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One other thing I have noticed is that newer classes tend to be less front-loaded. The CRB classes tend to get their stronger features first and have stronger lower-level damage that peters out, whereas the newer classes tend to have poor early damage that scales up, as well as strong features in the mid- and late-level slots.
I don’t think that’s a balance issue, per se, but I do think it becomes a factor if games are more skewed towards lower levels, which I do think tends to be the case.
I think it's definitely relevant to the discussion. There are some really choice swashbuckler feats a mid/high levels that can make them dramatically more powerful, for instance, whereas some of their lower level options (at least in terrms of raw damage output) are less impressive.
... I think that goes for your talk about thief rogues and dex builds too. The thief is getting a solid +4 damage at level 1 and freeing up some boosts, which is amazing when another build might have a baseline of d6+0 or d6+1... but by level ten that +4 has only scaled to a +5, while average monster HP is eight or nine times higher.
Running Night of the Gray Death I saw a lot of characters come up that I never see in a traditional 1-20 campaign because the build takes a while to come online or has serious output issues at low levels.
I feel like scaling is definitely something that wasn't really considered enough when this game was being developed.
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The undershooting on powerlevel is fine in PFS and maybe in home games, but The APs (at least Age of Ashes and Extinction curse) are too hard. A party needs to optimize to get through an AP, and that feels bad.
An easy solution to this is to just buff the PCs a little.
Maybe give them Free Archetype.
With inexperienced players, have their characters be a level higher than they "should" be.
The entire group being weak is easy to solve
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Not to beat a dead horse but things like dragon disciple dragon breath is really just silly. Theres very little reason it can't at least be an innate spell. As it is now, its basically a trap option for any but a tiny fraction of classes (arcane charisma caster... So sorcerer) unless they spend at least 4 feats on multiclass casting feats.
Asking for something like that isn't about being overpowered, it's just about making things useable.
Anyone who has seen a god wizard in play would know better than saying PF2 designers weren't thinking clearly when writing any of the classes.I really don't understand why people expect errata to bring a redesign of classes. An errata is concerned with correcting egregious mistakes, usually of the Too good to be true variety, and sometimes with giving needed clarifications. Redesign is completely out of an errata's purview.People were expecting the egregious mistakes of these classes' power budgets to be corrected, and it to be clarified that the designers weren't thinking clearly the first time around.*looks at the power balance of 3.x*
*looks at what this guy is calling "egregious mistakes" in the power balance of PF2*Huh.
People really do adjust to improvements in their quality of life with startling speed, don't they?
I actively paced myself when playing a level 9-13 Conjuration Wizard in PF1e. I picked up Bonded Item and mainly focusing on enabling my friends. One of my mates was always annoyed that I wasn't dealing more damage... While missing the fact that was basically carrying the team with my battlefield control, buffs and utility spells.
I could've been doing a lot more with my spells, picking the cheesy stuff or even summoning a horde, but I didn't.
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Anyone who has seen a god wizard in play would know better than saying PF2 designers weren't thinking clearly when writing any of the classes.I really don't understand why people expect errata to bring a redesign of classes. An errata is concerned with correcting egregious mistakes, usually of the Too good to be true variety, and sometimes with giving needed clarifications. Redesign is completely out of an errata's purview.People were expecting the egregious mistakes of these classes' power budgets to be corrected, and it to be clarified that the designers weren't thinking clearly the first time around.*looks at the power balance of 3.x*
*looks at what this guy is calling "egregious mistakes" in the power balance of PF2*Huh.
People really do adjust to improvements in their quality of life with startling speed, don't they?
I actively paced myself when playing a level 9-13 Conjuration Wizard in PF1e. I picked up Bonded Item and mainly focusing on enabling my friends. One of my mates was always annoyed that I wasn't dealing more damage... While missing the fact that was basically carrying the team with my battlefield control, buffs and utility spells.
I could've been doing a lot more with my spells, picking the cheesy stuff or even summoning a horde, but I didn't.
A friend of mine told us once to build whatever we wanted for a level 15 pf1e one-shot. I brought a caster with Icy Prison. We didn't play high level pf1e ever again.
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Actually, it is, if only to remember why things are this way and which pitfalls they were designed to avoid.
I guess players who come from 5e should play a bit of PF1 in all its glory and conversely those who come from PF1 should enjoy a few games of 5e, so that we can all better appreciate PF2.
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Perfect balance doesn't exist. When it comes to balance the only thing we can achieve is "good enough".
My main characters are a blaster Angelic Sorcerer, a Chirurgeon Alchemist, a Tempest Oracle, a bow Rogue and a Superstition Barbarian. I don't think any of these characters appear in an optimization guide, and I'm pretty sure half of them are subpar options.
I have fun playing them. Not because I don't need much to have fun but because they actually do the job while delivering my fantasies. As I play PFS I'm seeing a lot of parties, and I've very rarely felt that my character was not contributing properly (and very often it was due to level differences).
In contrary, in PF1 and 3.5, I've had way more issues with meaningful contribution. I've stopped playing a character because it was just too weak to contribute. I've seen optimized characters trivializing adventures to the point of boring everyone at the table.
