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As I understand from the podcasts and blogs and other posts here on the forums, Resonance is incredibly controversial. And I believe we almost universally agree that it doesn’t work in its present form. So I am going to put forth why I think it’s poorly designed and how I would go about fixing it.

Having played both D&D 4e and 5e, I see Resonance as taking the worst parts of 4e’s arbitrary “you can only use 3 daily use magic items a day” rule and 5e’s attunement system and combining them. Now I understand that the purpose of the resonance system is to curb spellcasters’ ability to use scrolls, wands, and staffs to break out of their limited daily spell preparation limit.

However, in attempting to accomplish this, I believe that it fails on several fronts. Firstly, it penalizes martial characters just as much if not more than it penalizes casters. For example, let’s look at a level 9 martial. Base you have 9 resonance points. It’s reasonable to assume you’ll have found some kind of magic weapon (1), maybe some armor (2), and you’ve got the most strength so you have the party’s bag of holding (3). After that one encounter with a bunch of annoying archers you found some bracers of missile deflection (4). You know you will be entering the Lava Cave of Certain Death, so you get your wizard to make you a lesser ring of fire resistance (5).

In the end you have spent 5 of your 9 resonance. So you have 4 resonance which seems kind of reasonable. But then you have to remember that to actually use your bracers or bag of holding it costs and additional resonance. Then if you get hurt and need a potion, that’s one more. Now you only have 1 resonance remaining. Granted you are allowed to “overspend” but critically failing an overspend means you can’t use magic items at all for the rest of the day.

Being a caster doesn’t really change much. You don’t need magical weapons or armor, but there are still plenty of permanent magic items that are useful regardless of being caster or martial. In my 9th level wizard for the playtest I have 10 resonance with 6 spent on permanent items. Still leaves me with 4 resonance to split between the staff, scrolls, and potions.

The second failing I feel is the added bookkeeping without benefit. Not only do you have to track uses per day of the individual items but you also have to track their resonance costs as well. How many items did you invest? How many uses of items do you have left? How many times did you overspend? How many charges are on your wand? Did you use that aeon stone ability already? You end up tracking a lot of this information twice and there doesn’t seem to be any benefit to doing so.

The third problem is the narrative and “magicalness” of magic items. Potions/oils are supposed to be self-contained spells that literally anyone can use just by drinking/applying them. No casting ability needed at all. But now it only works if the person has resonance remaining? And if you don’t have resonance and drink the potion, it’s still gone. You can’t undrink a potion.

So here is my suggestion for fixing Resonance. Chop off the Charisma modifier and just make it flat level. Any items that require charges/uses per day instead pull from this resonance pool. Permanent magic items and consumables no longer use the resonance system at all. To counter-balance this, we can slightly increase the cost of these items to make them less accessible. If we include wands in this, that might make them too powerful (basically a staff with more charges and only 1 spell), so maybe let them keep their own pool of charges. So only activated abilities of permanent items and staffs use resonance, with consumables and wands keeping their typical usage requirements.

So if we go back to the above 9th level characters, the martial character has not spent any of his Resonance up front and now only has to worry about spending his Resonance on his bracers which will likely mean that he rarely if ever runs out of resonance. Maybe he can even invest in some trinkets now. The wizard that I made however, similarly does not spend any Resonance up front, but now those 10 Resonance Points are going to be divined amongst a Spell Duelist’s Wand, an Aeon Stone, a Wayfinder containing said Aeon stone, a Phylactery of the Occult, and a Lesser Staff of Divination. Which means that I will generally get 2 uses out of each of those each day. Which is still significantly less than in 1e.

To begin, I want to say that I actually like the “everything is a feat” design choice, particularly with regards to class building and level progression.

However, throughout the process of building characters for this playtest and talking with my typical gaming group (we’ve been playing D&D and Pathfinder for nearly 20 years each) we kind of agree on most of the following points. So here is my good, bad, and ugly with regards the to feats and feat selection. I will be breaking this down by categories, so Ancestry Feats, Class Feats, General Feats, and Skill Feats.
As a quick aside, I will be talking about the number of options. I fully understand that this is a playtest and it’s not fair to compare a partially finished document to 10 years of content, but hear me out. Most of the time my concerns are going to be with the number of times you get to pick from a list of feats, not the number of available feat choices.

Ancestry Feats:
The Good: I like Ancestry Feats as a design space, because I definitely believe there is room to make this very unique to Golarion. The racial weapon proficiencies are good choices to put here, because it seems strange that every elf is good with a longsword or every halfling is David vs. Goliath. Even the human has gotten a rather interesting change on its usual “free skills, free feat” and nothing else. In the future I really see this expanding to the different human ethnicities: Taldan, Varisian, Tian, etc.
The Bad: Heritage Feats make very little sense from a narrative perspective. Any of the “genetic” or “biological” feats also seem to be an odd choice. Dwarf and elf only have one heritage feat, so that doesn’t really seem like too big an issue with regards to those ancestries, but then you have the Goblin. It has Flame Heart and Razor Teeth which makes them mutually exclusive. It’s kind of hard to think of a Golarion Goblin without its sharp grinning maw AND being a pyromaniac.
It seems like it would make more sense to bake the heritage Ancestry Feats into the level 1 Ancestry itself and then just not give an Ancestry feat at first level except to humans. That way human can either spend the feat or become a half-elf or half-orc.

