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It seems to me that the lore/mechanics for the animist are much closer to IRL shamanic traditions than to animist ones. The acquisition of helper spirits, which inhabit a spirit world, which you can allow to possess you, seems fairly close to what I've read of shamanic cultures. Far more to the point it strikes me as very different from what I've read of animist tradition. While definitions of animism are hard to pin down, one reasonable one is the claim that non-human things in general, and particularly inanimate ones, have a spirit tied to them. By contrast, there seems to be no particular idea that the apparitions are spirits of things.
I don't know, but it seems a pretty odd decision to me. I know it might have been hard to persuade the fanbase to accept some totally new set of mechanics for a "shaman" class, but given that Paizo have already said they want to talk with actual members of a given culture before trying to represent it in game, I'm guessing that any shaman class would be considerably altered in the new edition.

Amazingly, I think this class is pretty cool, and doesn't need a huge amount of change. That said, the lore sbout inner gates sort of reminded me of mediæval mystics, or of alchemists of the sort that existed before the scientific method. Perhaps another way to explain it would be to say if the kineticist is an avatar fantasy, I'd like to play morebof a guru Pathik type, though with more western or chinese influence than indian.
It'd be really cool to have some options for a more mystic kineticist. I don't really know what form that might take, and my own ideas are only half formed, but if you have any, it'd be great to hear them.

Of all the classes, it seems least likely that the cleric will get more subclasses. The feature gives them their proficiencies and not much else, and given that it represents their role in the church or religion (sort of, as I say it hasn't really been explored) there isn't much room to expand.
Or is there? The answer is yes by the way. Basically, there are two major archetypes of priest in fantasy role playing, the warrior priest and the more bookish congregation leader, but these do not paint a very good picture of priesthood as a whole. Rather, they represent a highly christo-centric view of that role, particularly as it developed in Europe. Throughout the world priesthood takes on many forms, which very rarely coincide directly with the ones presented here, and there are a number of examples of roles taken even in christianity that are left untapped. To this end I will present some examples here, drawn from my admittedly limited understanding.

A few notes before I begin: I will be talking primarily about cultures and religions alien to my own. If you belong to a religion or other group about which I talk here, and you feel I misrepresented your faith, please feel free to say so. That said, I am drawing on those faiths for inspiration for a fantasy game, rather than trying to produce an exact replica, so my primary aim is to present something that would be fun, at least when better polished. Second, I am leaving aside a number of traditions and faiths that might very readily be adapted to this, particularly a number of animist or shamanist belief systems as it seems likely that Paizo will give them their own distinct class. Without further ado, let's begin.

The missionary: this type of priesthood is one fairly specific to christianity (even though in many fantasy worlds many religions are evangelistic). It requires a very specific set of theological impetuses for a religion to want to go out and collect more followers. That said, a player might want to take on the role of a character who goes out into the world to bring knowledge of their faith to others to persuade them to join their religion. My mechanical thoughts are that your character should be given a proficiency in diplomacy automatically, and, each time they manage to persuade another character to take some action in line with their gods teachings they should gain some kind of blessing. I don't know exactly where the limits lie however, especially since it would depend very much on your game.

The religious lawyer: this type of priesthood is drawn from my understanding of priesthood in islam and judaism. My understanding is this: in belief systems with complex sets of strictures, edicts, commandments etc., one important role of the priesthood is to interpret the sacred law, to be able to make judgements, and to discuss that law, and also to put it into practice. My thoughts here are that there are two possible mechanical paths. Either way I think one should have some kind of legal lore proficiency, but the options are these: either, which was my first thought, you act primarily as interpreter, and have a feat which at some interval (say once a month) allows you to commit an act anathema to your deity and get away scot free, with a successful legal lore check to find a loophole. The second, which I like less, is as more of an enforcer, with a built in ability similar to the spell anathematic reprisal, to rebuke those who break the religious laws.

The final type I will cover here, though there are many others, is that of the ritualist priest. Tanking inspiration from a plethora of sources, though I am thinking particularly of the Japanese shinto priesthood, and also of traditions such as hinduism and confucianism, the role of the ritualist priest is less one of community leadership and more one of making sure the appropriate rituals are completed. In my conception of this role actual belief plays a relatively small part, though it is prerequisite. Rather, the priest job is simply, as above, to go through the appropriate motions and chants at the appointed times. Mechanically I imagine that, in addition to some specific lore on rituals, such a cleric would have on the one hand the requirement to stop their adventuring at certain predetermined(likely by a timetable composed by the player) hours of the day to perform rituals, but in response to that they would get some kind of blessing. This would again be dependent on the game for how well it worked, as it would require the GM to keep track of time, and for the player to keep track of the cycles whereby their precomposed timetable of rites would work. There would also need to be restrictions on said timetables of rites to prevent their being exploited.

