistic creatures. You’ll notice that these guidelines don’t refer to problematic mechanics like Hardness or player-sided resistances from character options, and what mechanics are referred to are generally given only vague suggestions at best. For player flight, for instance, the suggestion is to “adjust by instead using the progression of movement speed-related ancestry feats presented to other ancestries in Pathfinder:” what does this even mean? Does this mean getting a fly Speed at level 5 just like how the vanara can get a climb Speed, or does it mean you get to fly at level 9 like a tengu? Is this progression automatic or are you meant to create ancestry feats just for this purpose?

This is what I mean when I say Paizo could do more here. As it stands, the guidelines could do with significantly clearer wording and a more comprehensive list of adjustments, which would benefit any GM trying to port content from one system to the other. It can perhaps feel personally satisfying to claim that everything is already in the rules and that everyone else should just get gud, but I don’t think that kind of argument really helps anyone or contributes positively to discussion, nor does it stem from any solid basis here.

Playtest adventures tend to stress test specific mechanics or questions developers have. On page 250 of the SF2 GM core, there is explicit advice about looking at your party’s damage types and thinking through whether specific creatures you want to use will provide extra challenge to your party. There really are multiple pages of thoughtful advice dedicated to making material from one game useable with the other.

Remind me which damage types Hardness goes up against, specifically?

I have yet to see any concern brought up in this thread that isn’t at least pointed out in the GM core.

But it’s not being pointed out, is the problem; at best the notion of damage types and resistances is only vaguely alluded to. This to me reads a lot like the kind of people who point to millennia-old texts to try to claim that modern technology like planes or the internet were actually invented in ancient times: if you look hard enough, squint, and maybe use your imagination a little, you can easily find that anything will say whatever you want it to say.

I’d say that if we’re assuming this item is giving you both a +7 and a -1 to your AC automatically, that too is a non-starter: at that point, you’re not really presenting a coherent player option so much as just an expedient bit of math to min-max your character, and so in a game that is generally neither about min-maxing nor about disconnecting flavor from function. I very much agree with you that on top of this, we shouldn’t be looking to negate important character flaws, at least not with such minor item options. If a class’s core features let you negate the downsides of a Dexterity flaw, just as the Thief Rogue lets you dump Strength for Strike damage, then that could be acceptable if it makes sense, but this is an item that practically anyone could equip.

Have a lovely time playing a Magus! There are a few options at your disposal, depending on how you want to go about it: it sounds like you'll enjoy using a Laughing Shadow as your hybrid study if you're looking for a one-handed melee build. Your spell selection and actions I think will depend significantly on whether or not you want to take a Psychic multiclass archetype:

If you do take a Psychic multiclass archetype, the standard progression is to take Psychic Dedication as your 2nd-level feat, choosing The Tangible Dream as your conscious mind, and selecting Psi Development at 6th level to get imaginary weapon. If you want, I'd also recommend taking Psi Development at 4th level to let you round off the dedication requirements at 6th level, with Mental Buffer being a decent option for a bit of mental resistance. Getting imaginary weapon will effectively allow you to deal top-grade Spellstrike damage with just a focus spell, which would allow you to use your limited spell slots for utility spells such as invisibility or haste.

If you choose not to go down this route, however, or if you don't yet have imaginary weapon, I would still recommend having a couple utility spells prepared in your slots, alongside a couple of attack spells such as blazing bolt. As Captain Morgan mentions, keep an eye out for legacy spells whose reprints have a different name, as you can still use those.

As for your actions, you will generally want to look to Spellstrike on your turn if it's available and an enemy is within range. If your Spellstrike needs to recharge or you can't easily reach an enemy, consider using your turn to do other things instead: for instance, one good way to recharge your Spellstrike and close the gap between yourself and an enemy is to use the Laughing Shadow's dimensional assault conflux spell, enter Arcane Cascade stance, and then use your third action as you like, whether to Strike again, make a skill check, or do some other third action. If you're committing feats towards a Psychic archetype, consider relying on Recall Knowledge to communicate useful information to your team if you have an action free, and if you're not, consider feats like Magus's Analysis and Force Fang for juicy single actions that'll help you recharge your Spellstrike. As a Laughing Shadow, you'd want to enter Arcane Cascade as soon as you can, which may not be on your first turn given the large action requirement, so consider what your backup plan will be if you don't have the actions to enter the stance on your turn.

