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Whether it's monsters with a climb speed, or pcs making checks to leap and clamber over obstacles, switching movement types now hurts. A vampire can't walk 5 feet to a wall, walk 10 up, and then move 5/ft along the top with a move in an action, instead it takes three. Why wouldn't you want vampires to smoothly inter weave their climbing and normal walking?

Same thing a character trying to jump over something. It looks like an enemy 20' away with four foot fence halfway there basically means it's a minimum of 3 action to close, and possibly more (a strict read on high jump makes clearing it rather difficult still)

In 3e and pathfinder and 4e and 5e, jumping and climbing are part of movement, not distinct actions, precisely because characters good in those areas should be integrating those skills with running. Characters in cop movies vault over fences as they chase/are being chased. But apparently hurdles are a huge impediment even to characters legendary in athletics.

It seems to me that climbing and jumping ought to be free actions triggered during movement instead of actions incompatible with it.

This is a solo battle test. I want to see how higher level characters perform, no one in my group has expressed interest in trying PF2, and there is a fairly straightforward siege adventure in the playtest. So I'm going to play through the battle in the level 7 adventure and see how things work. Btw, I'm sorry if some stuff makes zero sense. I'm writing most of this on a kindle, and the autocorrect is the most aggressive version I've seen and it hates both gaming terms and acronyms.

Our heroes are a Halfling storm druid, elf healing domain cleric, human might cleric, and human paladin. Everyone has plus one weapons and armor, although the war cleric has the plus 2. As directed for the adventure, the party is two positive channeling clerics, and everyone else can heal. Via feats, the party also has two animal companions. Some of the other items may be useful, others are not likely to be so. It's not like everyone has disrupting or ghost touch stuff or whatever to especially beat undead.

I started the event with the scholar near the door, the paladin in the hallway somewhat behind - as if to say "no wait, don't open it"- and the other pcs in the dining room standing but without weapons drawn. I let the npc move back roughly even to the dining room door. Order is druid, human cleric, ghasts, elf cleric, and finally the paladin, who went on 11. The druid commands snake to double move, putting it next to sage man, then readies a sling and moves. Hc draws his greatsword and double moves. The ghasts double stride up and take some swings. Most the attacks are terrible, but the snake is hit for 12 and becomes infected. People are exposed to the auras, and the paladin fails. Everyone else succeeds and becomes bolstered. However, I may have run that wrong if the bolster is per ghoul, and not for the aura in general. The elf cleric readies a shortbow, enters the hall, and hits on 7 courtesy of 18 Dec and low level enemies. The paladin readies an s-word, crits a ghast for 16 (terrible roll for damage), and spends an action to save against the sicken. It looks like drawing a weapon would provoke, if the enemies could take aoo.

Round 2 starts off with the druid's electric arc and commanding the snake to crit and move. Hc does a miss and hit, then casts shield. The normal greatsword hit outshines th longsword crit, dropping the leftmost ghast. Noticing that the snake is soft target, the ghasts set up a flank and aim most of their attacks there. The snake is knocked to within 10 of death, and paralyzed, but one of the enemies takes retributive smite which crits and thus diverts its second attack to the paladin to clear enfeeble. And that attack crits back on a twenty. I don't want the animal to die this early, so elf channels for a three action heal to save snake, and mostly top off other scuffed people. And also mess up the ghasts, but one rolls a twenty - most of them are around half now. The paladin is evidently off balance, rolling a two and three. He shields with his last action.

Round three starts. Snake is paralyzed, so druid does electric arc and fired a critical slingshot while adjacent to a pair of enemies. Mr Slithers recovers. They didn't have aoo, so I guess it's okay? Human cleric gets one hit out of two and casts shield to deter the enemies who weren't attacking him from attacking him. But going for a triple seemed pretty marginal. He also killed one adjacent foe. Ghasts now avoid the Palin's reach if possible, and set up a flank chain that goes ghast, elf, ghast, snake, ghast. The snake takes some more hits, but less than it was healed. The elf stands and fires, killing another enemy. Now there are two of them. Paladin steps up, crits and kills another one. The survivor is out of reach. The druid starts and finished the next round by ordering Mr Slithers to finish off the last super ghoul.

