You all are very knowledgeable and I would definitely welcome any constructive opinions regarding the below proposed house rule for my group.
We have a Champion in my group who wants to play as a martial, two handed Shield basher. Awesome! And there's a Feat for that. More awesome! But there are *so many* drawbacks.
No Traits for shields, Bosses or Spikes. Have to leave Stance to Lay on Hands. So many problems that wouldn't be problems if they just gave up and went Warhammer / Shield at the low, low cost of zero feats. The only net gain is 2 Hardness and you have to enter a stance to do it. And you're locked into a strategy of Move. Shield bash. Everstand Strike press. Boring. Uninteresting. Yuck.
So here is our proposed House Rule, *for which I take no credit, another player came up with it,* but so far it has proved such an elegant solution that I had to share in case someone else has a use for it (or would help me poke holes in it.)
I don't think it is imbalanced, but it should be noted that my group wouldn't play our characters as imbalanced even when we have the opportunity. RP, Character, and colorful, fun Thematic elements trump all. Our Anethema is definitely "Boring" or "Plain."
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Everstand Stance [Stance] is considered 1+ hands until you make any Strike involving your Shield, or take the Raise a Shield action, whereupon it becomes 2H for that action and remains 2H until the start of your next turn.
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So now you can Lay on Hands, Shove, Trip, Knockdown, all as stand alone free hand actions, without breaking stance, *as long as* you do so before using your shield in any way. Basically once you have interacted with your shield (Strike, Raise, etc.) you are locked into 2H until the beginning of your next turn.
Now all the sudden your Move - Bash - E-Strike list of things you can do without wrecking the flow of your combat becomes a puzzle you have to figure out with meaningful, interactive gameplay. I literally cheered out loud when my friend came up with this.
The Manipulate Trait of the Lay on Hands spell doesn't create problems to cast it while two-handing the shield (this was a problem during the Playtest, it's not anymore). Regarding the combat maneuvers, I think this can be worked around. As a Champion, I think you should be Intimidating and taking advantage the class' inherent focus on Charisma, it doesn't have the Attack Trait, so it can be used to debuff first. Also, you could just break the requirements of your stance by simply using your hand to perform a maneuver, the worst that can happen is to spend an action in the next round to get it back up. When you have so many Action Economy enhancers, I don't think spending an action once in a while to get it back up again is such a steep cost.
The alchemist needs to be spending 2+ actions just to grant a buff and there are some folks that thinks it's fine, a Champion getting the Stance back up after some situational grapple/trip is no big deal.