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Click bait title? Not really; it's relevant.
I remember the early days of WoW, and it's less successful but vastly better in almost all ways competitor, Everquest II. During those early days (by which I mean the first 3 or 4 years, actually) there was a great deal of imbalance in both games. Really, in every MMO I've played.
By "imbalance", I mean when one class is vastly better than another, or when one skill or ability or spell is overpowered, or underpowered. Basically, anything that required the developers to fix it by balancing it against other game features.
What happened in all those MMOs, over and over again, was that the developers would make a change. For example, some Cleric spell that does way too much damage. So they fix that spell by making it do a lot less damage.
All too often, they fixed it too much. The new version doesn't do enough damage and nobody ever wants to use it.
The pendulum swung from "too powerful" to "not powerful enough".
Then they fixed it again, often swinging the pendulum back to "too powerful". And again, and sometimes again.
No big deal, they would just fix it again. And again. Eventually, they would get it right. Sometimes even on the first try, but often, it took two or three fixes until it worked right (balanced).
I mention this because I'm seeing some of these pendulum swings here.
The playtest rules had lots of things that didn't work quite right. The entire alchemist class. Ranger's Hunt Target. Some paladin stuff. Lots more.
Now at version 1.6 of the updates, with no more major updates coming in the playtest, we see that pendulum swinging the other way. Huge changes to the alchemist, but most of them cannot access mutagens now and their bombs are so underpowered as to make them want to just hit monsters with swords. Ranger's Hunt Target has been given more options, but they're all pretty weak and underpowered. Paladins got split into three classes, sort of, but clearly some are traps and some are not. Etc.
That pendulum is swinging wildly around, back and forth, to and fro.
Those MMOs had all the time in the world to fix stuff. They had the luxury of taking their best guess, throwing it to the players, then sitting back and seeing what happens. Because they can just patch and patch and patch until it works.
Paizo doesn't exactly have that luxury. It's very hard to patch a printed rulebook. They have just a few more months to get it all right. Whatever isn't right, we're going to have to live with it forever, or live with huge errata documents until they release a Pathfinder 2.1 rulebook.
I was hoping by now to see that pendulum sitting pretty still, but it isn't. Even the 1.6 update kicked it into new life, not that it had really slowed down much.
I am hoping that Paizo is taking stock. Considering the risk of missing a deadline vs. the risk of getting the rules only partially right (or partially good).
I want them to know that I can wait. If it's 2020 before I see a really really good Pathfinder 2.0 hit the shelves, I'm fine with that. What I'm not fine with is getting a mediocre Pathfinder 2e in 2019 and then I have to start houseruling everything or I have to wait for errata documents so that, a year later, the heavily errata'd 2020 version is finally fixed.
How does everybody else feel? Who, like me, can wait for a great product?
It is the last major update, according to one of the Twitch videos associated with it. There may be more minor updates between now and the end of the playtest.
One of the chief issues with balance in those games is that, while it was easy to quantify numerical stats and class representation in top end content, you lost much of the more invisible balancing mechanics. There was also the hurdle of numerical adjustments giving new context to other abilities such that tighter balance didn't make classes feel more equal, but rather shrunk the design space available for differentiating classes.
It's my impression that PF2 is dealing with that last issue. Balance is actually really close on most things, but the cost in range of differentiation has become rather narrow and the tolerance for remaining imbalance hasn't increased.
I mean, I still run RPGs that went out of print in the mid-90s, so I can wait forever. It's not like we don't have some PF1 APs to finish and converting those to PF2 is going to be a lot more work than "just using the old rules."
So I'm not sure I was going to run more PF2 until the meaty hardback supplements come out anyway. I personally did not think much of PF1 before the APG, ARG, Ultimate Magic, and Ultimate Combat came out.
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I mean, I still run RPGs that went out of print in the mid-90s, so I can wait forever. It's not like we don't have some PF1 APs to finish and converting those to PF2 is going to be a lot more work than "just using the old rules."
So I'm not sure I was going to run more PF2 until the meaty hardback supplements come out anyway. I personally did not think much of PF1 before the APG, ARG, Ultimate Magic, and Ultimate Combat came out.
Yeah, my table is probably in this boat. We love Pathfinder and we like Starfinder nearly as much (more, at least for the refreshing setting).
We'll be good playing the existing Pathfinder stuff for a long time and maybe only switching to Pathfinder 2e down the road when we run out of Pathfinder material.
Although, I do see us taking a few things we like from 2e and using them as house rules in Pathfinder games.
Director of Game Design
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Folks,
The purpose of these boards is to provide feedback on the mechanics and rules presented in the playtest. Speculation on our internal timing, print deadlines, and ability to accomplish needed changes in the time remaining is not germane to these boards or our playtest cycles.
I appreciate that some of you are concerned about where the game is going, but this is not a discussion that is going to lead anywhere productive.
This thread is locked.