So basically three rounds to clear the wave. After the battle, four level 1 heals top off the snake, the center area is sanctified versus the undead, a holly bush is planted, and three barricades are thrown up between the stairs and library column to create a narrow chokepoint. The paladin also brings his horse inside so it could fight in the next battle. So only one high level limited ability was needed, plus some level 1 spells. Could have been better imo, could have been worse. Using the barricades on the door seemed poor imo. The large windows provide extra entrances, and it seems like shooting enemies would be a problem. It seems better to use them to control access to the stairs and the library, and then ranged pcs can shoot over them from the stairs or upper hall. In theory.
I had wanted to start the battle off with web, but was not in position for it. No one in the battle had opp attacks, which was really weird. People could just move wherever - especially with the ghasts ' leap - or just shoot and cast right in monster faces. Kind of a double edge sword there - characters and monsters could move without threat, but at the same time, there was less need for ranged people to move and most of the pcs could take three decent actions against these enemies. Normally ranged guys benefit from looking at enemies movement paths and trying to get out of dodge in advance, or find ways to escape engagement. The ghasts could have dodged back to make melee potentially spend actions moving, but as monsters without a ranged attack, it seemed like the pcs would benefit more. If I made the characters roll for each ghoul aura, I don't think the outcome would have changed much. Although if it comes down to the last low level spell... Not a lot of limited abilities were used, and not much variety of actions taken. But then it is a pretty easy fight. The animals looked more vulnerable than I thought, and there are a number of enemies coming up with spawn type powers to really take advantage of that. I'll probably attempt to have them to hang back initially in the future, instead of having the battle line kind of form around them. Otoh, without aoo, won't enemies without a strong three action turn be able to swarm them anyway? Maybe I should just make sure the paladin can cover one of them.

Questions regarding the adventure:
How does the boss guy get intel? He sends the ghasts in to scout, but there are no tactics to try and have one escape to report back. Does that mean he's pulling in info in real time remotely? That's what I'll assume.

What is the reason for using so many waves versus throwing in more consolidated attacks? If you're going to sneak guys in the back, for instance, why not have a frontal attack going as well to cover for them? It kind of seems like there's no in world reason for splitting the forces up in this way. The undead either need more autonomy to create coordination problems, or multiple objectives so guys are being diverted from other areas as sombrefell proved tougher than expected, etc. There should be a reason why his big force is coming for sliced into hopefully manageable chunks.

There are Dcs for climbing up to the lake balcony. Possibly more should be provided for climbing on other parts of the estate like going up to the roof, smashing through interior doors or walls, or climbing up to the second level in the inside without the stairs. Similarly, there is some stuff for pcs to scavenge or abuse in the defense of the mansion. However, someone with snare crafting may want a gp value of stuff they can scrounge to make their traps. Snares seem great for static defense missions like this as opposed to normal dungeon crawling, so the information to support them should be provided imo.

The grounds seem fairly open. What happens if pcs with ranged weapons or spells and night vision start their defense further out than the building itself? It seems like some waves would be quite vulnerable to that kind of thing, since they are not especially fast, lack ranged, and long attack attacks reach to to 500' potentially.

Magic Fang requires that the target's unarmed attack be only one die. I did not see a higher level equivalent or heightening option. Items say they're for humanoids unless otherwise stated; I did not see such an exemption for handwraps.

What is the method of giving an animal companion with its first upgrade (and thus at least two damage dice) a magic attack?

Enervated does this stuff:

You take a conditional penalty equal to your enervated value on checks that include a proficiency modifier. The penalty can’t exceed your level, even if the enervated value is greater. For example, if you become enervated 4 and were level 3, you’d take only a –3 penalty.

In addition, you treat your level as though it were lowered by your enervated value (to a minimum of 1st level) when determining which spells you can cast and which abilities you can use. This applies only to actions, activities, free actions, and reactions you gained from feats and class features, and only those that have a level prerequisite. You don’t lose your prepared spells, but you can’t cast those that are higher level than the enervated condition allows.

Monsters just have net bonuses with no proficiency bonus. Monster abilities have no minimum level. Monster spells require no level, they just cast at whatever spell level they need to.

While I'm fine with monster/PC asymmetry, making it work does seem to require writing up conditions that don't only refer to stuff PCs have.

If I was talking about the positive aspects of 3e/PF, I'd mention stuff like building a character out of lots of different lego bits, pulling a piece from a different kit for your build. And a lot of actions could feel really powerful - you could mow down an enemy with a buffed up full attack in a single round, or cripple a bunch of foes with a multi-target spell.

For 4e, I'd mention balance (I could basically go through playing new classes each time and the characters pretty much all seemed decent at least), that there a lot of tactical combat combos you can set up internally and even more with your group. It also does a lot to establish class identity from level 1.

In FFG Star Wars, the two axis of success and way dice faces are set up means that success is often spawning some additional complication or problem, while failure is often creating some opportunity or other benefit. That usually helps things be Star Warsy IMO.

Obviously, people's experience with PF 2 so far is going to be limited. But what seems like the good part, the hook or pitch for the rules? I'm trying to be positive, but PF2 does not seem to have high impact attack rounds and spells of the 3e based systems while being more structured as well. And any combos of different actions aren't leaping off the page at me either the way 4e stuff did. What's the cool thing that PF 2 is good at, other than being Feat Tax: the RPG?