Finally, as a general bit of advice, be aware that you'll have some very strong incentives for your character that can risk making them feel quite inflexible, so you'll have to manage that: you'll be really tempted to recharge your Spellstrike as soon as you can just to have it ready every turn, for example, but forcing yourself to do this will risk making your character immobile, exposed, and generally not all that effective. Similarly, you'll be tempted to go out of your way just to enter Arcane Cascade stance when it might be better for you to take another course of action. In both cases, it will not feel amazing for your character to not deal a huge amount of on-hit damage, but that is a situation you will often be in, so that will be an expectation to manage. It is also thus important to have options for when your character can't do the thing they most want to do, which is why it's useful to have a few extra utility spells and cantrips, and some skill actions to deploy during combat like Dirty Trick for when you can't Spellstrike, aren't in Arcane Cascade, and can't do either of those things immediately, but still want to do something useful on your turn. It might also be tempting to Spellstrike with a slot spell every time, but you'll likely realize that this will often lead to significant overkill and a waste of very limited resources, so don't feel bad about Spellstriking with a cantrip like gouging claw if you feel it's better to conserve spell slots in the moment.

Other than that, be also prepared to deal massive damage with your Spellstrikes, especially if you crit! There can be some incredibly high moments to playing a Magus, and when those happen, you'll feel very happy to have picked the class. Enjoy!

That's because Society is the only place where a GM can be forced to have to deal with it. PFS GMs don't get to say "no" the way everyone else does.

Which is generally the best fix for this. The systems are mechanically compatible, but the baseline assumptions of how things work aren't the same and that means bringing anything over without checking it carefully first is a dangerous idea. And that's where I agree with you: the guidance for doing that is lacking.

While I agree that GMs are obligated to accept player character choices in Society, I still don't think this paints the complete picture, because behind this is the assumption that it's always the player requesting some broken option to a wary GM. It can and often very well will be the GM themselves who will want to port not only character options, but also monsters and other elements from one system to the other, and because they both use 2e and 2e generally assures us that everything will work right out the box, they might not think to adjust across systems, particularly as I think some of the incompatibilities are so subtle that not even Paizo caught them immediately.

For example, in one of the Starfinder playtest adventures we received, encounters were chock-full of constructs and machines with Pathfinder-grade resistances (the adventure in fact featured many monsters lifted directly from Pathfinder): these resistances were so high relative to the party's much lesser gun damage that it was almost impossible to damage them, which massively drove up the difficulty of those encounters. To my knowledge, this isn't really acknowledged anywhere in any official rulebook, which means that if a GM were to throw in, say, an animated armor into a Starfinder game, that armor would be difficult way beyond its indicated level, and so in a way the GM wouldn't necessarily be able to anticipate unless they had a profound understanding of both systems and the awareness to catch this kind of issue. It's therefore not just an issue with player options trivializing challenges, though that is certainly a problem as demonstrated by OP's example; it's also a problem of GMs porting content across systems, running that content RAW by all other measures, and ending up creating dramatically imbalanced challenges as a result. In all cases, I do think this all points to the same thing that we agree upon: we could do with fuller guidance on porting content across systems, and both ways too, and some kind of conversion guide would really help with that.

I get the concern, it would be bad if PF2 started printing ancestries with flight at level 1, but the fear being generated in this thread is about way more than that.

It seems like some of the fear is that society folks made a mistake and didn't realize that letting such ancestries count for the special boon broke with SF guidance. It was a curated list. I think they knew what they were doing. They are trying to generate hype for Starfinder. Having some special ancestries that will get other society players asking questions the rare time they see one was probably a goal. It is very likely this conversation generates attention for Starfinder.

I think there is a lot of interest from players for breaking the expectations of play by mashing up PF2 and SF2. Allowing SF2 content in a PF2 game from the beginning feels like the GM is choosing to go with that. Starfinder is a Sci-fantasy game. If those are not elements you want in your game, why would you allow it? If you do want those elements, it is probably a good idea to at least read the GM advice on AoN first. If you do, you will be prepared to decide what to allow and how it will affect your game.

I think the secondary fear here is that society has basically made this call for itself in a way that some players didn't want, but it is very limited in scope, hence why the fact that it is a one time deal (for now) is relevant to the overall conversation. Conversations about whether they should do special events with SF2 boons in the future feel much more like a society question that a PF2 question.