Edit, as I clicked post too early: As you can see, these ideas lack mechanical polish, but I hope also that they demonstrated at least some of the possible variety and untapped potential of the cleric's doctrine. This list of ideas isn't even close to complete. Just on the christian end of things (which is where I am the most familiar), I might suggest the scholarly theologer, the monk (no, the other kind) who takes on a particularly strict set of tenets, and the pilgrim, who spends much of their time traveling between holy sites. Either way however, I hope this is interesting to you.

It confuses me. If you are in favour of a thaumaturge that uses charisma as the key stat, please could you explain why charisma makes sense without making it sound like it should just be a spellcaster. That's what really got to me about all the arguments for charisma. All the 'I persuade the universe to bend to my will' stuff always made me think: that is just spellcasting, and that means that the class loses a degree of uniqueness. So, I would be willing to change my mind if you could make an argument for charisma that when looking at it didn't just look like a description of a sorcerer or similar.
Thanks.

I have been reading everyone talking about how they want to use the thaumaturge to play John Constantine, but I didn't know who he was, so I looked him up and am unconvinced that he isn't some other class(though I wasn't able to glean much information about him). So:
Who is John constantine? What about this character makes him not some other class? What about him means that his so explicitly NOT A SPELLCASTER? What about him makes him a thaumaturge? Why is he so cool? Please explain. Thanks.

Divs are lawful evil, which seems weird to me, as I find that the lore suggests NE. This idea is backed by the fact that Ahriman, their god, is NE, and they used to be NE in first edition. Does anyone know why this detail was changed?

So the whole thing with Rahadoum is that they banned the worship of gods. This seems irreconcileable with not being evil. It puts considerable limits on freedom of speech and even freedom of thought, in ways that simply are not inherently harmful. You can be fined simply for owning certain books or symbols (one wonders what happens to said books immediately afterwards). While the state has performed some good works, specifically the developement of non-magical healing, I cannot believe that that justifies the oppresion of it's people.

Additionally, I cannot believe either that the forcing out of religion was accepted unilaterally when it was brought in. Certainly, in any nation there is bound to be disagreement on such matters, and it is not an unreasonable assumption that when this decision was made there was a considerable number of people who dissented, or were worshippers, even if they didn't constitute a majority. I also don't believe that Rahadoum was a nation founded on those principles. If you look through history I don't believe that you will ever find record of a nation founded on an ideal that managed to survive without bloody conquest. Edit, having read the wiki: I now know that they did it to stop a holy war, but there are many better ways to deal with this sort of thing than just to ban worship. It reminds me of the japanese sakoku.

I recognise that Rahadoum is against human servitude to gods etc. but what about people who are quietly living their lives and giving thanks to their god of choice that they weren't born in Cheliax or Nidal. They are harming no-one, but the government has made their actions illegal and punishable.

In short, the country is built on the pure legion, who are literally thought police, and yet this is not considered evil. Please explain.

If one looks at the sorcerer bloodlines list, it is fairly obvious that different groups of planes are associated with different traditions of magic. The aligned planes are associated with the divine, the elemental ones are associated with primal (with exception given to genies specifically), the outer spaces between worlds ia! extra-dimensional entity of the week are occult, the material plane is arcane (sort of, for obvious reasons it's not exactly reliable), and the astral and ethereal have yet to be seen(I'm banking on occult for ethereal and either occult or arcane for the astral).

For the most part these are fairly obvious. The aligned planes are important to the whole 'where does one go when one dies', so of course they are integrated into religion. But why oh why is the first world primal where the plane of shadow is occult.

To deal with the obvious counters, the basic symmetry argument doesn't hold up, since either it applies to all transitive planes, or it applies to only those 2. If all transitive planes have it, then one of them has to be divine, but that feels very out of place, at best you could shoehorn it in for the ethereal. On the other hand, if it's only shadow and first world then why does the first world get primal. It is the obvious first choice to be sure, but the fey magic is also almost entirely defined in folklore as being mind affecting, with the background of trees being little more than coincidence. It feels a little off to me that the focus is more on the fey's ability to have pretty flowers than to get inside your head and make you beleive that there are pretty flowers, and also that said flowers are far more interesting than whatever thing is trying to kill you.

At this point or before you should have looked at the title and asked yourself 'didn't this person say that it was only a minor annoyance?'. To you, dear, astute, intelligent reader I can only apologise for having you read through my mad ramblings and say this. I was yanked out of my blissful ignorance a few nights prior, and if I'm going down I'm taking you all with me in a way that is hopefully coherent and well reasoned. Sorry again.