PF2 balance is good enough to me. It doesn't mean it is good enough to everyone, but I sometimes feel that power discrepancies are given more weight than they actually have. Do we need to compare every new martial to the Fighter and every new caster to the Bard?
I also think we sometimes forget the big picture: characters fill multiple roles and interact with each other. A Fervor Witch can be the perfect 4th character for a party lacking healing and buffing when a Bard, despite being mechanically superior, would be a worse choice.
I have a question to the OP: If you have a fantasy that is perfectly embodied by a Witch, would you play one or would you just forget about your fantasy?
Players only care about balance when the difference is super obvious, and even then they only care if it makes the game un fun. When you say players care about X +/- Y but devs care about X +0/-2 Y, depends on some stuff, but it's missing an important thing: What is the starting point.
A player sees option A, B, and C then decide B is the best and C is the worst. They want devs to make things closer to B rather than C and will settle for more A, they rarely want things better than B or worse than C. A dev sees option A, B, and C then decide B is the best and C is the worst. They have 3 options:
* Balancing around A in which case the new option can fall anywhere between B and C.
* Balancing around B in which case the new option can be better than B or closer to A.
* Balancing around C in which case the new option can be close to A or worse than C.The statement that devs use X +0/-2 Y has the huge problem that it requires the balance to be around the very best, but aims at creating something close to the worst. This is exactly the type of stuff players do not want to see. Players would rather that the game be balanced around the average option and get a better than average result. You can see this type of failure with the design of casters. Bards are the literal best casting class because every option that they have is always very impactful, while Wizards are seen as the worst because all of their options feel boring (or phoned in). So what type of casters have they released since CRB? More classes balanced that are closer to the Wizard and as far from the Bard as possible.
Martials, is less noticeable but you can still see it. CRB martials have effectively always on effects after you activate them. But every single non CRB martial requires that you reactivate their class mechanic every turn or limits the number of uses. Magus/Warpriest could had been balanced around being a martial with 2/3 spells for buffs/burst, that would put them on par with Barbarian needing to Rage or Ranger needing Hunt...
I'm catching up on stuff here but I felt I need to address this:
Wizard is definitely not the worst caster, many people disagree with that. Wizards are the ones that require the best system mastery out of all casters (Need to know which uncommon/rare spells to try to get, need to understand the learn a spell activity the best, need to weight all thesis, need to remember every g@*~$*n spell in the arcane list by rote) but if you DO have that system mastery, they are g%$$%!n strong because they have the ability to pivot and always have the right spell for the job, or to simply have the most higher level spell slots.
Bards are strong, don't get me wrong, but I've played both to high level and let me tell you that my wizard packed a lot more support AND punch than my bard because the bard was confined to his cantrips and a few spontaneous spells, as well as charisma casting which makes a poor ritualist, whereas my substitution wizard had a massive spellbook that he could spend 10 minutes to read out of to have the perfect spell for the situation at hand.
Also I feel Occult is way too biased towards will saves which, yes, are good to target but a lot of creatures are immune to mental or have high will saves. Occult is YMMV, Arcane has everything but heals.
Also for the weaker classes, I think it depends on degree of system mastery and prioritization.
I'm GMing a game with an arcane witch now, the player has great system mastery and is making that hex cantrip work very well, they combo very well with the lore oracle in the party. They are 2 players with great system understanding and mastery, and they chose some mechanically inferior classes because they thought it would fit the theme they wanted well, and now they combo almost perfectly together (I am lenient with RK checks though, often giving important plot information or relevant information on them to rewards their inventivity).
I have played a curse witch low level, if you know what you're doing it works well, my issue was with the occult spell list not the witch class.
I am a player in another game with a witch, the player kinda messed up his theme but so far its still working great.
Finally I am a player where I am the only prepared caster with a fervor witch in the party as the main support and so far she's been devastating. Stoke the heart can be very potent as it allows you to boost both spells and melee. With the right team and build I would say it is better than bard.
Let's not forget that while spontaneous casting is useful, it limits available options by a lot. Prepared casting is harder to master but potentially better at utility and OOC casting, if its the right campaign for it (AoE has very little downtime so maybe not... but Kingmaker has years of downtime and thus gives you the perfect amount of time to learn your spells for free and cast all your downtime lock and glyph spells on your perfect castle, as well as assemble your horde of explodable minions)
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I have a question to the OP: If you have a fantasy that is perfectly embodied by a Witch, would you play one or would you just forget about your fantasy?
Honestly, I would just play a Wizard/Druid/Sorcerer (depending on specifics) and say they have a patron. Maybe get a Familiar if that's important for this specific character. Flavor is malleable, subpar mechanics are not.
Would I rather have something that is good and better represents the flavor? Absolutely. But for what a lot of the new classes I don't think that's a possibility, and that's kind of why I'm frustrated to begin with.
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...Players only care about balance when the difference is super obvious, and even then they only care if it makes the game un fun. When you say players care about X +/- Y but devs care about X +0/-2 Y, depends on some stuff, but it's missing an important thing: What is the starting point.
