I'm working on a wizard build and for various reasons I have three skills that I want to advance to Legendary, none of which are Arcana. I will have Arcana trained, and a high Int as usual for a wizard, but I'm wondering if there's actually any negative mechanical consequence of not getting Expert/Master/Legendary in Arcana? I'm not seeing any but would greatly appreciate it if anyone can point out what I may have missed.
Learn A Spell runs off Arcana for Arcane, so not investing in that more will make those checks harder.
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Table of trained Wizard on Arcana and what you need to roll to learn the spell:
This is counting that you will at least buy or get the arcana items.
It keeps around 60% chance to learn the highest lvl spell possible, but the main thing is... you will not usually be trying to learn the highest possible because it's expensive money wise and harder to find the spell, so I usually see the wizards learning the spells lvl -1.
Can they? Sure. Is it viable? Not so much.
Learning spells, which is somewhat your bread and butter, and identifying spells (such as the Recognize Spell skill feat), requires Arcana. Can you skate by on simply getting the 2 spells per level? Potentially. It depends on how hard the AP (or GM running the content) is. For standard difficulty levels, it's plausible, and save for a couple spells I possess, it's basically the same progression I have, and that's while running through a notoriously difficult AP (Age of Ashes).
Also keep in mind that this doesn't mean you couldn't, for example, be a higher level and learn lower level spells on the easy (since you will be well above those DCs) to heighten to your higher level spell slots, while also saving time and money. Maybe you didn't take Haste at 5th level and decide that by 13th level you want to for that sweet Mass Haste heighten effect, saving your lower level spell slots for things like Slow, Mirror Image, etc. Well, all you need is someone who knows Haste that can teach you, or a copy of the Haste spell from a spellbook or scroll, and make a check as a 3rd level spell, then boom! 7th level Haste is a go!
But Identifying spells (and other Arcane-based effects), plus Recall Knowledge on difficult/strong creatures like Dragons or Elementals, are still plenty useful for you and your party so you can prepare plans of attack.
As far as your actual spellcasting to-hit and Save DCs, those will be unaffected, meaning your spellcasting contributions on that front will still be the same, which is what really matters for the Wizard class to contribute in a combat situation.
Thanks everyone for the very helpful comments. I guess what I'm trying to sort out is whether there is anything that is "locked" behind the higher levels of proficiency. For example, with Crafting, you can't even attempt to craft a higher level magic item unless you have a higher level of proficiency. But I'm not seeing anything like that with Arcana. Of course, with lower proficiency you will be less effective at, say, Learn a Spell or Recall Knowledge. But there don't appear to be any uses of Arcana that are simply unavailable if you don't go beyond the Trained level. Which, for me, inclines me strongly to go ahead and advance the other three skills, each of which do have features that only open up with Expert/Master/Legendary, and let Arcana languish.
I'd probably try to get Magical Shorthand somehow so failing to learn a spell isn't as bad. This would require you to go at least to expert somehow. Maybe pick up Runescarred Dedication to get there? Rogue Dedication with a few Skill Mastery feats also goes a long way towards getting more skills to higher proficiency.
The skilled heritage for humans also gets you to expert easily.
Taking Arcana skill to legendary is probably not necessary.
Getting master and picking up Magical Shorthand is definitely recommended. For most builds actually.
The only other thing that I can think of that would be 'gated' behind higher proficiency would be traps or other hazards that require higher proficiency in arcana in order to attempt search or disable checks.
If you were an archetype Wizard, you'd need progressively better Arcana to get the Basic/Expert/Master Spellcasting feats. A main class Wizard doesn't need to advance Arcana for anything.
If you want to advance more skills as a wizard, you could probably nab some archetypes that can give you more skill boosts. There’s the rogue archetype in the core rulebook as well as archetypes like the acrobat, bounty hunter, and dandy in the APG, not to mention a bunch of stuff from Lost Omens books & adventure paths.
