Missing Sunder? Combat Maneuvers suck?

[Dev-Alex]

Hi! In first edition, I always loved building characters around grapple/sunder/trip. After some time poring through this book, it seems like most of these maneuvers have been gutted to the point of near-uselessness as far as specialization. Sunder seems to not even be in the rules, Grappling no longer provides anywhere near as much benefit if you can't consistently restrain your targets, and now all of these maneuvers have critical failure downsides.
In the first edition, these combat maneuvers would give characters the ability to sort of specialize in taking down casters, but now since their grapple DC is scaling just as fast as your own, you'll be much less able to consistently take them out of the fight. I understand the weakening combat maneuvers to promote faster combats but it hurts these fun and unique combat styles.

Anyways, on to the rules question side of this. Does anyone know what the rules are for attacking an item someone is holding? I'm hoping I just missed it in my read-through.

[Malk_Content]

Sunder is gone, it was niche for player use and was mostly used to meanly destroy player items.

The remaining ones are way better at base than they were in PF1. You actually get to do them without getting hit by AoO before you get 2 feats. While they have crit failure stuff, PF1 had penalties for failing too (falling prone yourself for example.)

While there isn't much to specialize in maneuvers (which was true for core in PF1, the feats were all about not sucking at maneuvers which is base now) I'm sure there will be eventually via Athletics skill feats (you can already get a feat to grapple dragons.) There is some stuff in the class feats. For example a Giant Instinct Barbarian with Titan Wrestler can hit a Linnorm with another Linnorm. Fighters are also pretty awesome, getting feat support for most maneuvers.

[HammerJack]

In PF1, combat maneuvers were not a good implementation. They ended up being the domain of specialists, instead of something to attempt by situation.

A character with a trip build, who always trips, and has focused all of his skills around being the master of tripping isn't much more interesting than a character with no trip feats who knows that it's wildly impractical to attempt a trip, both detract from the variety of how specific encounters play out.

[Captain Morgan]

Sunder is gone, but not hard to house rule in if you want. Disarm is worse. I'd say the rest are all better. Many maneuvers had the same critical failure conditions in PF1, but I think people forget that.

[Captain Morgan]

Also, the maneuver class feats tend to be quite strong, allowing for things like auto success on them and what not.

Grapple doesn't debuff the enemy quite as hard, but it also doesn't debuff you at all anymore.