Class Feats:
The Good: Modular classes and being able to pick the class features you want and weed out ones that you find inappropriate to the campaign setting makes for better characters in my opinion. It also enables the design team to add and remove content to classes without substantially re-writing the entire class which helps in the inevitable stream of errata that we’re going to accumulate in the next decade of playing this game. Additionally this makes it easier to add archetypes and subclasses without creating a dozen classes that are “kind of like A, but with fighting/casting/skill monkey powers.” It even helps avoid the weird scenarios that came up in D&D 3.5 where you ended up doing a lot of crazy multi-classing and level dipping to get a certain combination of abilities.
The Bad: This is where I make my criticism about there being two few opportunities to take from the Class Feat list. And it’s not terribly consistent across the classes. Sorcerer and Wizard for example feel like they could use the change to take maybe 1 extra feat. They don’t really need much, because the Magic Item Creation feats have all been melded into the new “Magical Crafting” feat and rules. Other classes, especially the ugly that I will get to, feel like they are missing a lot of the class features that made them competent. I know there is a lot of mumbling about caster/martial balance on the internet, and it seems strange that many of the martial classes that are considered “underpowered” lose many class features to the features = Feats change.
The Ugly: The Paladin. While wizard is my usual forte, I have played a paladin in Pathfinder 1e from level 1 the whole way to level 20. He was a nigh-unkillable tank and managed to keep up with the crazy prepared Batman-style arcanist and the heavily DPR optimized war priest. It seemed to be a rather solid class with maybe a bit of help since this was a demon-themed campaign so Smite Evil got used heavily.
I preface with this because the 2e Paladin feels like it has been gutted. I’m not particularly bothered by the loss of Divine spellcasting, because the Paladin list was pretty mediocre in 1e/D&D 3.5. So no loss there. But the rest of the paladin’s class abilities and have been repackaged into smaller, less powerful pieces and placed at mutually exclusive levels.
For example, at level 2 a paladin can get their bonus to saving throws or they can be good at fighting Evil. And if they choose to fight Evil, they can only choose one kind of evil. They can be better at fighting evil dragons OR demons/devils OR undead. Same thing happens again at level 4. A paladin can either be courageous and help his allies fight off fear OR he gets to channel like a Cleric OR is particularly resistant to disease OR can heal his allies of status effects.

General Feats
I really don’t have much to say about General Feats. The ones that are solely labeled as General are pretty class-agnostic, but in terms of actually usefulness it seems like everyone will probably spend their five slots on some combination of Alertness, Fleet, Incredible Initiative, Toughness, and Remarkable Resonance. Those five are markedly better than the rest of the list. Alertness is just about the only way to improve Perception. And the remaining four are the ONLY ways to increase speed, initiative, HP, and Resonance respectively. There really is no reason to spend a General Feat on a Skill Feat as I will now explain.

Skill Feats:
The Good: The concept of using your level of training to unlock special uses of a skill is good. That’s it.
The Bad: The variety and usefulness of the feat selection is overall rather underwhelming. I didn’t look at any of the skill feats and really say to myself “Ooh I should make sure I take that.” In a lot of cases, the Expert level requirement of some feats meant I had to look for filler options to take up the slot until I qualified for a feat I did want as in the case of Magical Crafting. My first skill increase went to Arcana so I had to wait several levels to bump Crafting. Many of the interesting feats are locked behind Master and Legendary levels of proficiency which means only classes with those signature skills are going to qualify for anything interesting.
For casters this might not be so bad, based on spell selection, but my complaints about number of spell slots or magic items will get their own thread. But in general picking Skill Feats felt like a chore sifting through so-so options for a few gems.
One of the things I really liked about D&D 5e was that each of the feats really did something. They were something beyond that made you want to take them. A good feat list needs to grab a player in the way that they lament that they can’t take them all in one character.
The Ugly: A rather alarming number of feats seem to just unlock things that any character used to just be able to do in Pathfinder 1e. Recognize Spell was automatic with Spellcraft, Forager and Survey Wildlife are obvious applications of Survival, Train Animal was the entire point of the Handle Animal Skill, and probably one of the worst offenders in my opinion Group Coercion/Impression. Needing a feat in order to influence more than one person at a time? The break between game mechanics and narrative with those is quite stark.

In summation, I really like the design space that Ancestry/Class/General/Skill Feats creates in terms of making a modular game. Ancestry and Class are closest to a finished state in my opinion. I would recommend melding the “genetic” feats back into the base race, possibly at the cost of the level 1 Ancestry feat. Classes need more access to their respective feat lists, in varying capacities, to smooth out the class balance. Particularly the Paladin, it needs love. General Feats are generic, news at 11, nothing to see here. Skill Feats however are very poorly implemented in this playtest. They unlock basic things that you should just be able to do by virtue of being trained. Make them much more powerful so that the Master or Legend in their respective skill wows and awes their party members.