A player sees option A, B, and C then decide B is the best and C is the worst. They want devs to make things closer to B rather than C and will settle for more A, they rarely want things better than B or worse than C. A dev sees option A, B, and C then decide B is the best and C is the worst. They have 3 options:
* Balancing around A in which case the new option can fall anywhere between B and C.
* Balancing around B in which case the new option can be better than B or closer to A.
* Balancing around C in which case the new option can be close to A or worse than C.The statement that devs use X +0/-2 Y has the huge problem that it requires the balance to be around the very best, but aims at creating something close to the worst. This is exactly the type of stuff players do not want to see. Players would rather that the game be balanced around the average option and get a better than average result. You can see this type of failure with the design of casters. Bards are the literal best casting class because every option that they have is always very impactful, while Wizards are seen as the worst because all of their options feel boring (or phoned in). So what type of casters have they released since CRB? More classes balanced that are closer to the Wizard and as far from the Bard as possible.
Martials, is less noticeable but you can still see it. CRB martials have effectively always on effects after you activate them. But every single non CRB martial requires that you reactivate their class mechanic every turn or limits the number of uses. Magus/Warpriest could had been balanced around being a martial with 2/3 spells for buffs/burst, that would put them on par with Barbarian needing to
Wizards (specialy spell blenders) and most Sorcerers are better than Bards in the last quarter of the level spectrum because when you are there martial damage loses a bit of relevancy. Having more high level slots then is more important than being better at amping martial damage (which you might be able to cover with low-ish level spells now). Bards are still the best overall caster in the system, though.
Personally I think Arcane Sorcerers are the best casters late game. Spellbook feat + Crossbloded feats mean that you not only are able to somewhat prepare as a spontaneous caster, but that you can cherry-pick those 2 or 3 broken spells your list is missing.
I have a question to the OP: If you have a fantasy that is perfectly embodied by a Witch, would you play one or would you just forget about your fantasy?Honestly, I would just play a Wizard/Druid/Sorcerer (depending on specifics) and say they have a patron. Maybe get a Familiar if that's important for this specific character. Flavor is malleable, subpar mechanics are not.
I just so happen to be playing a sorcerer character who is colloquially known as being a witch. Not because the Witch class is in any way subpar, but because the Charisma-based chasis of the Sorcerer class better fit the deceptive villain I was going for.
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I have a question to the OP: If you have a fantasy that is perfectly embodied by a Witch, would you play one or would you just forget about your fantasy?Honestly, I would just play a Wizard/Druid/Sorcerer (depending on specifics) and say they have a patron. Maybe get a Familiar if that's important for this specific character. Flavor is malleable, subpar mechanics are not.
Would I rather have something that is good and better represents the flavor? Absolutely. But for what a lot of the new classes I don't think that's a possibility, and that's kind of why I'm frustrated to begin with.
Then, I assume that the balance is not "good enough" for you. I'd personally play a Witch, even if I fully agree with you that the Witch is weaker mechanically than the other casters.
Yah, on the witch side don't forget that they're the only intelligence based caster that can go divine/primal/occult.
Charisma has its perks for skills, but Int and Wis do too, and casting rituals is harder if you're a charisma caster (vs a wisdom or int caster who have solid synergy with religion/nature and Crafting/Arcana/Occultism)
Everyone CAN attempt it, but that +3 to +4 you get from being a main stat int caster is very potent. Depends how much rituals you use though.
Also sometimes I don't feel like being charismatic, I just want to play a douche with powerful spells.
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Perfect balance doesn't exist. When it comes to balance the only thing we can achieve is "good enough".
In contrary, in PF1 and 3.5, I've had way more issues with meaningful contribution. I've stopped playing a character because it was just too weak to contribute. I've seen optimized characters trivializing adventures to the point of boring everyone at the table.
Mostly this. The good thing about pf2e is that subpar mechanical characters can coexist with stronger options and still be relevant. Even if the games I play with my friends are roleplay-heavy and we sometimes go whole sessions without seeing combat, I need my characters to have mechanics I enjoy. Even if they tick all the boxes for me roleplay wise, I wouldn't be able to enjoy long term playing, let's say, an alchemist and dealing with all its quirks. Some of my friends are optimizers, some others don't care that much about overall power, but we can all play together and enjoy the same game without someone completely eclipsing the others or without someone feeling useless. Yes, I'm critic with the design of some classes and I would love to see them getting a redesign, but for the time being balance is good enough that even if my friends and I have different tastes and preferences when building characters we are able to play the same game and enjoy our time playing pretend. That's more than I can say about most systems out there.
Wizard is definitely not weak. They get 4 spells at all levels (barring a max level one at odd ones) and can drain their item to get another making them a 4/4 or 5/4 caster.
The "problem" with wizard is that they're a bit boring and/or flavor-lite. All the power is built into the base chassis, with very little going into things like the thesis or focus spells. Theres a lot less build variety in a wizard than with something like a rogue or sorcerer.
Agreed but at the same time you get TWO class defining choices (school focus and thesis) where most classes get only one. I feel it leaves the door open for many, many things and combinations.
Even more so with class archetypes like elementalist (yes its bad but its there) flexible caster, wellspring caster and runelord.