Lastly some people seem to feel like the existence of SF2 somehow forces all of this on PF2 and that is just not true. I imagine we will be getting a follow up AP to Iron Gods in the next few years, James Jacobs has been hinting at wanting to do that for a very long time. That AP will very likely include content that throws a ton of Sci-Fantasy into PF2 but it will all be rarity locked, probably rare and possibly even unique. The game was designed from the...

This is a complete mischaracterization of the actual concerns that have been raised in this thread. For my part, my "fear" is that Paizo has not done enough to establish what differences in balance and design exist between Pathfinder and Starfinder, such that tables choosing to port content from one system to the other are likely to end up with significant and unwanted disruptions to their gameplay, especially if they follow the example set by PFS. Judging by this thread's page alone, I don't appear to be the only one to have this sentiment. I believe Paizo could do with a more specific list of things to watch out for with more specific instructions for how to adjust for one system or the other, which a conversion guide would address neatly without requiring a great deal of work.

Really, I'm not understanding this obsession with Society or this insinuation that anyone is claiming people are being forced to port content across systems: the problem in my opinion specifically stems from when people want to port content but are unaware of the pitfalls or how to fix them. We've talked about flight at level 1, but as mentioned before, porting the Nephilim ancestry to Starfinder is similarly dangerous because the Nephilim Resistance feat can let you take zero damage from a great deal many ranged weapons, and this same problem applies to many other kinds of energy resistance effects that are balanced around the higher damage of melee attacks in Pathfinder. This is not mentioned at all in Starfinder's GM Core, much less in any Pathfinder rulebook. I can understand not caring about a conversion guide or not particularly agreeing with criticisms of the systems' compatibility, but I'm having a hard time understanding why anyone would devote this much time and effort to try to invalidate the constructive feedback of other people and vilify them for it.

Teridax wrote:

I'm a bit confused, isn't this effectively just an armored skirt but worse? Or is the intent here specifically to have this apply to heavy armor for a +7 item bonus to AC and a Dex cap of -1?

Yes and yes.

Thank you for confirming. Given the stated effect and intent, it is my opinion that this is one of the few proposals I'd consider fundamentally unworkable.

Beyond the fact that this copies the function of an existing item, aims to negate a drawback that really shouldn't be negated (and is also extremely rare), and aims to negate this drawback in an extremely math-y way (what does a Dex cap of -1 even represent in-game?), the basic reason I'd veto this at my table is that this breaks the cap of AC you can get from armor of any kind, due to the way it buffs heavy armor. Even with the tremendous drawbacks of the ponderous and hindering traits, I could easily see every heavy armor-wearing PC take this item just to have even more AC than anyone else. I could see this becoming a serious problem on Champions and Guardians in particular, whose AC would become so high in combination with shields that hitting them at all could genuinely become difficult to the point of warping play. I'm not quite certain what to propose to fix this, since even if one were to take out the +1 to AC, an item designed purely to negate the drawbacks of a Dex flaw in my opinion is not an item that really needs to exist.

Society is its own thing. The society folks deciding to reward people who sunk untold hours of unpaid labor into playtesting the new system with something that will prove unique but limited in scope, as it is one character who levels up past the point of these differences mattering, isn’t even something that has to be projected as a mistake.

As also already mentioned to you several times, the issue being discussed is not exclusive to Society play. I also just find it intensely weird that you would try to dress up an unbalanced option in Society as some kind of reward for playtesting, particularly as the bulk of playtesting feedback did not come from Society play.

I feel like several pages in the Starfinder GM core is enough official feedback. It really does cover the issue just fine and I don’t think Paizo as a company needs to be scolded or chastised for letting their society play folks have a special one time reward for really helping the company out.

See, I don’t think it’s enough, as it clearly wasn’t, and I similarly find it bizarre that you would try to take the mild and constructive criticism being formulated on this thread and twist it into Paizo being “scolded” or “chastised”. I generally just don’t see the point in being this defensive, especially when the criticism isn’t even being directed towards you either.

I’d also say that whether or not you personally consider that section enough is irrelevant: I don’t, I’m not alone in this either, and that enough is justification enough for requesting something like a conversion guide. Your disagreement does not cancel out my feedback or anyone else’s.

The Starfinder GM core has a specific section for dealing with this, on page 246. It talks specifically about ancestries and movement types. So the tools you are asking for already exist.

