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Honestly, I think it is fine if you just want to say "I liked being able to lower stats to crank something up to absurd levels." That's a fine opinion. You can be bummed you are losing that option. There's no need to justify it; it is an opinion. But the only loss here is mechanically having an edge over other PCs.That's almost it. I do like pumping a single stat to absurd levels, simply because I enjoy the concept of characters like that. The "best at ice magic", the "strongest man who ever lived," etc. There are other ways to represent this, though, of course, so I am not going to say I miss it more than any other thing they've changed in PF2 so far...but I did have a lot of fun doing it. It's a real shame. You can probably guess that I loved mythic. "Realism" or "realistic characters" has never, ever, been my modus operandi.
Well, the good news is that stat generation is one of the easiest things to house rule if you and yours like it. :)
The other thing is that you still can build someone to be the best at a given thing; you just don't need to dump stats to do it. (Unicore, can I use this phrase if I'm not making any sort of inference to a character's disability? I don't want to offend, but it is hard to skirt around that particular phrase.) My understanding is that in PF2 this will become less about your raw numbers, and more to do with the options available to you. So the "World's Strongest Man" would probably be some kind of barbarian with Skill Feats focused on Athletics. Given the sort of stuff we have heard referenced for high level skills/feats, your character might be able to smash the ground and knock everyone around him on their butt, then snag a piece of ground you knocked loose and chuck it at a distant flier.
That said, I don't think I've ever done it to have a "advantage" over other players, only the monsters.
While I get what you are saying here (you aren't doing it to be superior to anyone else at the table) the net result is you becoming "better" than the other characters. You'll still be able to push yourself to being more potent than 90-99% of the world's population. I think it might help if you think of it less as your person becoming weak and more everyone else being brought up to your level.
Again though, this is a personal taste thing, and it perfectly fair for you to not like it. I'm just trying to lessen the blow for you.
I like D for "Direction" and as a replacement for the word "Archetype." Since it sounds like Archetypes don't actually replace anything anymore, and just stack on top of your class to add more options, it's probably expected that everyone will have one. This makes archetypes actually closer to Starfinder themes, which are really more like this type of "archetype" than like a PF2-style background. So, after you pick your Ancestry, Background and Class, you pick the Direction you are going to take your character.
This fourth step would be where the remaining +2 to four ability scores at 1st level is going to come in. And for those people who /really/ want to have a 20, maybe an acceptable rule is you can give up the +2/+2/+2/+2 to instead get +4/+0/+0/+0.
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Personally, I have no issues with a system that would allow a player to decrease one stat and receive a bonus elsewhere (whether that be a stat boost, feat, or something else) as long as there is a penalty associated with that stat decrease that actually comes into play. The issue I had with dumping in PF1 is that the most common dump stats were ones you could usually get away with dumping at very little mechanical penalty, such as Charisma when your party has another more socially-competent character or Strength on literally any spellcaster. That feels overly min-max-y to me. If you take a lower stat for a bonus, it should matter. Some other RPGs such as Mutants and Masterminds have a flaw system where you tell the GM how often you want your flaw to become an obstacle and you get points based on that, which works really well for the more narrative-focused games but not so well for PF2.
Hearing about stuff like Bulk and Resonance gives me hope that Paizo is focusing on giving every ability score something that (nearly) everybody will desire so that penalties to ability scores actually matter for every character, so I'm leaning towards a potential inclusion of a flaw system personally.
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I don’t care for playing with characters that dumped a mental stat down below 8 for the most part. They’re generally played as uncomfortable stereotypes. I’d rather not have there be an incentive for that, and I’d really dislike for dumping a stat into the ground to be the only way you can get the best main stat.
I also don’t think trading out the stat you care least about for the stat you care most about can be a balanced trade. If we need painfully overspecialized characters, I’d rather it be something like being able to trade the four +2s you probably get after ABCs to instead get +4 to one stat. Something that isn’t an automatic “yes”, even if you’re playing a crit-fish build or a save-or-suck Wizard. For a caster, this would balance the increased DC requiring three defense stats to be increased to match.
What if, for once in a lifetime, every stats has some mechanical value to every character like COS? Would that make dumping a stat more accepted?
As others have said, there's nothing stopping anyone from character generation the old fashioned way, and that's what my group will do if we decide to play the new version. We've always rolled dice for stats, no matter what version of the game, and there's no reason to stop that now. From what I understand there will be some rules or a notation on dice rolling for stats.
I'm pretty sure it has been hinted at that any magic weapon that does more than just extra damage dice will cost Resonance to activate.
[...]
Imagine if Speed grants you an extra Attack Action at no penalty, but requires Resonance to activate? What min-max power-gaming fighter is going to dump CHA now?
What if Keen adds an extra damage die on a crit, but only if you burn a point of Resonance?
It has been stated that magic weapons and armor cost 1 point of Resonance to "attune" at the beginning of the day, and then function all day without additional investment.
Individual Resonance point costs seem to be used for single-use or charged items like potions, wands, and things that were otherwise x/day abilities on magic items.
Still. A fighter with 6 CHA is going to have to make do with 2 less magic items than the 10 CHA fighter.
I'm pretty sure it has been hinted at that any magic weapon that does more than just extra damage dice will cost Resonance to activate.
[...]
Imagine if Speed grants you an extra Attack Action at no penalty, but requires Resonance to activate? What min-max power-gaming fighter is going to dump CHA now?
What if Keen adds an extra damage die on a crit, but only if you burn a point of Resonance?
It has been stated that magic weapons and armor cost 1 point of Resonance to "attune" at the beginning of the day, and then function all day without additional investment.
Individual Resonance point costs seem to be used for single-use or charged items like potions, wands, and things that were otherwise x/day abilities on magic items.
Still. A fighter with 6 CHA is going to have to make do with 2 less magic items than the 10 CHA fighter.
Swords don’t attune, so they don’t have a resonance cost at the start of the day. I forget whether or not that holds for armor.
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Yeah, weapons don't need to attune, though armor probably does. Add that there are only two or three required items, and while the Cha 6 Fighter is definitely gonna get less use out of magic items (especially consumables and wands) than the Cha 10 one, they can manage the basics easily enough by the time PCs start being able to afford non-consumable magic items.