TL;DR If the justification for Wizard not being "the weakest core class" is that they require high or near perfect system mastery to even play right the entire argument is just coping. Quite literally, "It is not the weakest because I can memorize the entire book" and "If I spend 50+ hours studying and memorizing I can almost have the same effectiveness as a Bard that is just doing whatever whenever they want."
It is not the weakest because spell blending exists, it has nothing to do with system mastery. No other class gets 6 slots of their higher level. I agree their mechanics are extra bland but system mastery just improves on something that it is already powerful past the very first levels.
Agreed but at the same time you get TWO class defining choices (school focus and thesis) where most classes get only one. I feel it leaves the door open for many, many things and combinations.
Only 2 thesis are useful and only one of those 2 is actually powerful. School choice is so low impact that I would hesitate to consider that "class defining".
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Wizard is definitely not the worst caster, many people disagree with that. Wizards are the ones that require the best system mastery out of all casters (Need to know which uncommon/rare spells to try to get, need to understand the learn a spell activity the best, need to weight all thesis, need to remember every g@%&$~n spell in the arcane list by rote) but if you DO have that system mastery, they are g*#*~#n strong because they have the ability to pivot and always have the right spell for the job, or to simply have the most higher level spell slots.
Bards are strong, don't get me wrong, but I've played both to high level and let me tell you that my wizard packed a lot more support AND punch than my bard because the bard was confined to his cantrips and a few spontaneous spells, as well as charisma casting which makes a poor ritualist, whereas my substitution wizard had a massive spellbook that he could spend 10 minutes to read out of to have the perfect spell for the situation at hand.
What you call 'system mastery' I call 'cognitive overhead'; there's too much to keep track of for no gain.
The advantage of prepared spellcasting is campaign specific. If your GM telegraphs which spells you need before combat, or if your player group is super proactive in creating situations, then maybe it's worth it. But in actual play, you're unlikely to have exactly the right spell.
IME with PFS and APs, you don't get that kind of forewarning. If you play a homebrew campaign, or go off the rails, then maybe.
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TL;DR If the justification for Wizard not being "the weakest core class" is that they require high or near perfect system mastery to even play right the entire argument is just coping. Quite literally, "It is not the weakest because I can memorize the entire book" and "If I spend 50+ hours studying and memorizing I can almost have the same effectiveness as a Bard that is just doing whatever whenever they want."
You are in my opinion a bit extreme when it comes to the Wizard. The weakest core class is the Alchemist. And I think the Wizard is a pretty strong class, even if I agree that you need more system mastery to properly play one than, say, a Greatsword Fighter.
Also, what would be the point to have 2 classes suiting the same people? I personally dislike the Bard (despite being a Bard player in the previous editions, one of my rare disappointments with PF2), you seem to like it. I like the Wizard, you seem to dislike it.
To each their own, isn't it perfect?
It is thematical. Saying ''I'm an evoker wizard'' is about as impactful, thematically, as saying ''I'm a dragon sorcerer''
Mechanically for thematical impact they're similar outside of the bloodline power (which is replaced by thesis for wizard).
Sorcerer gets 1 auto assigned spell known in repertoire every spell level
Wizard gets 1 spell slot per spell level that has to be that school (point to wizard here)
Sorcerer gets 3 focus spells
Wizard gets 2 focus spells (Point to sorcerer here)
I'd say that there's 3 main thesis that are good
-Staff nexus
-Spell substitution
-Spell blending
Staff nexus blends utility and power very well, allowing you to make great use of good staves such as staff of power at higher levels.
Spell substitution is versatility incarnate, no one has the amoutn of problem solving tricks as the substitution wizard. They lose a bit of potency but outside of combat this is amazing if you've worked on your spellbook. It even allows you options to burn all your unused spell slots at the end of the day on fun stuff, like secure shelter, detect scrying, private shelter, alarm, glyph of warding, lock or magnificient mansion, without opportunity cost. You don't have to learn teleport the day before and lose an option, you can cast fly on a whim to cross that pit, you can switch a low level spell for comprehend language to decipher that mural, you can swap out a spell to learn knock if you don't have a thievery character. Sudden inflitration? swap to veil. I cannot go on enough about how amazing this thesis is.
Spell blending is the definite power move for the classic ''open door, kill monster'' style of mega dungeon though. It makes the wizard into the single highest strongest caster in the game.
Wizard is definitely not the worst caster, many people disagree with that. Wizards are the ones that require the best system mastery out of all casters (Need to know which uncommon/rare spells to try to get, need to understand the learn a spell activity the best, need to weight all thesis, need to remember every g@%&$~n spell in the arcane list by rote) but if you DO have that system mastery, they are g*#*~#n strong because they have the ability to pivot and always have the right spell for the job, or to simply have the most higher level spell slots.
Bards are strong, don't get me wrong, but I've played both to high level and let me tell you that my wizard packed a lot more support AND punch than my bard because the bard was confined to his cantrips and a few spontaneous spells, as well as charisma casting which makes a poor ritualist, whereas my substitution wizard had a massive spellbook that he could spend 10 minutes to read out of to have the perfect spell for the situation at hand.
