I've been keeping an eye on PF2 since it came out but sadly haven't had a chance to run or play in a game as of yet. That being said one of the major things that caught my attention early on was a lot of talk on forums and in reviews that you didn't have squeeze out every possible bonus like in PF1 to have a functional character. Two years on and I still find those comments and get that vibe from the core game. PF2 came up in discussion at my local store recently though and everyone there that has played felt the exact opposite. Their experience has been if you don't build a class to its fullest save/damage/armor potential your headed toward a hard time. The only thing I could decipher that was different was all of them were playing in adventure paths. I believe a couple were in Rise of the Runelords 2E and Abomination vault. Which lead me to wonder, are AP's just a bit tougher than your average GM when using the encounter building rules and running a home brew game? What have your folk's experiences been now that were a few years in and quite a lot of supplements in the library? Thanks for any input!
There's no official Rise of the Runelords 2e, so anyone playing that was doing so with a homebrew conversion.
I run a homebrew PF2 game and play in a couple of APs. These are my thoughts about the tight math of the system.
APs vs Homebrew
If the people who have played through APs have been playing early APs, there are several very challenging encounters in them to muscle your way through. Encounter design in PF2 is awesome, and really fun and easy to do, but it has some very different assumptions and challenges to it from PF1. In PF2 Low level characters get wrecked by higher level "solo" monsters. There are some really challenging higher level monsters tucked into some of those early APs. Most of them can be run from and wont give chase, but a lot of parties go all in on every encounter and some of the encounter spaces of those challenging enemies are difficult to get back out of quickly. At higher level, parties usually can hold their own against a single monster a couple of levels higher than themselves, but will run into more trouble against lots of lower level enemies, especially if those enemies have ways of targeting saves or multiple characters. In later APs, the adventure writers have a better sense of what causes those difficulties for players, and do a better job of moving them to places where you expect very difficult, boss like encounters.
Homebrewing in PF2 is the awesome fun and lets you really explore how flexible and easy putting together memorable encounters can be.
On the value of a bonus
The thing is, it is not usually a +1 here or a -1 there that is the biggest difference in difficult encounters in PF2 (Those bonuses matter and can effect 2 results of rolling the die instead of one, which is different than PF1 as well). What is usually the much bigger factor in the difficulty of the encounter is whether the party tried to meet the difficult combat encounter at a point of strength for the enemy, or a point of weakness for the enemy. This is very different from PF1, where, as long as you were meeting the enemy with your strongest strengths, and you had gotten all the bonuses you can to those strengths, you would usually steamroll your enemy regardless of what their strengths were...unless they had time to prepare for your party and caught you off guard.
So meeting PF2 encounters by just focusing on your own party and trying to boost yourselves as much as possible without concern for what kind of enemy you will be fighting and what their weaknesses are is usually a fast track ticket to getting smashed by some of the more difficult encounters in PF2. Instead, having the flexibility and resources to find out what will be most effective against the enemy you are fighting goes a much longer way to taking the difficulty out of an encounter than over specializing all of your resources into getting the highest bonus possible.
Overall, I find that many character concepts that are not singularly trying to do just one thing with 2 or 3 of their actions every round of every encounter really don't need to have the highest possible bonus to their primary attack to be very effective. This is largely because you can get 3 or 4 more points of swing in any encounter from adopting sound tactics than you can from building the most powerful character. A lot of very good characters can start with a 16 in a primary attack stat and be fine, as long as that character is not the party striker that everyone is trying to set up for biggest and most powerful attacks. Characters who often don't attack at all might even be fine starting with a 14 in a key attack stat, as attributes eventually flatten out by level 10 and make up a decreasingly important part of a character's total effectiveness over time.
For examples, I will see some characters decide that since they have an 18 strength and a 12 dex, they won't cary any ranged weapons at all. In many encounters they can melee smash their way through and everything is fine, but then they encounter some enemy that is 2 or 3 levels higher than them, has resistance to their primary weapon damage type, or has aura or reaction effects that punish melee smashers heavily. Attacking once safely with a total relevant bonus of +1 instead of 2 times with +5 (then a +0) might feel like a huge waste of time for your character, but if the enemy has a 5 point resistance and a 5 point weakness, throwing a piddly bomb, or hitting with a sling stone instead of a piercing and precision damage strike is the much better use of actions. These kinds of situations come up more often than players might ever realize against the most challenging of foes, because the party might struggle to successfully recall knowledge, or feel like every action spent doing anything but attacking is a waste of time.
In another example, having a high AC is good. But thinking that getting the highest possible AC will let you rush in and try to tank every encounter is a terrible, terrible strategy in PF2. Many are the monsters in this game that can TPK an entire party in 2 or 3 rounds if the party wastes actions moving close to the monster in round 1 before the monster goes in the initiative order, makes 1 or maybe 2 attacks each, and then gets hit by some nasty 2 or 3 action area of effect ability or multiple attack ability, or gets 2 or 3 players paralyzed, blinded or otherwise incapacitated before they even get to go again.
