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I think Unicore is right that if you have an awesome GM who understands the intricacies of PF2, playing a wizard could be an awesome experience.
But I think the average GM does not have that level of skill, and are mostly told that PF2 is so well balanced that they don't need to make many adjustments.
Also I think some wizard players want their class to be good independent of GM skill. A rogue or fighter is going to be fun to play regardless of gm skill.
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I can even anticipate what spells it will have per rank based on the example Mentalist School:Cantrips: Warp Step, Time Sense
1st: Sure Strike, Quick Sort, Longstrider
Longstrider is now Tailwind and an air trait spell, so no time for you. I'll be interested to see how many other formerly abstract school concepts got reconceptualized with an elemental flavor and attached trait.
Elemental archetype is the true school specialist for wizards.
To be fair, that one was reaching a bit, so I'm not surprised it was changed.
I would have actually preferred to have 3 spells for the 3rd level entry, so I can fit Slow in there as well, so I'd honestly rather it work out that way IMO, but I was attempting more to do a 1:1 construction than a more abstract one. Either way, I'm still having one level of spells granting up to 3 choices, with the rest granting 2, and one granting only 1, which is ultimately what I wanted to replicate, so I think either way it's fine.
I think Unicore is right that if you have an awesome GM who understands the intricacies of PF2, playing a wizard could be an awesome experience.
But I think the average GM does not have that level of skill, and are mostly told that PF2 is so well balanced that they don't need to make many adjustments.
Also I think some wizard players want their class to be good independent of GM skill. A rogue or fighter is going to be fun to play regardless of gm skill.
That's a large crux of it. Turning the Wizard into a "GM May I" class seems backwards in design, since we already have mechanics in place for this kind of thing (notably the Rarity rules), and the Wizard in years past have almost never been a "GM May I" class. Most other classes don't function that way either.
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I think Unicore is right that if you have an awesome GM who understands the intricacies of PF2, playing a wizard could be an awesome experience.
But I think the average GM does not have that level of skill, and are mostly told that PF2 is so well balanced that they don't need to make many adjustments.
Also I think some wizard players want their class to be good independent of GM skill. A rogue or fighter is going to be fun to play regardless of gm skill.
Here's the thing though. In a low system mastery game, there is a pretty good chance this will effectively buff the wizard by giving them a reliable baseline of spells to fall back on. You actually need a fair bit of system mastery to understand this change. A lot of players want to play wizards but don't actually have the attention span to keep a fully stocked spell book and drastically change their load out every day.
There is a middleground band of people who want to go full Batman but play with GMs who won't enable them to, but I for low op tables this will probably improve the experience.
I mean, the dark secret of the "wizard" or equivalent class from the beginning of Table top RPGs is that "because Magic" has always required a friendly relationship between player and GM to work. There is really no way to change that without making the class into a computer game class where every single thing that they can possibly do is so well coded and limited by the rule set that there is no real room for creativity or imagination.
How much a game creates limits for its magic system, and how much it leaves up to the player/GM relationship is a dial, that various systems tune one way or another, but overall, PF2's dial is set pretty far into "this magic system is well constrained by the rules." It is just that those rules are much more flexible than these boards tend to represent. I mean, how many folks here play in campaigns (not PFS) that use 0 variant rules?
I would not be surprised if, within 2 years of the player core 1 book coming out, there are twice as many wizard schools as there were to start, especially if players say "give us more schools, especially thematically linked ones to specific settings and campaigns!" SO even for PFS, I hardly see the schools thing as being a massive constraint for very long.
It is new, and it changes things quite a bit. People keep calling the mentalist the new enchanter, but my first thought when I saw it was that it was more illusionist than enchanter, just with a focus on blatantly fooling other people rather than the stealthy, "go unnoticed" illusionist.
Over time, I think all of us will get away from saying "this is the x school from D&D" and wizards can really get their own unique Golarion identities. I think just one book introducing schools for the Rune Lords, that really rides the sin and not the D&D school is going make that very clear.
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Darksol's curriculum is better than each and every one of the official curriculums we have seen so far.
But keeping the Curricula to like "20 spells" instead of 200 means that it's very easy for Paizo devs but also players and GMs to make new ones.
Like I would allow a player to pick any 20 spells that go together in a coherent theme, explain to me what the theme is, and I would come up with a focus spell for them.
I still expect the Arcane Theses to have been buffed considerably though, since I suspect this will be most of your subclass budget.
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I mean, the dark secret of the "wizard" or equivalent class from the beginning of Table top RPGs is that "because Magic" has always required a friendly relationship between player and GM to work. There is really no way to change that without making the class into a computer game class where every single thing that they can possibly do is so well coded and limited by the rule set that there is no real room for creativity or imagination.
But it doesn't.
Pathfinder 2 has ten spellcasters and eighteen classes that use magical or pseudomagical abilities to some degree.
The complaints in this thread are specific to one of them (although some of them also apply to the Witch).
Two out of Eighteen is not "magic is fundamentally unmanageable as an idea", it's a specific class having some questionable design choices that might make it less fun and more awkward.
Given how immersed in PF2 you are, you have to know that, so I'm not sure why you'd say something like this that's so obviously incorrect.
The 'dark secret' here is that wizard focus spells are kind of trashy, their feats aren't super interesting, and they have a weak core and it would be really cool if the Remaster makes some of these things better, but some people are a bit skeptical because of what we've been shown so far. Not really a secret at all.
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Darksol's curriculum is better than each and every one of the official curriculums we have seen so far.But keeping the Curricula to like "20 spells" instead of 200 means that it's very easy for Paizo devs but also players and GMs to make new ones.
Like I would allow a player to pick any 20 spells that go together in a coherent theme, explain to me what the theme is, and I would come up with a focus spell for them.
I still expect the Arcane Theses to have been buffed considerably though, since I suspect this will be most of your subclass budget.
The old schools were so broad you often wouldn't have needed to make new ones to fit a concept and if you did there was nothing preventing you and your GM sitting out add deciding which spells are appropriate to your theme. This change offers no new benefit and puts work onto the GM more often than the old system did.
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You are forgetting that we also have to get 2 focus spells in the curriculum.
So add/change a spell selection of a existing curriculum is a thing create a new one is another thing.
And let's be honest if the idea is build your own curriculum it would be best to create a system like Personal Staves instead of bedding the GM to make changes in the schools that also won't work for PFS and more restricted GMs (or that already have more things to do than personalize the school spell list for a wizard player).
Locked for flags