Oracle Focus Points

[Piasid]

Hey everyone, I'm brand new to the pathfinder system so forgive my ignorance if this is completely obvious, but I had a question about oracle's focus points. It is my understanding that you cannot ever have more than 3 focus points in your focus pool, however, there are multiple oracle feats at 12th level that give you 1 extra focus point. This is merely one level after you gain your third focus point at 11th level with the Major Curse feature. There are also feats that you can get before 11th level that also give you a focus point, again maxing your focus pool to 3 focus points prematurely and effectively devaluing Major Curse. To me, this seems completely useless and I'm not sure why the extra focus points were included in these feats. Does anyone know why they are there? Is there actually a way for an oracle to get more than 3 focus points?

[Kyrone]

No, the max is 3, the extra focus point in the feature is to make sure that an Oracle that picked 0 feats that gives focus points can still reach the max curse level with their first focus spell.

[Piasid]

But they already reach max focus at 11th level don’t they? They start with 2 points at level 1 and then gain an extra point at 11th level with Major Curse (class feature). Then at 12th level they can take an oracle feat to gain another focus point which seems like a waste since all oracles max out 3 focus points by default.

[breithauptclan]

I don't think that maxing out your number of focus points before getting Major Curse devalues Major Curse much at all. The extra focus point that it gives is the least benefit of the bunch.

First, Major Curse gives the 2-point refocus. Most classes have to pay a class feat in order to do that.

Second, it lets you spend more focus points during a single encounter. Oracle quickly gets too many focus points to be able to spend them all before getting hit by the curse burnout and not being able to cast focus spells for the rest of the day. Major Curse lets you push your curse one step farther before needing to refocus.

Third, and least important, if you do happen to still only have 2 focus points, Major Curse will give you a third automatically.

[thenobledrake]

Some feats in classes have what look like redundant requirements or benefits listed because those things become important when a character is using the multi-class archetype to gain those things. That could be the case with these Oracle feats.

[Piasid]

thenobledrake wrote:

Some feats in classes have what look like redundant requirements or benefits listed because those things become important when a character is using the multi-class archetype to gain those things. That could be the case with these Oracle feats.

True, but I didn't think you could get 12th level feats from multiclassing.