I have been struggling to get my head around why the summoner is it's own thing rather than a class archetype of something like the witch.

My problem comes from this. Classes should fill a narrative niche not filled adequately by another class. So what role does the summoner fill? The witch gets magic from a patron; the sorcerer from their magical ancestry; the bard fills the character archetype of the supernatural musician; the barbarian rage gives them superhuman powers. By contrast the summoner seems defined by their mechanics: getting good with summoning and having a magical companion.

What makes them different enough narratively from a witch who says that their familiar is their patron. Why could the class not be achieved by rites of convocation and a few feats that let your familiar be an animal companion or similar as well.

Please explain why this is it's own thing. I recognise that it may have a very different feel to what I described above, but I don't believe that should inform whether it's a class. It might require fairly radical archetypes, but, as I say, I think that that makes more sense than having an entirely new class.

Thanks for any replies,

Having ordered it from amazon in late may, I am still waiting for my hardcopy of the bestiary 2. In fact, amazon doesn't seem to have any idea when it will arrive. Is this a common problem for other people? I live in britain, so perhaps they don't know where the boat is, but I would have thought that some solution would have been found.
Is there anything I might be able to do about this?
Thanks.

I basically understand how it works, but I've not been able to track down the formal statement, since it doesn't appear to be in the monster abilities section of the bestiary. Can anyone help me find it?

Having thought about the research and library rules presented in the GMG, they don't, in themselves offer a challenge to the players beyond do some checks and some encounters. Here are some ideas on how to make better use of the system.

1. You never use a library with a single research track. With a single research track the only choice a player makes is which skill to use, which is a simple numerical evaluation. This may be partially hidden, but it is still simply which gets the best results, unless certain parts trigger only with certain skills.
2. Make sure your different tracks interact. This can be in terms of mechanics or information, but without this it will simply be 2 different grinds. The simplest way to do this is putting on time pressure, and putting valuable information in all of them, but I also like the idea of a secondary track which contains the password for a trap higher in the primary one.
3. Think about how information is revealed. This is probably the most obvious one, but worth keeping in mind. The encounter is all about information, so be careful with it. If the players are likely to run out of time then include something of value at lower levels. If the players might miss something in another section, point them to it. Sprinkling in seeming irrelevant trivia can allow you to surprise the players with its usefulness later, with the added bonus of allowing you to deliver exposition (we all know you want to).

Anyway, these are my thoughts. Do you have any. Also, do show off any of your more interesting libraries that you made for your games.

What would it mean for a spell to be unique. While it is intuitive that the knowledge for a rare or uncommon spell is simply hard to come by, how would that manifest uniqueness. Would it require only a single person to know it, or that there was only a single scroll. If you learn it, meaning that 2 people know it, does it cease to be unique.
Thanks for any thoughts.

I know that they are meant to be the thing that gives the Oracle their power, but why, what are they in the world, how does the Oracle access them etc.. It doesn't seem very clear what they mean for the Oracle. The name would imply that the Oracle is a divine philosopher, and the gods don't like people being too nosy, but that doesn't seem to be it. Could someone explain it, if there is a single answeanswer that warrants the existence of a class based on it.

The swamp witch feat give you a benefit on a certain type of land. It doesn't really matter what the benefit is, since if you take it, and the campaign takes place in a city, you just wasted a feat. Not only that, but it rather restricts the witch to certain kinds of flavour, which isn't needed. Mightn't it be better to do something similar to the rangers favoured terrain, or to do something more pratchett/discworld, and link primal witches to the land as protectors or something. Either way, you can hit a broader range of flavours and have a more valuable feat to boot.
Any thoughts?

The lack descriptive text and of other material about similar classes in other games makes it very difficult to understand what's going on with the oracle. My understanding is that you're a sort of divine philosopher who the gods got angry with. Could anyone expand on this, correct me or provide any other flavour text.

The witch is a class built around having a familiar, but the set of familiar abilities currently reads as the bare minimum of what you need to make sure your familiar mechanically what it is thematically (like a raven flying) and a set of flat upgrades for spellcasters, so you don't have to invest in so many feats. I feel like this is going to have to change if familiars are to feel more than just a toolbox.

Here are a few ideas(very important that bit) for probably master abilities to get you started. sickening stench: it smells so awful that people near it have problems with fort saves(say -1, to 5ft. aura). Incorporeal: it's can move through walls. attacker: it has a strike in which it's trained, uses controllers appropriate modifier and deals maybe 1d6-ish damage.

It's these kinds of things that might mean that a familiar is more a companion than a package of bonuses.