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Part of it is also that it's better to let the fighter get nearly killed than to actually spend a fireball. Because outside of combat you can get HP back to full for 0 resources. That fireball isn't coming back without resting. There's no reward for nuking the mooks as hard as possible. The casters are the only ones playing resource management so anything short of the fighter's life is cheaper than actually spending a top level slot on fireball. What is the caster actually providing the party by clearing the mooks out in 1 round instead just letting the fighter spend 3 rounds cleaning up?3 - This is a feeling I don't personally have, but I think it's worth mentioning. Blasters are at their best when fighting hordes of minions. Lots of people don't think of punching below their weight class as very fun or important to the party.
This is very much an encounter design issue and a perception issue as opposed to an actual game mechanic situation. Most people have better things to do that sit around for hours at a time waiting for the fighter to heal up to full hit points. When does it matter when the wizard can nuke 4 enemies in the time it might take another martial character to kill one? When the story arc of the encounter has consequences bigger than spend an unlimited amount of time fighting this next group, then take as long as you want before fighting the next group. Navigating that can be a little tricky and take time to develop, but why is it fine to give parties 3 hours to heal between every fight and not for the party to invest in resources that will let the party move on from one encounter to the next quickly and efficiently?
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Elements of the wizard that relate to them being an academic:
Having a spell book that they have to study every day to memorize spells
Having a thesis about magic that expands the way they use their multiple spells.
You gain an additional spell per level in the school you study.
Your class skill is the skill that will let you excel at identifying magic eventually having a feat that lets you use it for all things magical (I actually do have a little bit of gripe with what really separates occultism from arcana as a skill and don't think the game is better for having both of them, but it is not enough of an issue to break the game).
But this is all window dressing, you get that, right? None of this actually makes them academic or function as knowledge utilising class in the actual game.
Just being a prepared caster doesn't make you academic. Needing a book that is pure set-dressing, it doesn't do anything.
Arcane Thesis is just a name, none of them do anything with knowledge or academics.
Unified Theory is a general feat that anyone can take. Wizards don't even get it from anywhere other than just taking it themselves normally. It's no more a Wizard ability than Scare to Death is a barbarians (EDIT: Actually, I totally forgot, Barbarians actually have a class feat which gives them Scare to Death for free with other stuff...)
None of this does anything academical. If you re-flavoured a druid to be all book themed, he would be just a Wizardy apparently.
This is what I mean when I talk about executing on the class concept. The Wizard has a knowledge based concept, but doesn't interact with the games knowledge system at all. It's not mechanically there.
Wizards have to dedicate a lot of the study time to learning and memorizing spells as a result they have the most spells to cast per day and get feats to make that number even bigger.
I must have missed the part of where sorcerers need to spend a lot of study time for their 4th slot.
Without mechanical expression, they aren't a knowledge class. Study, research, experimentation... all stuff in the Wizards concept that don't have a mechanical expression. Just slapping a word on something doesn't make it that "thing", it has to actually do something.
I think you're missing the main point of #4. I'm not saying casters should one shot encounters that are mook hordes. I'm saying they already do that, at every level up to 20, with AoE Incapacitation spells. It's not a theoretical what if scenario, my Occult Sorceress has been doing that for the past 8 levels or so, and only gets better at it the higher level we go. I've actually stopped using these spells on purpose unless we were getting pushed hard, so the other players didn't end up doing cleanup job. The point here is that the thing AoE Blasting does the best (horde clearing) is done better by a completely different class of spells.Also, blast spells damage increases faster than enemy hps. It's true that if you blast enemies of a lower level, there will be a spot at level 5-6 where the difference is huge because there's a huge difference between a level 5 enemy and a level 2 one. But I don't find that "killing everything with one spell" should be an expected outcome. It trivializes the encounter and your allies are just there to watch.
At higher level, even if you don't one shot the encounter, scoring hundreds of damage in a single round is always a very satisfying moment.
So, from your answer, it looks like you're speaking more of a feeling than an actual weakness of blasting. As I said earlier, feelings are important, we are there to have fun. But there's a difference between saying that blasters are weak and saying they are not enjoyable.
Calm Emotions only exists in the Occult and Divine spell list which are quite bad at blasting. If you are a Primal or an Arcane caster, you have no way to end an encounter with an AoE Incapacitation effect before high level.
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Doesn't it reflect poorly on Paizo that people have to look to homebrew just to play archetypes that were viable out of the box in PF1? Shouldn't Paizo have done their best to ensure that blaster casters, specialist wizards, and bomber alchemists felt good to play from day one rather than forcing people to wait years for a book that *might* help them?
