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The witch exists and the kineticist is coming in July, so you should already be good to go.
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I'm not sure you will get anything.
Double using an attribute is out of bounds for PF2.
A Magus is about as close to the role as you are going to get.
A Witch can be close to the flavour.
Maybe a Starlight span Magus mutliclassed into a Witch for a few extra spells, a good focus spell option and the flavour. Is as good as you are going to get in the system as it stand now.
If you want to be charisma based. Then maybe some hydrid of the Thaumature and a Sorcerer. Perhaps a Pyschic is the one that plays most like a ranged cantrip spammer.
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I think Paizo has generally wanted to strike out in their own direction away from WotC's, and directly copying from them just because they now legally can (especially when they already provide similar enough options of their own) isn't something I imagine them doing.
Likewise I wouldn't expect dragonborn or other post-4e/5e-isms to happen now either.
3rd party publishers can go ham though, but debatably they always could already.
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As has been said, Witch has the flavor and Kineticist will have the playstyle. PF2 isn't just 'Good 5e,' it's its own game.
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I'd still love to see a radical witch class archetype that cashes in the spell slots for a robust set of hexes and hex cantrips, but if it shows up, that'll be late-stage PF2, and by my estimation, we're currently in the early part of middle-stage.
It also includes Strahd von Zarovich,beholders, slaadi, mind flayers, and displacer beasts.
Those have been unusable by 3rd party creators for 23 years. Now they're open.
But I don't think Paizo is short on ideas.
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Yeah, I've never been a fan of the flavor of the D&D Warlock and I prefer the Pathfinder alternatives for "slotless magic class" and "person with a patron." I've personally never liked how the Warlock was generally about having a deal with somebody who's bad news.
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As has been said, Witch has the flavor and Kineticist will have the playstyle. PF2 isn't just 'Good 5e,' it's its own game.
To some extent, but the mechanical and flavor combination is a mark that PF2 never really hits, and it's a fairly popular one (you single out 5e here but the class has been a part of D&D for three editions worth now and going strong). So I think it's not particularly strange to see people talking about it.
Honestly I'd say the Witch probably does the worst job covering that design space though. It has overtures toward esoteric magic and pacts baked into its flavor, but in terms of raw mechanics instead it's really the closest thing Pathfinder has to just a generic spellcaster.
The original Pathfinder witch felt like a more obvious counterpart to the D&D Warlock (particularly the 4e version which had more utility than its 5e counterpart), but the PF2 witch decided to ditch the focus on at-will magical abilities and the esoteric spell list in favor of being... the PF2 Witch.
It also includes Strahd von Zarovich,beholders, slaadi, mind flayers, and displacer beasts.
Those have been unusable by 3rd party creators for 23 years. Now they're open.
But I don't think Paizo is short on ideas.
Usual not-a-lawyer disclaimer, but just a disclaimer that "It includes those" is a little misleading. Those words are in there, but D&D's expressions of them aren't. If you include a spherical many-eyed aberration that shoots magic rays in your Creative Commons publication and you call it a beholder, you will get in approximately the same amount of legal trouble now as before.
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I've honestly never understood the obsession with DnD warlocks. Is it just because the 5e version was one of the only classes with halfway decent customization?
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I've honestly never understood the obsession with DnD warlocks. Is it just because the 5e version was one of the only classes with halfway decent customization?
Well, in third ed, my three favorite classes were Warlock, Binder, and Dragonfire Adept. From time to time I make up new worlds with new magic systems, and in a sort of personal carcinization, the magic systems all keep winding up having heavy warlock themes. (I don't plan it out that way. It just kind of happens.) I think I can speak to this one.
First, I like the theme. The idea of power at a price, of desperate pacts made not because you can afford them but because you need them, of the uphill battle involved in taking the tools of the devil and trying to bend them to good purpose? There's a lot of really rich narrative material to work with there. It's the story of being someone who has power, not because you're some rare talent, but just because you were willing to sign on the dotted line... and then fighting to manage the costs of what you signed for. You have a patron who you may not agree with on everything, but they have paid your soul's price, and now you need to hustle to give them what they want... or struggle against them in spite of the fact that they have all of the advantages. You've got some awesome magic powers to play with, but you're also kind of creepy.
I mean, some of us are a bit chuuni, you know?
The witch theme is sort of there, but, especially in 2nd, it's not the same. The theme isn't reflected in the actual powerset nearly strongly enough, for one thing, and the patron... just doesn't feel like that big a deal.
As a secondary thing, I personally really like the aberrant theming in general - all tentacles and madness and strange otherworldly entities that don't necessarily hate you because they barely care about you at all, but really aren't safe. Star Pact has generally been pretty good at following through on that. The Binder/vestige theming on connecting to the broken husks of dead gods was also pretty cool. It wasn't initially part of warlock, but it got sucked in in 4th ed.
Finally, I love magic, and I hate daily resources. Warlock gave me the magic without the daily. There's a reason I've been really stoked about kineticist... and why I'd still love to some day see a slotless witch. I also love the customization, particularly in the "you get small numbers of powers that you can use any time you like. Figure out how to apply that limited toolbox to every problem you encounter." 5e Warlock had some issues, but it was still the best 5e class on offer for my personal needs.
So I can't speak for others, but that's me.
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The concept of specialized caster, trading versatility for sustainability, is nowhere to be found in PF2 and I think it's really the biggest thing it lacks. A lot of games/media are featuring casters who cast all day the spells of their specialty while dabbling in any other form of magic. I have nothing against the vancian system and super versatile casters, I can even say I quite like them, but we now have a really big bunch of them and only one single caster that is not even really a specialized caster with the Psychic.
