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This is just a spitball, and may be entirely off the mark, but thought I would throw it out for discussion. Please forgive if it has been raised elsewhere, this just occured to me while playing a bard last night.
At the moment striking spell feels kind of meh to me personally, and it feels like a negligible difference from just casting a spell and striking as normal. The whole "I have this spell I can cast, I'm also going to sneak some strike damage in" feels kind of... boring? with the new action economy allowing for that double up fundamentally.
As a magus, you should be able to do it as part of your core routine, like a bard's composition cantrip, without feeling like it's a burden.
What if your strike was placed in a cantrip wrapper? That is, you gain a magus attack cantrip with a range of touch that deals damage equal to the damage of your weapon strike. It could be textured as a magical energy placed into your weapon, or even a held weapon created out of magic itself.
The key here is then the interactions you can get from applying spellcasting effects to your strikes. For one thing, you could get unique heighten effects depending on your synthesis or feats.
I'm hoping we see new spellcasting feats and metamagic feats in the new book, which is a perfect opportunity to use them in a unique way.
Reach Strike? Cool.
Widen strike? Heck.
We can then use the real estate of magus potency for focus spells that may give you free metamagic or combination effects.
This then allows the magus to then apply their magical upgrades to their martial prowess pretty organically. It means they can keep their identity as a intelligence caster, but one that is just trained to use it more directly in combat.
Obviously there would be things to consider:
- How do potency runes on a weapon work? Are they applied to your spell modifier?
- The magus should have a level of security casting spells while threatened
- Can we make dex/str more relevant by allowing you to choose that for your spell modifier when using the cantrip?
This may be too out there, but keen to hear any thoughts on it.