What you call 'system mastery' I call 'cognitive overhead'; there's too much to keep track of for no gain.
The advantage of prepared spellcasting is campaign specific. If your GM telegraphs which spells you need before combat, or if your player group is super proactive in creating situations, then maybe it's worth it. But in actual play, you're unlikely to have exactly the right spell.
IME with PFS and APs, you don't get that kind of forewarning. If you play a homebrew campaign, or go off the rails, then maybe.
AP's are eminently predictable (I don't PFS though), but in AP's each dungeon or sub-section usually have a theme of ennemies going through it that you can most likely exploit.
As an example (not a wizard but a druid) in SOT we're in the book 1 below school dungeon? It's been made very clear that this is a fey and vermin dungeons with a focus on swarm, that's been the opponents the entire book. Feys are weak to cold iron and share a weakness in fort saves, being high in ref and will. Vermin are weak to will and strong in ref and fort. Swarms are weak to splash. This means you should prioritize AOE Damage spells that target fort saves (sudden blight is my go to, the witch got sound burst) and maybe some good fort debuffs like ray of enfeeblement for some fey bosses.
**EDIT**: prep gust of wind too because both feys and vermins tend to fly at low levels and gust of wind will devastate swarms and flying bees, cockroaches and such.
And that's low level, higher level you can use rituals and downtime activity spells to learn more information and then prepare better.
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Right, if it's not fun for enough people that's when they really have failed. I personally find all the classes fun except for Witch. I don't know what satisfaction percentage among customers is enough, or whether we are even at all representative on these forums, but I suspect mass discontent would be an awful sign.
As someone who does still enjoy playing Witch even though I am aware that it is sub-par, I still point out that it would be a drastic improvement to the class if Basic Lesson got similar treatment to what Powerful Alchemy did. Make it a class feature, or have the feat be granted automatically with the Patron benefits.
It isn't going to make the class more powerful than other spellcasters. What it will do is remove a feat tax and allow taking archetypes (especially class archetypes) to be a viable option again. That would put it back up with the other (non-Bard) spellcasters in power level again.
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I'm rather sad that we've got to this point in PF2's life span and we are still having this conversation.
- Are classes in Pathfinder 2e under powered as a whole?
In context of the game they were designed for, no. Paizo made the choice to make a relatively narrow range of power open to players, and so the only real question is if each class internally has equal access to this narrow range.
We know that this isn't the case, even if the difference are minor on paper, within the confines the narrow game, they make a big difference.
- Are classes in Pathfinder 2e weaker than PF1 and 5e?
Yes and no, mostly yes, but the question isn't really fair to ask. Power in Tabletop RPG's, in terms of player characters, is reflected in two general ways. Can you go Tall and can you go Wide?
Tall, in this context, means the characters ability to gain power through sheer math. The ability to pile enough bonuses and modifiers on the thing they want to be good at, that the character's power comes from just being the straight up best at what they do through specalisation.
Wide, to contrast, is when a character can obtain power not because they are good at one thing, but how capable they are of being good at everything and anything. Characters who gain power by going Wide can also make use of subsystems and uncommon mechanics to do things less-wide characters cannot.
As game lines go: 5e is Tall but not Wide. PF2 is Wide but not Tall. And PF1/3.x systems are both Wide and Tall.
In this respect, we can understand that the best PF1/3.x characters were not just powerful at one thing, but could also be powerful at everything.
PF2 characters then can have a lot of options open to them, but with a pretty low ceiling for power open to them, it can feel like all those options don't provide any real advantage.
This is where character / concept dissatisfaction comes into play.
Generally, when we accept a limitation or a restriction, we expect there to be a payoff or reward for doing so. A drop in power here, so we can get a boost in power there. However, with PF2 being so narrow, and the guidelines for power being somewhat harshly defined, there isn't much point in accept any loss of power because the rewards for doing so can't surpass characters who didn't do anything.
This is why the intersection of Wide&Tall character design can be difficult to design from a game PoV. Opting to go full-in on width but keeping your power ceiling at a fixed low point means that at somepoint you will just be publishing interesting but mechanically suboptiomal character options.
- Why does any of this matter?
Because, big shock, people like to play characters that they feel are interesting, cool and capable.
If a player has to sacrifice a part of being interesting, cool and capable, they should expect there to be a bump in some other part of those three things.
But people are also people, and there is a floor to each of these categories as well. People aren't going to play characters for long that don't interest them. People aren't going to play characters for long that don't jive with their expectations of what they want to do. And people aren't going to play characters for long that constantly fail.
By limiting how Tall a character can be, we introduce a ceiling and a floor on how capable a character can be.
By overly expanding how Wide a character cam be, we risk hitting diminishing returns on interesting or cool.
The intersection of both is where a game line can be amazing or utterly fail.
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Generally, when we accept a limitation or a restriction, we expect there to be a payoff or reward for doing so. A drop in power here, so we can get a boost in power there. However, with PF2 being so narrow, and the guidelines for power being somewhat harshly defined, there isn't much point in accept any loss of power because the rewards for doing so can't surpass characters who didn't do anything.