I also received mixed messages about the difficulty of playing Pathfinder 2nd Edition during 2019-2020. The Paizo forums contained a few threads complaining about how Moderate-threat encounters would leave their party barely on their feet, perhaps with one PC unconscious. In contrast, my players were handling Extreme-threat encounters.
The strategists in the forums eventually figured out the paradox. The players who used PF1 optimization tactics in PF2 were failing, because optimization-based combat did not work. Equal-level enemies are better optimized for raw power than the PCs. On the other hand, my players did not care about building for individual optimization for power. Instead, they build for teamwork. And teamwork works great in PF2. Tactics work, too, because PCs are a lot more versatile than monsters. If they are clever, then they can find a tactic that the enemies cannot adapt against.
As for adventure paths versus homebrew, I am in a half-and-half campaign. I am converting the 2017 PF1 Ironfang Invasion adventure path to PF2. Sometimes I can just swap the PF1 monsters for their PF2 counterparts, who are usually the same Challenge Rating. Other times I have to port a PF1 monster to PF2. And I had to replace PF1 treasure with PF2 items. And my players know that I am converting, so they sometimes will go off on a side quest, knowing that creating new material is only a little more work for me compared to conversion. And they took so many side quests that they are one level higher than the adventure path expected, so I am beefing up the module's encounters in addition to converting them.
The PCs just ran through five Moderate encounters with only a single 10-minute rest break. The fourth encounter was solved diplomatically, but it could have gone to combat. They are doing fine. I could throw a Severe-threat encounter at them and know that they will 100% win. They could defeat an Extreme-threat encounter, but not guaranteed, and would need a full night's rest after such an encounter. That is worse than what the most recent PF2 adventure paths throw at the PCs.
The third encounter was supposed to be against two PF1 Froghemoths, CR 13 each, against a 14th-level party. Given my 15th-level 8-member party, I used five PF2 Froghemoths, creature 13, but boosted them to creature 14 with better numbers and fast healing, for 3.5 times harder than the original encounter. The encounter was fun, with three PCs swallowed whole and each rescued in a different way. Teamwork won out.
Comparing that to the 15th-level section of Lord of the Black Sands in the PF2 Extinction Curse adventure path, the encounters are A1 Low 15, A2 Moderate, B1 Moderate, B3 Moderate, C1 unrated with Hazard 16 trap, C2 Moderate, C3 Severe. It seems the same difficulty as my converted adventure path.
My experience as a player of less-than-optimized characters in PF2 has been rather good. I also find that tactics and party synergy is a lot more important than individual optimization.
In PF2 you don't carry the party. The party has to carry each other. And I haven't found that being short by one or two points from the maximum possible bonus has made much of a difference in that.
I’ll be blunt. PF2e is harder than a lot of us fanboys give it credit for.
Now, I enjoy it. I like applying clever tactics to complex problems, I love the consistency, the optimization, the customization, the playability all the way from Level 1 to Level 20. But if you are coming from another system you will struggle - at least at the beginning. And in my opinion, that is a good thing.
But if you want an easier game, folks here can help you modify yours to be easier and less deadly.
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My experience as a player of less-than-optimized characters in PF2 has been rather good. I also find that tactics and party synergy is a lot more important than individual optimization.
To some extent. Part of it is that low level, individual optimization choices are less extreme than before and party level optimization is very powerful. Big choices in PF2 tend to also be a lot more high concept. In PF1 there are strong considerations are specific feat and gear synergies, whereas in PF2 people tend to talk more about classes, subclasses, spell lists, and weapon categories.
Though, on the other hand, I'm a lot more comfortable playing a 16 Str beatstick in PF1 than I am be playing a 14 Str beatstick in PF2 and you'll almost never build a martial who doesn't fully upgrade their weapons and armor at every opportunity. In those cases, being less than optimized can be pretty brutal.
Though, on the other hand, I'm a lot more comfortable playing a 16 Str beatstick in PF1 than I am be playing a 14 Str beatstick in PF2 and you'll almost never build a martial who doesn't fully upgrade their weapons and armor at every opportunity. In those cases, being less than optimized can be pretty brutal.
That's it. There are a few basic things in terms of character building in PF2: Max your attack stat, improve your save stats every five levels, grab the best fundamental runes for your weapons and armors. You can choose not to do that of course, but you'd better know what you do then.
It may feel like a strong limitation to some players, but once you're accustomed to it, it feels more like mild optimization. And beyond these three things, you can play whatever you want. The Fighter/Barbarian/Rogue will be only slightly stronger than the Fighter/Dandy/Archaeologist. With just a bit of common sense you should build a very efficient character that should perform as expected. And if you are, on top of it, a tactically sound player, you should do fine in most campaigns.Now, comparing homebrew to APs... Well, people can definitely speak about APs but hardly about homebrew as there's as many homebrew than there are homebrewers.