As already pointed out when someone else referenced these exact same rules on this thread, and made the effort to actually quote them that time, the guidelines for archaic adventures are vague and incomplete, as they only vaguely point to Pathfinder flying ancestry feats, which no longer follow a standard progression, don't cover what to look out for when taking Pathfinder content in to Starfinder. You'll notice that I keep mentioning a conversion guide: I hope you understand that a concise reference sheet listing exact mechanics to watch out for with a concrete list of adjustments is meaningfully different from asking someone to refer to page #246 of a large rulebook in order to be told to essentially just figure it out.

In this one specific instance, Society decided to allow something that pushes against the default assumptions of the pathfinder system. That is not a systemic issue, and it is not even really that big of a society issue because of the one character, one time nature of the boon.

The OP of this thread was talking about whether this was a sign of the floodgates of power creep on the PF2 system...the answer to which is no.

Experiencing the fallout of fundamental differences in two gaming systems is quite literally a systemic issue, and as once again pointed out to you already, this risk is not exclusive to Society play. The release of SF2e invites people to include content from one game in the other, and PFS doesn't appear to have set the best example here by not following their own guidelines, vague as they are. There needs to be more attention drawn to the differences between these systems, and I think the best answer ought to be a clear guide that sets out to help GMs with concrete indications and rules for converting content. I feel like I'm being made to repeat myself quite a bit here, and in general it doesn't really feel like your latest posts here have really been about engaging with the topic of discussion, so much as attempting to show superiority over everyone else by acting like we should all have known better.

I don't think one time events really get to decide "power creep" for a system. It is not the system itself breaking.

As mentioned already in the comment you are quoting, I am not claiming this is power creep, so I’m not sure where your reply is really coming from. I am, however, pointing out that the issue being discussed stems from cross-pollination between the two systems, which is not a “one time event”, and I don’t think you get to be the sole decider here of what does or doesn’t count as breaking the system, by whatever vague and undefined metric it is we’re even using. There clearly are issues porting content from one system to the other, and that much is worth acknowledging.

SF2 is compatible with PF2 but will change many basic assumptions about the game. This is not something that should catch anyone by surprise.

Perhaps not, but the specifics of what those assumptions are easily can and clearly did. Knowing that the two systems are different does not mean everyone will automatically know what to look out for, otherwise those flying ancestries would likely not have been allowed in PFS without adjustments. If we want to avoid more of this in the future, whether in Society play or at people’s tables, we should probably make explicit what those systems implicitly assume to be different, and Paizo could do with giving us a conversion guide.

Flight at level 1 didn’t get added directly to PF2 though. A handful of PFS characters are going to have it,

I don’t think anyone here is making the claim that Pathfinder is directly adding flight at level 1 to its own player options, but your claim is also an admission that it is now a possibility, and in PFS of all places. The root of the discussion here is the inclusion of Starfinder content in Pathfinder, which the developers have touted as a feature. I wouldn’t necessarily call it power creep either, though, so much as an incompatibility in the balancing of certain character abilities like flight, but the fact remains that this is something to to be wary of now that both games are released and are likely to have bits of their content included in each others’ sessions.

I've played a Kineticist up to level 20 and I've routinely run into situations where using Timber Sentinel did nothing due to common monster abilities, making me waste 2 actions for zero gain. It's certainly a very good ability, but there's just so many counters to it that only get more numerous the higher level you go that it's hard for me to say it's actually OP after using it extensively in a multiyear campaign. In fact, I'd sooner say that Protector Tree is underpowered as a slotted spell before claiming Timber Sentinel's OP.

Although Protector Tree is unlikely to be overpowered at high level, I don’t think it’s a strong argument to claim this just because it’s being misused. I wouldn’t call slow a weak spell just because monsters with high Fort saves and Inexorable exist, either.

More generally, I’m not sure why we’re talking about specific Pathfinder mechanics here as instances of power creep. The remaster did make classes generally more powerful, and stronger options undeniably exist that make weaker alternatives less desirable, but I don’t think that necessarily relates to OP’s discussion of Starfinder and how it provides certain abilities for cheap. Flight at level 1 does run the risk of warping Pathfinder’s gameplay on a large scale, hence why there should probably be adjustments made when porting content across games.

The difference between "skipping exploration material" and "trivializing obstacles" is that the game basically works by setting a rhythm for alternating "you can do what you want here" and "you need to overcome this hurdle to progress". When players skip exploration material they are looking to get to the next obstacle quicker, but ideally there are still obstacles that create challenge and drama. If the party would make the obstacle trivial or otherwise uninteresting, a GM should either tweak it or skip it entirely.