I pretty strongly disagree with your basic argument.
For everybody who has been in a game where one character was completely overshadowing other characters OR in a game where the math completely broke down and the characters were either ROTFLstomping AND/OR constantly TPKING the payoff for the limitations on power is clear cut. For a great many people the game is a lot more fun when it is more balanced (both intra party and between the party and the world).
And in PF2 I'm CONSTANTLY making decisions about tradeoffs. I'm deciding to trade a bit of martial strength to get some casting ability, or deciding that my desire to be able to contribute to social conversations is worth taking a hit in my purely combat abilities. The tradeoffs are much more real in PF2 than in PF1 (I haven't played enough 5th edition to have a really informed opinion of it) because in PF2 you can NOT do everything whereas in PF1 past the early levels your wizard or druid or cleric really COULD just about do anything and everything.
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I believe it's become more and more apparent that Paizo's general philosophy with post-core content is to undershoot things
I'm not sure this is accurate, the only people I know who believe it have been beating the drum of it since day one. It certainly hasn't been reflected at my tables-- and we're pretty ardent power gamers.
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PF2 is Wide but not Tall.
I'm not sure I really agree with this. PF2 characters tend to only be good at a couple of things. The average character gets a core gimmick, three or so skills, and it's relatively difficult to branch out from there.
You can do a decent job adding spellcasting to a martial, but only certain kinds of spellcasting. A spellcaster, no matter how many feats they spend, is never really going to be all that good with a weapon. You can buy more skill increases, but it tends to be limited and a little expensive.
Contrasting with like, a 5e or PF1 Bard who can be a decent martial and a decent spellcaster and party support and good at nearly every skill in the game and still have room to grow and add other things to their kit I think it's hard to really say PF2 characters are good at being generalists.
And that seems completely by design, Paizo has gone out of their way to limit options for generalists. Instead of being kind of decentish at everything, the PF2 Bard is an overpowered specialist at party support.
PF2 is a game about staying in your lane.
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PF2 is a game about staying in your lane.
Maybe? But then we compare to, say, 4e (hey - I liked 4e) and we notice that it's also about having multiple lanes. Like, you're not going to be the supergeneralist who does everything reasonably well unless you're willing to accept a pretty low bar for "reasonable", but at the same time it's also not a good idea to try to be the person who only ever does one thing. You do get those three skills, after all, and you have skill feats that you've gotta spend on something. You've got general feats and ancestry feats, too. With enough tweaking and optimization you can get at least some of those pointed in ways that support your core competencies, but you're not all that likely to get all of them.
As a prime example, I put forth the Animal Companion. They're a solid way to spend feats. If you choose to spend feats on them, you're pretty much committing yourself to investing reasonably heavily... but there's also a limit to the number of feats that you can spend on them, and then you'll have to find something else to do with the rest of your feats. Perhaps you might like to invest in Marshall? Oh, you're Strength-based? Have you considered grapple and/or trip? Again, they're areas of endeavor that will happily consume meaningful chunks of your available build space... but not all of it.
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I'm rather sad that we've got to this point in PF2's life span and we are still having this conversation.
Its different waves of players, and not the same people.
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I find that my biggest issue with PF2 is that it can be had to get excited about anything because the balance is so tight. Even the classes that seem cool - here's looking at you Magus and Swashbuckler - take so much effort to do their unique thing that I find my heart's just not it when I try to build them. I wish that PF2 had more than its tight balance and the 3-action system (which feels underused) to hang its hat on.
I'll also freely admit that my table isn't that big on rules-heavy games and that of our group I'm the only one who feels overly confined by 5e. I've made a few suggestions for other systems we could play that didn't get any traction. However, it's looking like the compromise is bringing Morrus' Level Up to our table to see if that broadens the system enough for me while keeping it simple for them.
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I think this discussion requires more analysis myself. I don't see things exactly the same way. I don't think it is as easy as saying the Core are more powerful than the added books. The added books add fewer classes each book and those classes all are not the same.
In the the Core book, I would say the fighter, champion, rogue, bard, and druid are clearly very good and stand a cut above the rest.
The sorcerer is very versatile to build and certain bloodlines are better than others.
Cleric does one thing really well, but is otherwise boring.
Ranger can be ok, but you have like its playstyle because it's kind of a locked in playstyle.
Giant instinct barbarian is good. Every other barbarian is meh depending on what you're fighting.
Wizard isn't that great all. They can cast a lot of spells, but the spells are only as good as the saving throws for them. They have nothing to make their spells hit for more or work better.
Alchemist bomber is ok. Every other type, not so much.
Monk is ok, but you won't miss anything if no one every plays on.
APG:
Swashbuckler has one really wonky panache mechanic. If that mechanic were improved, overall class would be pretty good.
Oracle is like the sorcerer. Certain mysteries are solid, others not so much.
Witch can be a nice alternative healer, but I haven't seen it great for much else.
Investigator. Meh.
Magic Book:.
Magus. My players love the Magus. So far when it comes to smashing things, the magus does very well which is why they like it. It also has useful abilities in battle and plays well enough to hold up against other classes.
