It has been said (and, it seems, confirmed by Mr. Bulmahn) elsewhere that:
Lich-Loved wrote:
Far too many people assume that backward compatibility means backward competitiveness (as you have done here). Likewise, people believe the last point about making the sorcerer 1-20 useful without a PrC assumes the use of non-OGL (eg existing, proprietary and therefore offlimits) PrC's as a basis for comparison. What we can expect is that the new sorcerer will seem viable when compared to the Loremaster and Archmage, (the two SRD-supported arcane PrC's available under OGL) and any Pathfinder PrC's yet to be created since only these PrC's can appear in an official PRPG game.
Backward compatibility has never promised that Splatbook X would fit directly within Pathfinder and indeed James Jacobs has clearly stated in the past that use of such splatbook classes is outside the expectations of the module writers and thus requires additional DM work to integrate splatbook-based PCs in the Pathfinder world (most notably by the DM raising the power level of the foes faced). In short, Pathfinder says that will not invalidate your splatbook investment, but they have no plans of making Pathfinder exceed or even meet the (sometimes silly) bar set by the splatbooks.
While I quite agree that said bar is silly at some times, could the following be explained?
Jason Bulmahn (I suppose) wrote:
DESIGNER NOTES: RACE AND CLASS POWER
These rules increase the power of the base races and classes to some extent. This was done for a number of reasons, the most important of which was to balance them with the current level of power in the game. Over the years, a number of other races and classes have been released that are a bit more powerful than the base options. Since we do not want the core races to be suboptimal choices, and we cannot change the other material, adding to the base choices seemed like the best option. We think that you will find these changes are not all that intrusive, and might even allow you to play with some of the other races and classes on an even scale.
(Emphasis mine) - "over the years" means 3.x noncore material, by definition. And "even scale" implies backwards competitiveness. So what gives?