I don't think that's really a difference either, though, since players trivializing combat encounters would similarly just get to the next obstacle quicker, and there'd ideally be a more challenging encounter further down the line. The problem with flight is that it easily trivializes challenges that would normally be interesting at low level in Pathfinder, which makes gameplay that much more brittle overall.

So flying PCs seem acceptable in Pathfinder games where the GM knows the capabilities of the party in advance and can plan to challenge them appropriately, but they really shouldn't be in PFS.

I agree to an extent, which is why I think a conversion guide would really help. Ideally, there should be multiple options outlined for the GM depending on how they want to handle Starfinder content in Pathfinder and vice versa: for flight at level 1, there should be the straightforward option of converting that to a series of less disruptive mobility improvements to avoid needing to adjust obstacles or encounters, but then it would be good to also have an outline of Starfinder's exploration and encounter design around flight, so that a GM can port that over to their Pathfinder games if they want to allow flying PCs at level 1. Effectively, make the implicit or tacit design rules explicit, so that the GM has all the tools they need to deliver a suitably challenging experience.

Important to note though is that all of this increases overhead for the GM, even with a straightforward guide: one of 2e's advantages in my opinion is that compared to some other rules-heavy TTRPGs, it doesn't expect the GM to also be a game designer in order to be able to run a game session smoothly. By default, the GM doesn't have to expect to fill in many blanks or house rule fixes to broken game elements, and above all they don't have to proof their adventure against a PC potentially breaking entire bits of their campaign over their knee with some specific feat or spell. This I think starts to introduce some of that proofing that many GMs switched systems just to avoid, and for that reason I think it's going to be important going forward to respect GMs who don't want to take on this extra homework. Something tells me there's going to be a lot of players pushing their GMs to include Starfinder content at their Pathfinder table, and a lot of online discussion handwaving the extra effort this requires on the GM's part. We need to watch out and push back against this, lest we start putting GMs in an uncomfortable position where they're expected to bend over backwards just to cater to their players' wishes and make their game work at the same time.

The difference is one of scope. While I don't recognize the scenario the OP mentions, what was skipped here was probably a round or two of skill checks. The core experience of overcoming an obstacle still happened, just in an unanticipated way. Maybe if the GM really feels players need to roll dice, they can have a surpise gust if wind call for an athletics check to hold onto the passenger.

Right, but that round of skill checks is still important, otherwise there would be no reason to include it. Not only that, navigating obstacles like this is something players invest part of their build towards as well, whether it's putting skill increases into Athletics, getting rope, having spells like gecko grip, and so on. Normally, the earliest one can access full flight in Pathfinder is with a fly spell at 7th level, and it's a major investment at that point. All of that just kinda collapses when you start introducing cheap 1st-level options that accomplish all of this at no resource cost. This is fine in Starfinder, because Starfinder's obstacles account for flight and impose different challenges instead, but Pathfinder treats flight as a thing you only get at higher levels, and going against that has meaningful consequences in all aspects of play, particularly with the prospect of all-flying parties.

Okay here's a weird idea: what if starting from 5th level and every 4 levels afterward (5,9,13,17; coincidentally maps to each time proficiency for either strikes or class DC increases to expert and master), what if the solarian got a free feat? Seems the way to sneak in feats without needing too much page space to me.

I quite like the idea of giving the Solarian more opportunities for customization, and I definitely think there's room for it given how bare-bones their progression is at the moment. My main point of contention however is that I think the Solarian comes into their own in terms of flavor, if not balance, as they level up already, since their feats do end up giving them some standout abilities eventually. It's mainly at level 1 that I think the class comes the closest to being the "Fighter in space" that the Starfriends so desperately wanted to avoid with the Soldier.

I might get around to posting a full homebrew document for this, but my ideal change list for the Solarian would likely be along the following lines:

• Remove Solar Nimbus and make it a 6th-level feat. I don't think Reactive Strike can be a class-defining ability on two classes in 2e without leading to unfavorable comparisons one way or the other.
• Remove the solar flare manifestation, and instead make it a 1st-level feat that lets you manifest any common commercial-grade simple or martial gun, or any commercial-grade simple or martial gun available to you, which upgrades based on the solarian crystals you use for your solar weapon and can be reforged with Re-Forge Solar Weapon.
  
