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I've been comparing P1 and P2 a bunch this last week and trying to put my finger on why I felt so dissatisfied with P2. Its especially vexing because playing P2 is actually pretty fun, and has much of the feel of playing first edition pathfinder.
I think my main dissatisfaction with P2 comes from the incredibly narrow range of possible bonuses that the 4 degrees of success system forces on it. You can't have a character with an attack bonus or defense bonus be too far out of the range that the system expects or there will be tons and tons of crits. This exacerbate the effect of a small accuracy bonus; transforming it into a large damage bonus.
I started comparing this to how 3.5 and P1 approached balance and I noticed this: P1 takes a limited-resource balance approach. It gives you a certain number of resources, like feats, gp, point-buy etc, and asks you to spread them around to different offenses and around 6 defenses. The idea is that you can be average across the board, or specialize in some number of those fields. And it mostly works, as long as you avoid the blatantly broken combos and as long as the challenges you encounter attack all of your defenses, at least sometimes. This shifts a lot of the balance burden on to encounter design.
Its this build sub-game that was one of my favorite parts of pathfinder 1 and it gave context to all of the combat that I would engage in later. I also feel that the P1 approach gives more design space to create new and distinct options later on.
My suggestion would be to significantly expand permissible bonuses by level. Such that a combat focused character can have a 30%+ chance to crit on their first attack. However, to prevent accuracy from being godly, you would remove bonus damage on crits and replace it with weapon specialization effects. This gives a sneaky crit confirmation mechanic for the more powerful crit effects that would require a save. Further, to prevent unhittable AC and worthless attacks, make it so that misses, but not critical misses, are instead a graze and do minimum damage or have some other minor effect.
So an Strike with a Greatsword would look like:
success: You deal normal weapon damage
critical success: The target is also made off-balance by your attack, becoming flat-footed for 1 round.
failure: you graze the target dealing damage as if you had rolled 0 on your on your weapon's first damage die and 1 on each additional damage die. (Minimum 0 damage)
critical failure: You miss completely, dealing no damage.
Fireball would look like this:
success: The target takes half damage.
critical success: The target takes no damage
failure: the target takes 6d6 fire damage
critical failure: The target also catches fire, taking 1d6 persistent fire damage
Heighten (+1): Increase the damage by +2d6 and the persistent damage from a critical failure by 1 point of damage.