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I want to start preparing for a PF2 game that I'm HOPING to start in March that is a continuation of an old Slumbering Tsar game that I had run for two years in Pathfinder 1st Edition and along with this comes the necessity to convert a folder full of "stock" PCs that can be swapped in or chosen like a pregen by the players at any time given the unforgiving nature of the adventure itself and to help make sense of things given that the adventure location simply does not make sense to have replacement PCs just show up out of the blue.
One such Character is Strix and I used him myself as a GMNPC and also had them passed around by nearly half the party as a temporary Character until they were able to write up a new replacement. For myself having played this Character and for the players as well the Strix ended up being one of my favorite races in the whole system.
The Strix has been pointed to a number of times as being an example of where the PF2 rule set is going both have a particularly hard time actually allowing for Players to take control of them as PCs due to their natural and contact ability to fly that is... well, it isn't really optional... at least in my opinion. I had considered the idea of changing Nocutural into an effective always-on penalty instead of providing a bonus to help offset things and adding in some other penalties given that they're more than a bit spooky and uncommon to the point of probably even being considered Rare in the PF2 rarity system.
I'm starting this topic to get the ball rolling on a discussion on how we might reasonably balance the Strix to account for at least SOME measure of functional flight. Since this PC is higher level (12th level) it's not crucial that it be possible at level 1 but in the spirit of the Strix I really do think this is something it should have, after all their wings are very much NOT vestigal at all. On top of this, they also have Darkvision which is also quite valuable.
I would like to find a way to make this work.
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Interesting topic. I'm slowly working on a harpy ancestry, and the way I'm planning to include flight is to go with the "wings are part of arms" interpretation and say they can't take actions that require arms or hold anything of greater than light bulk while flying. Even without that specific physiological setup, the ability to engage in mundane flight inherently comes with some disadvantages, at least to my conception of it, that should help balance it out:
★Flight requires action maintenance to stay in the air, moving upwards in any way takes twice as much movement, and you need Acrobatics to do anything difficult with a chance to fall or waste time if you mess up. These are already in the rules.
★★As a follow-up to this, even if you can hold things like bows, I think it makes perfect sense to enact some sort of penalty to make ranged attacks while flying, because the constant strenuous motion required can't be very good for that. This would help curb the most consistently brought-up "cheese potential".
★Flight requires a pretty light build, so low ancestry HP and a CON penalty make sense.
★★If the creatures have talons, and Strix do, it also makes sense to be kinda slow on the ground. Flight doesn't need to be especially fast, either.
There are always going to be GMs who refuse to allow any players the freedom of flight so early, even with the above stipulations, so I'm also planning on including a heritage which removes flight but also removes some of the above disadvantages and allows a second heritage to be taken, with later class feats offering flight at the same rate as aasimar and tieflings.
Speaking of which, Darkvision or Low-Light Vision could be locked to a heritage too, and my harpy homebrew will be going the halfling route. If you feel like Strix need it (due to their nocturnal nature) and are worried about the power of it being there in the chassis alongside flight, you can put in some form of sunlight sensitivity to help balance it out, as you're already considering, and/or a penalty to social impressions.
Whatever you do, don't feel too constrained by 1E mechanics, since a lot of the flavor evoked by those mechanics can be represented in heritages and feats. Good luck, I can give feedback if you come up with something ¯\_('v')_/¯