• Change the solar weapon manifestation in the same way to let you manifest any common commercial-grade simple or martial melee weapon, or any commercial-grade simple or martial gun available to you. Add a feat at level 6 to let you manifest advanced weapons as well (including advanced guns if you get the feat for ranged solar weapons).
  
• Give the class heavy armor proficiency, Shield Block, and a fly Speed equal to the highest between 30 feet and their land Speed at level 1. Solar Shield instead should let you manifest any common commercial-grade shield or any commercial-grade shield available to you, which upgrades based on the solarian crystals you already have and can be reforged with Re-Forge Solar Weapon.
  
• Give the class an AoE feature at level 1 that combines Black Hole and Supernova, allowing you to deal AoE damage with either a mass pull or persistent damage depending on your attunement. Potentially give the action the disharmony trait in exchange for either removing the frequency requirement or reducing the action cost down to one.
  
• In general, combine the feats that only give you a benefit in a single attunement whenever possible, and have feats consistently provide some basic benefit even when not attuned whenever possible, with a bonus based on your attunement.
  
• Rather than give the class legendary solar weapon Strikes at level 19, give the class more meat on its bones across odd levels. This can be through additional solarian feats as you suggested, and also benefits like being able to Re-Forge every time you Attune at high level. Alternatively, instead of bonus feats, increase the Solarian's fly Speed as they level up, and make them uniquely a master in every saving throw as well as Perception, so that they become hyper-mobile and a solid all-rounder. Alternatively, give them a legendary class DC so that they can truly shine at their AoE.

The TL;DR being that the Solarian in my opinion could start with just their solar weapon and not their solar flare or nimbus, but better defenses and mobility and a starting AoE, with more versatility to all of their potential solar manifestations. I think the class currently lacks a solid identity, and the above changes I think would have the class provide AoE as a central feature right out the box, while potentially also having the class shine through exceptional mobility in exchange for their melee-range limitations.

One issue Contemplatives, Dragonkin, and Skittermanders (of the scrabbler heritage) do introduce is the ability to stay indefinitely out of reach of a melee only enemy while still maintaining use of a set of arms with witch to use ranged weapons, but unless the entire party can do that, most combats will be fine.

Although I do agree that this is a problem, and have witnessed this trivialize fights in D&D, I question how this is any different from the case of the Dragonkin trivializing the obstacle: if we're okay with the party skipping bits of exploration gameplay entirely, what's wrong with the party shortening encounters by the same amount by taking potshots at the melee enemies from the air until they die? Is it really okay for any part of the game to be trivialized in either manner when Society play normally aims to avoid this kind of situation?

I'm personally of the opinion that minion respawns should be shortened a step across the board: by default, you should be able to recover a lost animal companion or familiar the next time you make your daily preparations, without expecting the GM or AP to provide you a week's downtime to recover a core class feature or an important part of your feats. If having this minion is meant to be an extra-important part of your class, as is the case for the Witch, then you should be able to recover a lost minion as an exploration activity within the day, ideally by Refocusing.

And yes, this would make final sacrifice really good on the Witch, and I'd argue that that's completely fine, as you're still sacrificing an important part of your class for the rest of the combat encounter on top of expending a spell slot. If it turns out to be too strong a combo, that could be easily fixed by adding a per-target immunity to the spell via errata, e.g. "if the target was a minion you permanently control, you cannot target that minion again for 1 day even if you recover it sooner", though it is worth noting that this spell is already spammable through low-rank summons.

At the heart of this is the issue of downtime, in my opinion: not every adventure offers downtime, which means that if your permanent minion dies, that can often mean you won't see them again for the whole adventure, or at least some significant portion of it. Because animal companions require a lot of feat investment and the Wizard's Improved Familiar Attunement thesis is meant to be a fairly important part of their character, this can often result in characters feeling like they're only playing half a class for extended periods of time, and this problem I think extends to the Witch if they lose their familiar during the day. I don't think the Witch really has anything that powerful in their kit that justifies the pain of losing so much of their class-defining power for the rest of the adventuring day if their familiar dies, and when I tried homebrewing familiar resurrects on Refocus for Witches at my table it helped avoid that problem entirely, while also encouraging players to use their familiar more aggressively in combat encounters. This was especially useful to a player's Inscribed One Witch, who was otherwise reluctant to use their familiar's special flanking ability when the risk was so high.