Summoner. This class is just too wonky in actual play for my players. Too many rules to remember for too many different conditions. Just not a very player or DM friendly class. Not worth the hassle for what the class gives. Very disappointed with the final product and could use a rework to make it easier to play and manage during play. Summoner rules really need to be streamlined and simplified and the one creature in two bodies theme needs to go. It's just a headache remembering how slow, haste, and action modifiers work with the two in one.
Don't know the other classes.
The bigger problem I've found with the new classes is the designers are working too hard to make up new mechanics that make for wonky gameplay. It's easier on us players and DMs if they just make the classes more straightforward, easy to play, and their abilities work well within the game framework without having to read 10 pages to figure it all out.
That's what makes the core classes so nice IMO. There aren't any weird mechanics. The core classes work as they are designed. Their concepts are fairly simple and don't require hoops to be jumped through or little side rolls to make them work.
I get tired of having to remind the player to make their oracle curse roll every round for ancestor oracle.
I don't like having to figure out how a particular damage spell or effect is going to affect the eidolon versus the summoner.
The swashbuckler having to roll every round to make their finisher work or use their swash abilities is just a pain. When they fail, feel terrible.
Simplify this type of stuff to make the classes easier to play. These additional rules feel more like inherent weaknesses which are not present in the core classes.
One of the reasons my players like a class like the magus is it's very simple. Hit stuff with your spell strike. Spend an action or conflux spell to recharge. There isn't a whole lot to it. They control the powers of their class rather than having to rely on a random roll or dig through 10 pages to figure out if an ability works a certain way with the class.
To me that's what really separates the core and the additional classes: simple, easy to use mechanics in the player's control. The designers are creating headaches with some of these additional classes that make playing them feel like a chore rather than fun.
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Simplify this type of stuff to make the classes easier to play.
Don't really agree. The fighter's right over there if you want a class that just hits things.
Classes with more involved mechanics are cool. The problem is some of the classes have too many failure points or destroy their action economy, not the underlying concepts themselves.
Plus none of the classes are really that complicated to begin with, you're always pretty much running on the same engine.
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Every class has its strengths and weaknesses. The alchemist and swashbuckler are my least favorite. I can't relate to the opinions that the summoner is overly complicated. It has been very straight forward for the two that I have played.
With dedications and archetypes, there is a lot of flexibility one can add to each class. Though, you main class chassis cannot be changed. Be creative and look into the options.
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I think that if we simplify the post-CRB classes, while also keeping the balance, we merely end up with the CRB classes.
The Magus strikes me as the only exception because it is the 50/50 class they could not make in CRB.
If players do not like the systems of the post-CRB classes, they should just choose to play the straightforward CRB classes.
Why choose something you do not enjoy ?
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Also on the point of balance and the perception that paizo is being too harsh on it.
I say good for them and that that is preferable.
Don't forget the that base rules are that, the base rules. They must be as tightly balanced as possible because then they create the meat and bones of the system to allow us, as GM's, to extrapolate from there and adjust/adapt/homebrew stuff.
Despite pf2e being excellent, I still have 10-15 house rules per game, and I change them as we game.
I allow tumble through as part of a stride, I made disarm a non MAP, I allow diagonal flanking, I allow hero points reroll on damage rolls, I allow bandoliers to give you 1 free action draw from an item in there once per round to favor using consumables. This and much more.
But I'm happy my tweeks aren't part of the core, I'm not sure if they're balanced! I like that the base rules are common ground to allow us to grow from there.
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I think that if we simplify the post-CRB classes, while also keeping the balance, we merely end up with the CRB classes.
The Magus strikes me as the only exception because it is the 50/50 class they could not make in CRB.
If players do not like the systems of the post-CRB classes, they should just choose to play the straightforward CRB classes.
Why choose something you do not enjoy ?
I wish it was that simple, but it's not. As people already said, PF2 is a game that's heavy on customization outside of your class, but leaves very little room to change what your class does. If you wanna be a graceful and charismatic duelist, it's not very good to do that on a Fighter because investing heavily in Dex and Cha will leave very little room for Str to do decent damage, and it's not very good on Rogue because they're too squishy to be a duelist rather than a skirmisher. Swashbuckler is the answer for that. Or it should be, if it didn't had to jump through so many hoops just to achieve mediocrity.
Same goes for other classes. Magus is the only that does offensive casting+bonking people half-decently. Inventor is the only one that does... well, Inventor. Investigator is the only class that lets you play a martial that's smarter than they are skillful or strong without completely screwing your build. Classes have niches, but when a class fails to satisfyingly fill its own niche, it just leaves a frustrating feeling. Believe me, I've been trying — and failing — to build a dextrous duelist that feels good to play for two and a half years. Three and a half if you count the playtest.
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Huh, in my experience Rogue and Fighter should both be good at that- the Fighter should get the lost damage back a solid portion of the time through inflicting the frightened condition, with the actual damage mattering less as you get damage runes, while Scoundrel Rogue should do the job just fine out of the box with a tertiary Con score.
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Also on the point of balance and the perception that paizo is being too harsh on it.