The Kineticist is supposed to bring the blaster focused caster (at least it has the flavor, I reserve my final opinion for when I see one in play/test it myself as it looks more like a martial with a caster sugar coating to me as of now).
Paizo, bring us specialized casters!!!! Call them Warlock, specialized casters, one trick poneys or whatever, but bring them. The Psychic doesn't go far enough in the specialization.
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I would be very interested in a wave caster chassis with actually good hexes instead of martial capability.
Or, hey - what about a psychic who loses all of their base slots in return for some number of free amps? At that point, all they'd have to do is figure out "how many free amps are your spell slots worth?"
Possibly start with something like "one per refocus, only usable while unleashed" and work your way up to "one per round, only usable while unleashed". I'm not sure about the balance on that one. You'd probably have to pay a bit of an extra price to get that much. Some sort of deal like that would be cool, though.
Possibly something like the above, but you also get to roll on a random (moderately unfriendly) table of effects every time you spend one of those "free" amps?
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isn't that just what lead to disappointment of kineticist playtest
focus spell are the peak power of something can be done again and again and still have a 3 time per fight limit
anything can be done more time per fight would require a lower power level
such as how 1d4 turn cooldown ability like searing wave are balanced
deviant feat are the best example for how power and backlash should be balanced
Kineticist playtest was pretty awesome as far as I'm concerned. They undertuned it a bit going in (SOP for Paizo playtests) and it was still cool.
The Psychic playtest had really underwhelming amp effects because of the "unleash gives free amps" rule, but that's why the suggestion was to cash in their ability to slot-cast. That's a major class feature, involving both their peak power spike and a lot of their flexibility. It's got to be worth *something*.
Deviant feats are effectively on a daily use limit, and are thus useless to me.
You might think that daily powers are totally awesome and want everything to conform to that model. I do not.
Cooldown abilities are also cool. I liked them when they were part of the Binder schtick, and I'd love to see a class based on them again. I just don't think they fit the psychic all that well.
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power is nice but cannot be endless and come without a cost
Are cantrips not endless? What about the fighter's ability to swing a sword, or the ranger's to fire a bow? "Cannot be endless" isn't actually a rule.
That said, I agree with what I *think* you were trying to say, which is that you have to accept tradeoffs. We have a limited build budget to work with, and that means that you're not allowed to just be arbitrarily awesome forever. If you have moves that are particularly powerful, then you can't use them forever. If you have something that you can use forever, it cant' be but so powerful, and the more of your build budget you invest in other places, the more limited these things will be.
Thus, for example, why a barbarian with an axe is doing more damage than a wizard with a cantrip. The wizard has spent a big chunk of their build budget on spells that are not cantrips.
so more often than focus spell without a cost would mean they should be weaker than focus spell
This does not follow.
Focus spells are less powerful than max-level daily slot spells of their level, pretty consistently. Having a selection of slot spells also gives you a lot more flexibility. There's quite a lot of value in having those slot spells to cast.
Therefore, if you start with a class that was balanced overall, that had both a healthy set of slot spells and a selection of focus spells and focus points to cast them with, it should be possible to build a variant on that class that is still balanced that loses those slot spells and has more focus spells and focus points to work with instead. It's not a thing that Paizo has done yet, but it's something that they could do, and it's something that they might do.
They didn't do it with the Psychic playtest because they wanted the psychic to have spell slots. I even understand why. First, it made them much easier to balance against existing casters, and Paizo is learning as they go. Second, the standard psychic of fable and song has a *lot* of different powers that are ascribed to them - teleportation, object reading, telepathy, mesmerism, clairvoyance, firestarting... the list goes on and on. Filling out all of those powers as different spells that the psychic could reasonably decide to take is relatively easy. Trying to fit them in as cantrips and feats would have been hard. In order to make the core psychic satisfying as a core psychic, they needed spell slots.
But whatever alternate class feature stuff comes up later? It doesn't have to fulfill the core "being a psychic" fantasy for everyone who might want to be a psychic. It can afford to be a lot more constrained in some ways, which means that it doesn't need to have spell slots, which means that it can spend that part of the budget on other things.
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The concept of specialized caster, trading versatility for sustainability, is nowhere to be found in PF2 and I think it's really the biggest thing it lacks. A lot of games/media are featuring casters who cast all day the spells of their specialty while dabbling in any other form of magic. I have nothing against the vancian system and super versatile casters, I can even say I quite like them, but we now have a really big bunch of them and only one single caster that is not even really a specialized caster with the Psychic.
The Kineticist is supposed to bring the blaster focused caster (at least it has the flavor, I reserve my final opinion for when I see one in play/test it myself as it looks more like a martial with a caster sugar coating to me as of now).Paizo, bring us specialized casters!!!! Call them Warlock, specialized casters, one trick poneys or whatever, but bring them. The Psychic doesn't go far enough in the specialization.
I now officially demand that Paizo gives us the One Trick Poney class !!!
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Also, whether it's creative commons or not, it's unlikely Paizo will do a warlock simply because 5E's already got it as one of their iconic classes, and one of their more popular ones at that. No point in duplicating what D&D is doing when they can make their own unique and interesting stuff.
My thing is that I like WotC's intellectual property, but I hate their system.
I would like to be able to engage with concepts I like in a system I enjoy playing.
Also, whether it's creative commons or not, it's unlikely Paizo will do a warlock simply because 5E's already got it as one of their iconic classes, and one of their more popular ones at that. No point in duplicating what D&D is doing when they can make their own unique and interesting stuff.My thing is that I like WotC's intellectual property, but I hate their system.
I would like to be able to engage with concepts I like in a system I enjoy playing.
Third party stuff, maybe? At least for now. I'm pretty sure that there are at least two 3PP versions of warlock for PF2, written by people who share at least some of your feelings on the matter.