It sounds like the main culprit here is the lack of a clear conversion guide between Starfinder and Pathfinder, and I'm quite surprised Society play allows cross-compatibility without any adjustments in this kind of situation. This "power creep" goes both ways, as well, since picking a resistance to energy damage like Nephilim Resistance can completely negate the weaker damage of Starfinder's guns and trivialize combat encounters.

In this respect, it's not that Starfinder power creeps Pathfinder, even if SF2e in my opinion is a much rougher-balanced game with some wildly overtuned options, so much that the two games run on slightly different design assumptions in order to engineer their respective vibe. In order to preserve balance in both games, these differences ought to be laid out clearly and accounted for via a list of adjustments and suggested bans when porting content from one game to the other. Although Pathfinder and Starfinder are advertised as compatible, it's more compatible*, emphasis on the asterisk. The two games can have their content combined, but you're going to get some hiccups if you don't adjust like in OP's example, so it would benefit us all to have some kind of easily-accessible reference sheet to see what the key differences are at a glance and what adjustments to make, which PFS/SFS should start applying if they want to include cross-play content without disrupting balance.

So where does the Solarian stand. On par? Above? Or Below?

Definitely below in my opinion, and so for two reasons: the class's starting package isn't amazing, and it gets a lot less as it progresses. At level 1, the Ranger gets Hunt Prey and a hunter's edge, which isn't quite as strong as the features really powerful martials get, but is still at least decent. The Solarian by contrast starts out as a Fighter that trades off their Strength/Dex KAS flexibility, +2 to attacks, Shield Block, and heavy armor proficiency, all of which make a huge difference, for essentially two free starting weapons and Attune, none of which I think really hold up to what gets lost. To compare directly to the Ranger, the class deals less damage than a melee Flurry Ranger due to accuracy differences, doesn't have the range or damage output of a Precision Ranger, and in both cases is a lot less flexible in how they can build.

Over time, the Ranger also gets a lot of nifty core class features, including legendary Perception, legendary Reflex saves, nature's edge, unimpeded journey, free-action Hunt Prey, and their masterful hunter upgrade, all while similarly getting medium armor expertise at 11th level and improvements to their class/spell DC at levels 9 and 17. The Solarian, meanwhile, gets a situational free-action attune on Stellar Resilience, the initiative bonus on Stellar Senses, legendary solar manifestation Strikes at 19th level, master armor prof at level 17... and that's it. Although legendary Strikes is a big upgrade, it's too little, too late in my opinion, and until then the class gets peanuts when they already don't get that much to begin with.

And to be clear: this isn't to say that the Solarian is a worse Fighter in space, because ultimately their feats make the two classes quite different, or at least have the potential to do so. However, I'd say the feats are at best on par with those on other martial classes (and some, like Defy Gravity, are terrible), which means I don't think they really help make up for what the core class lacks. Really, it wouldn't have sent the class anywhere near over the edge to give them a few free AoE feats, nor even to give them what I'd consider essential benefits like starting heavy armor proficiency and Shield Block.

I think it’s worth mentioning that a lot of other SF2e classes get major power boosts at 19th level in a way that goes above and beyond the Pathfinder standard: the Solarian gets legendary Strikes, but then the Mystic gets their perfect harmony, the Witchwarper gets their battlefield-wide Quantum Field, and the Operative gets reduced MAP on their Strikes a bit earlier at 17th level. It’s not very consistent or balanced, but it seems to be part of the designers’ intent to have Starfinder’s classes become extra-strong at top levels in a way that doesn’t necessarily relate to their early-game profile. I suspect those top-level power boosts weren’t really factored into the classes’ power budget, and I would rather classes were balanced at both ends of the level spectrum rather than the opposite.

I'm a bit confused, isn't this effectively just an armored skirt but worse? Or is the intent here specifically to have this apply to heavy armor for a +7 item bonus to AC and a Dex cap of -1?

The Witch in my opinion went from being the worst caster in the game, if not the worst class in the game, to an okay caster in the remaster. I do still think the class is a bit weak unless you're going for an extremely strong patron like The Resentment, at which point they're fairly decent, but at least now they have more standout features and more feats worth picking.

