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My playgroup's been a bit busy this month, but we managed to get in a two-session playtest campaign. We hope to get in one more playtest session with different characters before things close, but here's a quick writeup of our thoughts so far:
I was GMing for a party of 3: a Sniper Gunslinger using an Arquebus, an Armor Innovation Inventor going for a melee build with a Dwarven War Axe, and a Swashbuckler just to round things out. All were level 7, with standard gear for their level, based on the "Character Wealth by Level" table.
The campaign only had 3 combat encounters. The first was a werebear and 3 werewolves, the second was by 2 Vrykolakas spawn, and the final encounter was a Vrykolakas Master. The first two encounters were one after the other in the same location, with only 10 minutes between them. The final encounter was effectively an ambush, but the party was freshly rested going into it.
It wasn't clear exactly how the tripod was supposed to work, so for the purpose of the playtest, I ruled that the tripod was something you set up in a square, and could then rest your weapon on it without any action cost so long as you stayed in that square. The gunslinger set his tripod up in the first encounter, but ultimately felt like spending the actions to move it wasn't worth it. He didn't really get a chance to deploy it in the final encounter.
Though the gunslinger player really dug the flavor of the class, he seemed frustrated with the clunkiness of the Arquebus. One shot per turn with PF2's fairly bounded accuracy made for enough wasted turns to be annoying (in his case exacerbated by bad rolls). Coupled with the relatively low damage on non-critical hits, and he didn't feel he contributed much in combat. Big critical hits were cool the few times they happened, and definitely felt right for a sniper, but I don't think he liked the price he had to pay for them. Maybe a little too much risk for not quite enough reward.
The fact that you still took a penalty shooting from prone with a firearm was also pointed out as an oddity, especially for a Sniper.
The Inventor player seemed to have better time. He was able to get off a Megaton strike in the first encounter, and found an opportune time to use Explosion in the second. He was hesitant to use an Unstable action twice in an encounter due to the high DC, but that's already been addressed. Overall, his Inventor played as well as any martial, but with enough tricks to feel unique.
One complaint I did get at the end of the campaign, however, was that the Inventor player felt the armor innovation was not particularly defensively impactful. He was never hit by energy damage, so the innovation amounted to little more than a free breastplate. He would have liked to see some first level modification options that were less situational.
We're going to try for one more session before February 5th, though this time I'll be playing a PC (I've decided on a Pistolero Gunslinger). I'm looking forward to seeing how it stacks up against the sniper, and hopefully I'll have better luck with the dice than my friend did.