I played Raiders of Shrieking Peak yesterday and now it's time for some detailed thoughts.
I played a Dwarf Wizard with a fighter multi-class and the magical striker feat that I built to try out the true-strike + weapon combo.
The rest of the party were: Valeros the pregen, a dragon-style monk who could Leap 25 ft, and a bard with a horse.
The most obvious thing I noticed is that my wizard was better then Valeros in every way. Between my arcane focus, spells, and my two-hander I could attack with a bigger bonus and more damage then the fighter, while also throwing down powerful buffs and debuffs. The ability advancement meant that I could have 18 strength and intelligence along with 16 constitution while poor Valeros was limited to 19 strength giving him no benefit in combat. I also had the same AC as him, my shield cantrip did not take a hand and I had 65 hp with false life up.
To balance all this out, Valeros has... reactive shield?
PE2 gives you more options to move, but because there were no AoOs I never felt the need to. When the minotaurs attacked us on the bridge, I stepped once that combat and then proceeded to cast a 2 action spell, boost my weapon to +2 and then attack every round for the rest of the combat. As powerful as this was, it felt kind-of lame thematically.
The battle against the boss with the watchtowers felt strange. I don't think the adventure gave a height for the watchtowers so our DM declared them to be 10ft tall. That's when we discovered that it was impossible to jump that high for anyone not optimized for it and that climbing the ladder would take 2 actions. I spent all fight throwing my sword with Hand of the apprentice and Magical Striker at the BBEG and poor Valeros had to plink away with his non-magical bow. That felt pretty unfair too.
Fireball and Haste felt underwhelming compared to glitter-dust, and true-strike. Fireball did less damage then my (magical striker empowered) sword and it never had more then 2 targets. Since I was a gish I was hoping to haste myself but I found that the bonus action was not really useful. I couldn't use it to ready an action after I cast haste, the second or third attack it gives is not that exciting and moving was not that exciting because I would usually already be in fierce melee most of the time. On the other hand the bonus speed was not so absurd that I could use it to quickly climb the watchtowers as it would still take me my whole turn to go up the ladder and the lack of an AoO means that the BBEG would just fly away from me. I think Haste could be safely dropped to level 2 and fireball probably needs a bit more damage to be worth using your best spell-slot on.
Almost all my character building time was spent picking spells. The poor organization of the PDF and the lack of a hyper-linked SRD meant that it was incredibly tedious to figure out which spells fit my build. I gave up actually filling out my spellbook and just selected the spells that I would prepare; like some-sort of sorcerer.
We had no cleric, so I was worried about healing, but the adventure was pretty short so it was fine. I did discover that the feat Trick Magic Item lets me use the minor staff of healing and I converted all of my resonance into heals. That felt pretty neat. It was unclear which skill I was supposed to use to activate the staff or at what point resonance is spent: when I make the trick magic item roll or when I actually activate the staff.
On an editing note: Either Hand of the Apprentice needs to not have the attack trait or Flurry of blows needs it. Flurry has you make 2 Strikes and (by my reading) those suffer from the multiple attack penalty (so -0, -5) because Strike has the attack trait. On the other hand (of the apprentice) the wizard power has the attack trait and it has you make a Strike, so by the monk logic the power "eats" you first attack and the ranged attack you make would be at -5. But that's clearly not the intent.
TL;DR The adventure was fun, I felt powerful, Fighters need to be re-written, haste/fireball were meh, AoOs need to come back.
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The battle against the boss with the watchtowers felt strange. I don't think the adventure gave a height for the watchtowers so our DM declared them to be 10ft tall. That's when we discovered that it was impossible to jump that high for anyone not optimized for it and that climbing the ladder would take 2 actions. I spent all fight throwing my sword with Hand of the apprentice and Magical Striker at the BBEG and poor Valeros had to plink away with his non-magical bow. That felt pretty unfair too.
I looked at the scenario after we played and the GM got the watchtowers slightly wrong. The watchtowers were 15ft tall. More importantly, climbing the towers by the ladders was quite easy (1/2 move vertically WITHOUT an athletics check).
There is an entry in setting skill DCs by level that calls out that some tasks don't require a check. But its pretty hidden and, at the table, it never occurred to me that climbing a make shift ladder to a watchtower would be one of those tasks. I expected it to be low or trivial difficulty but NOT automatic.
Hand of apprentice is power, not spell. Even though they are listed in the same chapter.
Magical striker trigger is "You finish casting a non-cantrip spell on
your turn."
Reading it literally, Hand of apprentice+magical striker combo should not work at all.
Wondering now whether they were planned to work together and whether that bit gets fixed.
A power is a kind of spell. The whole point of powers was to get rid of the spell/spell-like-ability distinction.