I wouldn't call standard martial progression on a martial class "rock solid" so much as part of the bare minimum. Basic stat progression, even one with proficiency bumps on the earlier side of the standard, isn't really the main selling point of a martial class so much as the foundation upon which one lays the actual features that make the class special, and if those bits were missing then the class would be truly dysfunctional. This is also why I generally don't think calling a class "playable" or "functional" really helps evaluate their balance, because it's such a low bar: unless you miss essential bits of the class's core stat progression, which even most homebrewers manage to avoid but which did happen with a few classes in the playtest, your class is always going to be playable in 2e; that doesn't mean it can't be weak. In fact, a class with nothing but this basic progression would be extremely weak, and while the Solarian does have a bit more than that in their core features, it's not actually all that much more on balance.

I do agree with oimandibloons however that the release version of the Solarian presents a quirk that didn't exist in the playtest, which is that the Solarian's feats make them a class with surprisingly good access to AoE, except that AoE is nowhere to be found in their core class features. With the original stellar arrangement features being made into feats, there are quite a few options for AoE damage and crowd control, which in my opinion were one of the selling points of the playtest class, yet the base class basically just Strikes. It doesn't help that the class is quite feat-taxed too, as Solar Rampart is an important pick for AC and they're missing Shield Block by default as well, while needing Stellar Rush for gapclosing, so it's difficult to access those big boom feats when the class is busy getting the basic stuff needed to get off the ground.

I sympathize. That is INCREDIBLY frustrating. One of the main reasons that I've pretty much given up on playtesting. Rightly or wrongly from my point of view it very much seems like Paizo just ignores lots and lots of feedback and I'm just wasting my time.

In my defence, I had no clue that your opinion was based on actual experience. You did not state that in this thread. In fact, from the tone of your comments you are one of the people who I suspected was theory crafting.

I think the lesson to learn here is to give people the benefit of the doubt, at least to begin with, and not make judgments based on uncharitable assumptions.

As for Paizo's playtesting process, I personally disagree: I think that in general, at least when it comes to Pathfinder, Paizo is really good at taking feedback. The recent Guardian class is proof of this, as the developers took what was quite possibly the worst-balanced and designed playtest class in 2e history, incorporated player feedback, and released a thoroughly fun and robust end product. I do feel, however, that much less player feedback was incorporated into SF2e's final release: despite over a year's worth of fairly consistent player feedback, the game has released with most of the core flaws that were pointed out from the very beginning, and that includes the flaws with many of its classes like the Solarian. I'm not sure what went wrong, but at the moment I'm hesitant to recommend the game to my friends who have been waiting a long time for a good sci-fi TTRPG, despite personally being really excited for this edition's release.

For 2 actions I think the results reasonably comparable. One does more damage to a single target on a hit, the other can move you an extra 20 ft and potentially affects several targets (more than 2 is unlikely, but possible. 2 is quite likely) if they fail a Fort Save.

But I think that Stellar Rush definitely wins when you can afford to spend 3 actions on it plus strike as opposed to Sudden Charge + Strike (and this will be a great deal of the time. The entire purpose of both feats is to let you get into the battle). I'd much rather have the graviton effect than a Map-5 attack.

Now I've admittedly taken a possibly unintended use case that some GMs may disallow. But, RAW I'm pretty sure it works. Which means that I think I can rely on it in SFS which is where most of my play will be coming from for the forseeable future.

I'd say the reverse is more true in practice -- the chances of you affecting even one target, let alone several at a time, are not that great, and often the extra Speed is overkill. A MAP-5 Strike I'd say is still generally preferable to a Fort save to deal potentially 5 extra damage, particularly as the Strike scales in damage, whereas this strategy of yours does not. Make no mistake, Stellar Rush does have its uses -- being able to pull enemies towards you can be quite useful and comboes well with a Soldier or Witchwarper -- but I don't think that level 1 feat makes up for what the core class lacks.

This is an extremely unfair criticism.

I do think Squiggit has a point, though. My own negative experience with the Solarian is based not only upon comparisons to PF2e, but upon my own play experience of the class. I posted an extensive write-up of my playtests of the class outlining my issues with it specific to Starfinder, and playing the release version of the class hasn't made me feel like any of the major criticisms have really been addressed. The class is effectively taxed to go for a flying ancestry and Stellar Rush at level 1 to be able to close gaps consistently, and even when they do get in range, they still struggle from their lack of durability and anemic core chassis. As noted by HolyFlamingo!'s own assessments, I'm not the only one basing my opinion on play experience either. Acting like comparisons to Pathfinder are the sole foundation of criticisms being made of the Solarian here is dismissive of these play experiences, and is made all the more obnoxious by the fact that you're basing your own opinion off of theorycrafting and wishful thinking.