I say good for them and that that is preferable.
Don't forget the that base rules are that, the base rules. They must be as tightly balanced as possible because then they create the meat and bones of the system to allow us, as GM's, to extrapolate from there and adjust/adapt/homebrew stuff.
Despite pf2e being excellent, I still have 10-15 house rules per game, and I change them as we game.
I allow tumble through as part of a stride, I made disarm a non MAP, I allow diagonal flanking, I allow hero points reroll on damage rolls, I allow bandoliers to give you 1 free action draw from an item in there once per round to favor using consumables. This and much more.
But I'm happy my tweeks aren't part of the core, I'm not sure if they're balanced! I like that the base rules are common ground to allow us to grow from there.
Aside from fixing gross imbalances, I'm not sure I can agree with the balance first mindset. I can see why it would be prevalent on these forums but game balance has never had a large impact on a system's sales or its lasting appeal. I think this large focus on balance and the added
workload it creates is likely a bad thing for PF2 in the long run as it will be hard to write new and exciting classes, feats, and spells for such a constrained system.If this was pushing strong sales it could make sense but I don't think PF2 is really selling to the wider market on the strength of its balance. Especially when D&D 5e is still selling well with its 'meh, good enough' levels of balance.
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For me the balance is one of selling points of 2E over D&D that helps me to keep playing it. Maybe not all players care about this but this is a market niche where's D&D always failed to achieve. The other differential where's 2E attacks is about customization. Even with all complaints about "I cannot do my character just like I want without risk to turning it less efficient" yet your have way more customization capacity than any D&D edition without abandoning the class+race selection concept and turning the system in a GURPS' like game.
In D&D the maximum you can do is choose a race, class, subclass and if you want trade some stats for some feats. In the end is less customizable than 3.5 and far less than pathfinder and far way less than PF2.
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Also on the point of balance and the perception that paizo is being too harsh on it.
I say good for them and that that is preferable.
Don't forget the that base rules are that, the base rules. They must be as tightly balanced as possible because then they create the meat and bones of the system to allow us, as GM's, to extrapolate from there and adjust/adapt/homebrew stuff.
Despite pf2e being excellent, I still have 10-15 house rules per game, and I change them as we game.
I allow tumble through as part of a stride, I made disarm a non MAP, I allow diagonal flanking, I allow hero points reroll on damage rolls, I allow bandoliers to give you 1 free action draw from an item in there once per round to favor using consumables. This and much more.
But I'm happy my tweeks aren't part of the core, I'm not sure if they're balanced! I like that the base rules are common ground to allow us to grow from there.
Aside from fixing gross imbalances, I'm not sure I can agree with the balance first mindset. I can see why it would be prevalent on these forums but game balance has never had a large impact on a system's sales or its lasting appeal. I think this large focus on balance and the added
workload it creates is likely a bad thing for PF2 in the long run as it will be hard to write new and exciting classes, feats, and spells for such a constrained system.If this was pushing strong sales it could make sense but I don't think PF2 is really selling to the wider market on the strength of its balance. Especially when D&D 5e is still selling well with its 'meh, good enough' levels of balance.
I think it might be a selling point, it is frequently brought up on reddit by people who are transitioning over from 5e which is itself a frequent occurrence-- and it was the feedback I got just the other night as a GM for Beginner Box day from a group of long time PF1e players, that they felt like it was way better balanced and they enjoyed that it was more authentically difficult when it was supposed to be. Meanwhile the dndnext sub is consistently getting upset over the lack of balance in that game. I recently went 150 positive karma on a post there discussing how pf2e fixes a major frustration they have there with martials and casters-- the problem itself being major enough that it topped the sub with a whopping 1.8k net karma, which is a significant number of people.
The 'wider market' for 5e is hard to identify, especially when you factor in the people that buy the core book, play a few sessions and then move on with their lives entirely. When it comes up it often feels like people are trying to invoke the 'silent majority' that happens to agree with them, whereas I suspect that impression of 5e's wider market is based on the massive wave of new players that it brought to the table, who aren't actually evergreen, some of them have quite a bit of experience now and are developing frustrations with the system-- in that sense I would say the system's strength is that the problems it has are 'backloaded' you don't start to notice until you play for a while, or start hanging out in the community, which makes it perfect for getting people into the system, and developing a sunk cost to exiting it once they start to notice that the walls are cracked under the paint.
I'm inclined to agree with something Stephen Glicker said in a Roll for Combat stream, there are 'Pathfinder People' who don't know they're Pathfinder people in the DND community, basically people who need their rules to be precise and balanced (say, they need one class to mostly keep up with another class to think of it as viable) and right now you're seeing a lot of friction from them in the 5e community that is to PF2e's benefit, since it caters to that niche. I don't think its the only camp though, I think you also have some of the lighter, fuzzier people getting frustrated with how crunchy 5e is, and how much time is spent on combat and learning combat rules-- and those people are probably going to gradually move over to Story Now and other movements that prefer lite systems. Out of the remaining people, a solid chunk seem to be developing more of a low power, gritty, OSR bent as well, although I don't think that crowd has self-realized to the same extent.