Is it just me or do pathfinder AP's require that the players "optimize" there characters to the max (or as i like to put it become power gamers)
Because in all the aps I've played in our party struggles and we're all experienced players with good solid characters that are good at there roles .
Or is it just the dice gods conspiring against us
I hate to tell you this, but most Adventure Paths have a fairly low "optimization bar". If your group is having trouble, you may want to go over some of the helpful optimization guides available in the advice section of these forums. (It could I suppose be the Dice Gods, but you would have had to really offend Icosa, the Dice God to get that kind of string of bad luck.)
In my experience...no the APs are not designed for optimized characters. Yes certain classes are helpful for certain APs but the characters do not need to be highly optimized.
Pathfinder society can be a different story.
Yeah...APs are designed for, at best, "passable" characters.
Look at the Iconics. The APs are basically designed around the Iconics. 15 PB, some abilities chosen for flavor even if they literally make your character worse or another option could have done the same thing but better, etc.
If your party is struggling in most APs then they are really the opposite of solid characters good at their roles, or they never roll higher than a 2.
With a few exceptions. Carrion Crown can be a meat grinder for an averagely optimized party, for example.
Yeah...APs are designed for, at best, "passable" characters.
Look at the Iconics. The APs are basically designed around the Iconics. 15 PB, some abilities chosen for flavor even if they literally make your character worse or another option could have done the same thing but better, etc.
If your party is struggling in most APs then they are really the opposite of solid characters good at their roles, or they never roll higher than a 2.
With a few exceptions. Carrion Crown can be a meat grinder for an averagely optimized party, for example.
It could be a case of bad tactics/teamwork too. I'd rather run an AP with four middle-of-the-road builds whose players know how to work as a team than four optimized builds whose players don't know how to use their characters or work as a team.
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Yeah I'd need to know what AP you're playing, I'd also be curious to know what Point Buy and options you let your players choose from when building stats.
Also are you the GM or is it someone else at your table? There is a possibility your GM is increasing the challenge beyond what the book recommends if that's the case.
There's a lot variables here.
The characters are good capable of taking on the task at hand but i just find dome of the encounters are ott
The last one we did put four lvl 6 characters up against 3 trolls one of which was some type of magic user and this encounter is early in the game
The DM worked out the cr as a 9 that's an epic encounter and was basically the first combat of that section of the ap
And where all experienced players and have a good grasp of tactics
Ehhh...CR can be misleading sometimes.
3 Trolls (CR 5, maybe one CR 7 caster) vs 4 level 6 player characters is a fair fight.
That extra turn a round really counts for a lot.
Trolls in my experience are easy prey for level 6 characters unless maybe not a single one of them has some sort of fire/acid damage weapon/spell, or even a torch. So it stands to question what level the spellcaster was.
Also a note on CR. A creature is (supposed to be) equal in power to an appropriately equipped PC of a level equal to the creature's CR. So when a 4 player party of level 6 runs into a CR 6 monster encounter, the monsters are clearly at a disadvantage powerlevel-wise, they only amount to the power level of one of the players. A CR 9 encounter vs APL 6 is in theory just shy of having a 50% chance of winning. (if your PCs were to have a combat encounter with an exact copy of themselves the clones would amount to CR 10)
To be honest, my group is pretty far from optimized and we have often found the AP's to be too easy. Like when I dm'd for kingmaker, sometimes the fights were so easy another group of baddies just happened to show up right then.
At least I am pretty sure we are not that optimized. Like one person played a soulknife who was focused on Wisdom, just so he could use the guided weapon property. And I generally require my characters to have at least decent Charisma.
For the most part I have found APs to be extremely easy. My group is far from optimized (I am usually the exception) and we usually don't have much trouble through most things.
In my DnD/Pathfinder experience, it's all about the teamwork, balance between party roles, preparation and very quick fights.
If the roles within the party are perfectly balanced (e.g. melee tank, skill monkey, dedicated healer and dedicated arcane caster) combat becomes much easier. In Rise of the Runelords we had some monstrous fights that we only just survived because we lacked a full-on healer (sure, Wands of CLW out-of-combat but Druid just doesn't cut it in-combat).
If you allow prep-work or 'easy resting', even more so. For example my Wizard had real problems with dosing his spells in dungeons and the like during Rise of the Runelords, since we rule that spells only replenish once per 24 hours. I spent most of my time dishing out Magic Missiles or Acid Darts to save my main spells for a boss fight that did not necessarily come. In the two or three fights that we actually had intel about, could prepare beforehand and had no dungeon beforehand or afterwards, my Wizard basically took down Big Baddies in one or two turns by himself.
It's often hit-or-miss combat that's over in a split second; either it's impossibly difficult or incredibly easy. In APs probably even more so, as it's not as easy to fudge the rules/encounters (e.g. replace a white dragon with a red one or spontaneously tack on a few caster levels to that necromancer).
[edit: spelling]
No, you do not need to optimize.