No. No it does not. Paizo is producing an RPG with (comparatively) very few people on the writing team, and a heavy focus on keeping a number of disparate classes well-balanced, with a smooth, easy-to-use system. They did an amazing job at that. This is fundamentally both a difficult thing to do and an act that requires sacrifice. One of the things they sacrificed was that "breadth of viable character archetypes" was kept at "moderate" rather than "huge". PF1 didn't have that problem because PF1 wasn't trying nearly as hard to be balanced in the first place, so they could throw stuff out there in a way that PF2 can't. Now, Paizo is slowly adding this stuff back in, in a gradual way, so they can maintain that game balance. That's *good*. That's the way they *should* do this thing. It's much, *much* easier to put in a ceiling, then find the archetypes that fell behind (perhaps by listening to the players) and make little tweaks to bring them up to par than to try to run it the other way... and the games that result in the interim are a lot more playable, too, once people learn which builds to avoid (or houserule).
The thing about doing your best is that it's fundamentally spending from a limited resource pool. You can't "do your best" at every conceivably important thing, because if you do, you're just lying to yourself, and it's not your actual best anymore. Tradeoffs are a thing... and even people like bomber alchemists are still a lot more viable by comparison with their allies than, say, a mid-level monk was when standing next to a mid-level minion necro party member in PF1.
Emphatically, no. "It works in a different game" isn't an argument for something being actually worth adding to a game.
Then Paizo, already a niche company within a niche genre,must have accepted that it will bleed PF1 players while also having no starter box ready at launch. How is this anything but a failure to grab the most players possible which should be their explicit aim?
Paizo did do their best.
Paizo also, in less than "years" and without the price of buying an additional book, improved on their best effort where it fell short of their goals.
Yes, with errata and SRD material? That's common to all TTRPG companies and isn't an example of Paizo doing anything special.
That some people don't like the way things turned out is not proof that Paizo didn't put in appropriate effort, nor even that they didn't do an excellent job.
They sure put in a lot of effort only to have a lot of people disappointed with how certain classes work. That isn't excellent by a long shot.
Because Pathfinder isn't the Dresden Files RPG, nor is it trying to convince you that it is. It isn't even trying to be that kind of fantasy game, so acting like it's weird that you can't be Harry Dresden isn't actually a reasonable thing.
There are tons of characters referred to as "wizard" that the game isn't trying, and thus is not succeeding at, emulating (and more than one of them are named Harry).
If people can't play their core fantasy they won't play this system at all. This is why Paizo must do a better job at making the clunky aspects of this system work. Customers won't care about how small they are or how hard it is to do, they'll just see a game that doesn't let them play and skip on to the next one.
This might work for those that are invested enough to defend the system on these boards but will not work for the public at large. Given that Paizo lacks a valuable and unique IP they really must be, by a long shot, the best Fantasy RPG on the market if they want to keep growing. I don't think they've hit that point yet and I worry that they never will.
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How is this anything but a failure to grab the most players possible which should be their explicit aim?
Actually their explicit aim is to make a game they think is fun. If their goal was to make a game that attracts the most players then they'd shut the company down and get jobs at WotC.
No. No it does not. Paizo is producing an RPG with (comparatively) very few people on the writing team,
Why should I, as a fan of TTRPGs and not Paizo specifically, care about their staffing and/or budgetary issues?
and a heavy focus on keeping a number of disparate classes well-balanced, with a smooth, easy-to-use system. They did an amazing job at that. This is fundamentally both a difficult thing to do and an act that requires sacrifice. One of the things they sacrificed was that "breadth of viable character archetypes" was kept at "moderate" rather than "huge". PF1 didn't have that problem because PF1 wasn't trying nearly as hard to be balanced in the first place, so they could throw stuff out there in a way that PF2 can't.
Paizo has essentially made a luxury sedan with a good resale value, reasonable full efficiency, and a not substandard number of features. It may be a feat that they managed it in a shed with only handtools but that doesn't mean that I, as a player, shouldn't be disappointed that they didn't manage to add any customization options that might help it better fit my desired performance needs.
Now, Paizo is slowly adding this stuff back in, in a gradual way, so they can maintain that game balance. That's *good*. That's the way they *should* do this thing. It's much, *much* easier to put in a ceiling, then find the archetypes that fell behind (perhaps by listening to the players) and make little tweaks to bring them up to par than to try to run it the other way... and the games that result in the interim are a lot more playable, too, once people learn which builds to avoid (or houserule).
How can you call PF2 a balanced game with one breath and then say that it has builds to avoid with the next? Either their flat math worked any made *every* build viable or it failed. I also would have prefered a higher floor to PC power and more magical martial classes as that would have allowed casters to keep a little more power budget that could have made them more interesting.
The thing about doing your best is that it's fundamentally spending from a limited resource pool. You can't "do your best" at every conceivably important thing, because if you do, you're just lying to yourself, and it's not your actual best anymore. Tradeoffs are a thing... and even people like bomber alchemists are still a lot more viable by comparison with their allies than, say, a mid-level monk was when standing next to a mid-level minion necro party member in PF1.
This was only an issue in PF1 if the group didn't discuss campaign goals and power levels. You could also run a perfectly balanced PF1 game if you had a group that all wanted to play at a similar power level, you just also had a greater range of possible power levels and more tools to build out the *exact* character you wanted rather than sticking to the safe well trodden path that PF2 asks you kindly stick to.
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