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Aside from Learn a Spell, it's not like anything you have depends on it. I would argue Unified Theory is one of the best "magic skill" legendary feats, but it's not like a must have.
I think it might also play a role in Identifying Spells, but you probably aren't focusing in that anyways.
You're honestly fine as long as you're okay with using hero points to learn spells every so often and maybe taking Spellbook Prodigy. If you're worried about RP, nab additional lore for academia lore or some similar thing if you still want a high theoretical knowledge of arcane magic, and if you're at a home game, maybe work with the DM if they'll let you use it for learning spells
Thanks everyone for the very helpful comments. I guess what I'm trying to sort out is whether there is anything that is "locked" behind the higher levels of proficiency. For example, with Crafting, you can't even attempt to craft a higher level magic item unless you have a higher level of proficiency. But I'm not seeing anything like that with Arcana. Of course, with lower proficiency you will be less effective at, say, Learn a Spell or Recall Knowledge. But there don't appear to be any uses of Arcana that are simply unavailable if you don't go beyond the Trained level. Which, for me, inclines me strongly to go ahead and advance the other three skills, each of which do have features that only open up with Expert/Master/Legendary, and let Arcana languish.
It would be useful to know what skills you want to improve. Because some of them have very similar effects compared to Arcana. Occultism, for example, allow you to recognize spells, perform rituals and even add Occult/Arcane spells to your book if you have an Occult Dedication (GM dependent, but RAW doesn't forbid it). So it's possible to get nearly no downside when dumping Arcana. But that's very dependent on what other skills you improve.
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Thanks everyone for the very helpful comments. I guess what I'm trying to sort out is whether there is anything that is "locked" behind the higher levels of proficiency. For example, with Crafting, you can't even attempt to craft a higher level magic item unless you have a higher level of proficiency. But I'm not seeing anything like that with Arcana. Of course, with lower proficiency you will be less effective at, say, Learn a Spell or Recall Knowledge. But there don't appear to be any uses of Arcana that are simply unavailable if you don't go beyond the Trained level. Which, for me, inclines me strongly to go ahead and advance the other three skills, each of which do have features that only open up with Expert/Master/Legendary, and let Arcana languish.It would be useful to know what skills you want to improve. Because some of them have very similar effects compared to Arcana. Occultism, for example, allow you to recognize spells, perform rituals and even add Occult/Arcane spells to your book if you have an Occult Dedication (GM dependent, but RAW doesn't forbid it). So it's possible to get nearly no downside when dumping Arcana. But that's very dependent on what other skills you improve.
This is for a gnome Staff Nexus wizard who will take the Cleric dedication archetype. The last two feats in the Cleric archetype chain require master and legendary in Religion. Because he's a Staff Nexus wizard he'll want to be crafting his staves (and other magic items) and the crafting of higher level magic items is gated behind proficiency levels. So that only leaves one skill that he can advance up to Legendary. It could be Arcana but I'm really liking the idea of making use of the Gnome ancestry feat Empathetic Plea (for both mechanical and rp reasons), which will have much more staying power throughout his career if I advance Diplomacy rather than Arcana. If there were something that I cared about that was gated behind the Arcana proficiency levels (comparable to the Crafting/Religion examples above) I would likely give up on the Diplomacy idea, but from what I'm seeing in this thread, it seems like the only rules element like that are rituals (which I could presumably access via Religion anyway). Otherwise, it sounds to me like I won't be quite as good at Learning Spells and Recall Knowledge checks, but not that, e.g., you can't even Learn a higher level spell if you don't have sufficient proficiency, and I think I can live with that.
RP-wise, the idea is to make a "priest" of Nethys who believes that all his wizardry is actually just theology in action. Not the most original idea, but I'm having fun with it.
Thanks to everyone for the helpful comments and advice!
Have fun with your character~!
I would say yes, but for higher level, more effective spells, you might feel like you are lagging behind a sorcerer.
You will have a nicer collection of low level utility spells though.