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Right now it is difficult to know if a given god is a Deity, Demigod or Quasi Deity (sometimes called Lesser Deity in some 2e books).
One aspect of the lore I love is the cosmology of Golarion, back in 1e you could instantly know if a God was either of the three by the amount of domains they gave to the followers (5 for Deity, 4 for Demigod and 1-4 for Quasi Deity) or if they had statblocks (Deity didn't have, Demigod were 26-30 and Quasi Deity were 21-25).
With the change to 2e now all gods have 4 domains, but they don't have 2 linked to the alignment, so they can express better what the god is about. For example: Immonhiel, in 1e was a Demigoddess, and so she had 4 domains: Chaos, Good, Healing and Plant, but only really 2 of them define her as a goddess, compared to 2e where she has Creation, Healing, Nature and Repose. I like this change, but the problem comes that in 2e Immonhiel is not clarified as being a Demigoddess anymore, so if we didn't know from 1e what she is we wouldn't have any way of knowing, this is even worse with gods that only exist in 2e.
Right now it doesn't have a mechanical implication, but in the future if we get a way to fight demigods and quasi deities (the last one we really can do already) it would make it easier to think how hard fighting such a god should be.
To me (and I know many other) it would be better if going forward we could get this info written down in the gods, be it in the tittle of the god (something like “Deity/Demigod/Quasi deity of XXX”) or with just a simple trait added on to it.
In the last PaizoCon AMA I asked Luis Loza about this, and he told me that this classification of the gods hadn't changed from 1e and that they could look into it if people thought it was important. So what you guys think about this? Should they add it? Any ideas how they could do it?
Paizo doesn't do a lot of stories about fighting deity level entities, although they have done things like fighting an AVATAR of a deity.
In any event, I don't think worrying about how hard a fight against something like even a quasi-deity should be is a big concern. The GM should make narrative reasons way the PCs don't instantly get destroyed, as even a 20th level character should probably just be vaporized by the power of even a quasi deity. So there's some sort of McGuffin that stops that from happening.
Paizo doesn't do a lot of stories about fighting deity level entities, although they have done things like fighting an AVATAR of a deity.
In any event, I don't think worrying about how hard a fight against something like even a quasi-deity should be is a big concern. The GM should make narrative reasons way the PCs don't instantly get destroyed, as even a 20th level character should probably just be vaporized by the power of even a quasi deity. So there's some sort of McGuffin that stops that from happening.
You are overestimating what a god means in pathfinder I think, a demon lord is a Demigod and a lot of them got stats back in 1e, a nascent demon lord (Treerazer) is a quasi deity, a Conqueror Worm is a quasi deity, even a Owb Prophet is a quasi deity and it's only lvl 13 in 2e.
The mechanical side of it may have pushed it aside, but it shouldn't affect the people that want to know it because it's also part of the lore.
Brinebeast had a similar post on June 17 at What are some small changes you'd like to see in the Remaster? comment #129. My own comment is #140, but I will repeat some of that here.
In the Iron Gods adventure path, the party fought two Iron Gods. Hellion was CR 8/MR 4 and Unity was CR 20/MR 8. In Prisoners of the Blight, the 5th module of the PF1 Ironfang Invasion adventure path, the party rescued Gendowyn, Lady of Fangwood, who was CR 15/MR 7. Thus, my campaigns involved entities that could grant spells to clerics but were killable, and none were as high level as CR 21 for quasi-deity. I don't know how Mythic Ranks affect Challenge Rating. Those were PF1 adventure paths, but they appear to have ignored the PF1 deity categories in favor of creating playable challenges instead.
I myself in the Ironfang Invasion adventure path am having trouble with the followers of the deity Hadregash, one of the four goblin-barghest hero-gods. I have been converting that adventure path to PF2, but Hadregash is legacy material form PF1. He has only a brief mention in PF2 under Barghest. He is a god of slavery and for peace at the end of the adventure path, the hobgoblins will have to give up keeping slaves. Thus, I am planning a battle against an 23rd-level avatar of Hadregash to knock him down a peg and to represent the hobgoblins being persuaded to give up slavery. Plot and symbolism justifies battles against gods. For further flavor in the battle, I let one PC become a fledgling god, much like Gendowyn in her youth. She is a leshy fey-blooded sorcerer awakened from a Fangwood plant, so I can make a good case that she would count as Gendowyn's granddaughter.
I find that inventing setting elements, such as rules for deities, as part of a story plot is much more fun than inventing setting elements from abstract principles.
Creative Director
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The standard categorization remains as it was in 1st edition:
Deity = any divinity that doesn't get a stat block.
Demigod = any divinity that gets a stat block and is almost always level 26–30 and is thus generally out of reach of typical groups.
Quasi-Deity = any divinity of level 25 or lower with a stat block and is thus in the reach of typical groups.
In 2nd edition, we've removed all the other quantifications, most notably the number of domains a divinity grants since 2nd edition rules work differently. As we move into the remastered rules and away from the OGL, I suspect we'll use these naming conventions even less, to be honest, but we'll see!
I feel it is better that the power and importance of deities is left to the GM so that they can tell the story they want without having a player explaining that such deity differing from their divine categorization in a Paizo book hurts their sense of verisimilitude too much.
I see it as a tool for the GM so that he knows how to use gods as obstacles in their games, not something that restricts him in a narrative sense. If a GMJ wants to use a god already existing, a not one made by themselves for their campaign, why wouldn't they research it first or make it fit in the narrative that they are fighting an avatar or weakened version of it?
As we move into the remastered rules and away from the OGL, I suspect we'll use these naming conventions even less, to be honest, but we'll see!
It's a shame since it's something I always loved about the setting and something I hated seeing going away from 1e when 2e came out, even more so after getting it all written down in Planar Adventures only 1 year before 2e came out. If it ends up staying in any form (even with another name) I think it would be great if it was communicated to the readers in some way.
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1st of all, you are not categorizing deities in PF1 correctly.
I was just quoting the requirements listed in Planar Adventures to make a point that the easiest way to know the category of a god, the amount of domains it gave, is gone in 2e.
2nd, because you misrepresented how many domains deities gave you missed how much more detailed PF1 domains are.
In 2e there are also something equivalent to subdomains, the Alternate Domains, some gods don't have them, but they do exist. Arshea has: confidence, freedom, passion, perfection, change, family, and protection between domains and alternate domains.
That they changed how they give domains to have more space with how they do things is okay and I didn't mind to say or argument that one is better than the other, what I wanted to say is this had an impact in making clear what category each god is in.
But I don't think that every deity needs to tell you whether they are a full deity or a demigod unless the difference is not obvious as is the case with deities having the same number of domains.
The point is that for a new deity that we only now we know about in 2e, for example Lubaiko or Yelayne we don't have any way to know what category they fit in because the text always calls everything "god", not making distinction between deities and demigods.