If a Universalist Wizard uses their Hand of the Apprentice focus spell to attack a foe with Magic Immunity (for example, a Will O' Wisp), and if the attack hits (and assuming the wizard beats the flat check to target a hidden/concealed enemy) would the attack do damage as per a normal melee attack or would the enemy take no damage due to magic immunity?
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I agree. You aren't making a Strike, but a Spell Attack. It's just a Spell Attack that deals the same damage as your weapon. If TK Projectile wouldn't work, this spell wouldn't either.
However, any spell that has you make a Strike will still do that Strike, it just wouldn't do anything extra. For example, if you used Thunderous Strike on a wisp or golem, it would Strike, but the creature would not make a Fort save against the sonic damage.
That makes sense, thanks y'all!
I would argue that the spell shouldn't use a spell attack, but then it wouldn't add your mental score either.
But since you are making a spell attack, it's really only narratively that your weapon is used. Mechanically, you might as well be making a spell attack that happens to deal the same damage as your weapon.
Anyways, I agree with the conclusion that it wont work because it's magical spell damage.
It could say "Make a Strike with your weapon, but you use your Intelligence modifier for the Attack Bonus and Damage instead of Strength."
It could but it doesn't. I think it probably should (as I imagine thematically you're using magical energy to hurl your weapon, which is a real physical weapon striking a target regardless of what hurls it) but that's not technically what the spell does based on the mechanics.
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Yet another confusing situation caused by a lack of strictly codifying what abilities and traits actually mean and instead trying to lean on "natural language" as though there is any truly commonly accepted meaning for pretty much anything these days... SMH.
This is purely going to be up to GM calls at the table because Magic Immunity in general is one of the most poorly described and defined pseudo-universal monster abilities. As for my opinion, I've only actually run a single PF2 encounter with an NPC that featured Magic Immunity but in that case, I made the simple overhead ruling that unless the type of Magic that is being used is the specific type that the statblock has notes to indicate how it specifically works with the creature by way of Harmed/Healed by/Slowed/Vulnerable/Etc then they are simply not even a valid Target for the Magic/Spell. These types of creatures can tend to be extremely brutal to Casters, esp if the group didn't spend 1-5 Actions between them using Recall Knowledge to successfully learn about the specific Magic Immunity that the NPC has and by doing this it gave them a less punishing encounter as it wholesale prevents the wasted Spell Slot (but not Actions) when trying to use something that they are flat-out Immune to.
In this situation, if the NPC does not have a special Magic Immunity clause that relates to the Weapon Traits of whatever Weapon you're using, the School, or the Tradition of Magic that is being used then I would simply rule that the Spell fails to be cast at all and use that as a heavy-handed sort of clue for the player that the opponent is Immune to the Spell.
Tbh I think the issue is less that the mechanic is badly written, and more that the way magic is conceptualized in Pathfinder is fundamentally different than the way most other settings and people imagine magic to work, including being significantly different than PF1. This makes the whole rule pretty unintuitive.
There's a general assumption that when you telekinetically throw an object at someone, the magic is creating the telekinetic force, while the damage would come from object itself hitting an enemy and in that way it's similar to simply throwing something very hard. In other settings (including the golarion of PF1), once the object is launched, the magical part is done.
But in Pathfinder 2, the act of propelling an object telekineticaly makes the entire sequence, throw and impact, fundamentally magic. So the wisp (or golem or etc) in this case is immune to swords thrown in their face because of the method, indicating that for the length of the spell, the thing being thrown isn't entirely real, or at least fundamentally altered in some way.
Similarly, there are spells that make holes, and generally speaking people imagine the magic there is in the process of creating a hole, but for many of these spells the hole itself is fundamentally magical, so in that instance, the wisp or golem would be immune to falling because of the nature of the hole.
For a lot of people it's deeply unintuitive and the quasi-real, magically-corrupted nature of anything created or modified by magic (except things with no duration) isn't how magic works in many other settings which people draw from.
It's also a significan change in how we understand magic to work compared to the golarion of PF1, which probably throws people off even more (especially since there's no in-universe event to explain this shift in magic).
But as long as you remember that Golarion is kind of unique in this regard, the rules are mostly consistent (albeit with a few edge cases).