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I was thinking about how to build a purist fire kineticist recently. In particular, you might not want to put more than about a 12/+1 in dex for various reasons, but you also don't have access to the armor impulses, and you don't want to do things like take an entire archetype to get armor scaling... but I realized you don't really need that.
Armor Proficiency is right there as a general feat.
So, basically, you take the 12 dex that you want. You get some light armor that'll give you 2 AC and you accept that you're down by 2 and try not to die for the first two levels. At level 2, you archetype to Sentinel, and upgrade your armor to something like Chainmail or a Breastplate... and now you have the same AC as everyone else. At level 3, you take Armor Proficiency as your general feat, and retrain Sentinel to whatever level 2 class feat it was that you actually wanted. (Possibly Oracle? It isn't like it was going to actually help you much before level 4.) At 5, you get your ability boosts. You probably bump con/cha/str/dex. At 10, you do that again... and you switch back to light armor and retrain Armor Proficiency to something else, because you don't need it anymore. At 13 you get Expert in light armor, and the whole "nonscaling" thing would start to matter, but it doesn't, because you're done with that ride.
Oh, and if you're the right kind of human, you don't even need to wait until level 2.
The whole thing is so much easier than we've been telling ourselves this entire time.
I'm sure there are some out there who already realized this. This message isn't for you. It's for all of those people out there trying to build characters who are thinking like I was thinking as of yesterday.
Strength-base investigator would find it useful too... if for some reason you wanted to play a strength-based investigator.
Good trick to remind people of. I think there's a tendency to see retraining as a way to fix mistakes or address buyer's remorse, but PF2 has a lot of scaled benefits that make the idea of actively retraining as part of your build a lot more appealing.
Feats like Canny Acumen feel almost designed to be retrained since they don't actually do anything for big chunks of a campaign.
Strength-base investigator would find it useful too... if for some reason you wanted to play a strength-based investigator.
Strength Investigator is surprisingly good. You end up being a lot more reliable than the normal build since you always have your attack bonus, you get a better athletics, and turns out equipping a huge weapon, having a high strength score, and being able to attack twice a lot more consistently does a lot for your damage even without your normal class booster.
While this is obviously a good thing to keep in mind for optimization, I rather dislike that this is kinda how armor works in 2e. I hope in a third edition there's more built-in flexibility and control over your character's costume from 1-20, especially since class proficiency is what should actually be determining the bulk of a character's AC. If non-scaling feats are currently necessarily for balance reasons, I would like a third edition to be designed from the ground up to avoid the need for them altogether - if a player thinks an option is cool now, they shouldn't feel pressured to abandon that option later.
Good trick to remind people of. I think there's a tendency to see retraining as a way to fix mistakes or address buyer's remorse, but PF2 has a lot of scaled benefits that make the idea of actively retraining as part of your build a lot more appealing.
Feats like Canny Acumen feel almost designed to be retrained since they don't actually do anything for big chunks of a campaign.
After the "big three" general feats (Fleet, Toughness, and Incredible Initiative), Canny Acumen is one of the "better" choices at 15th or 19th level to boost a character's worst save from Expert to Master proficiency (17th+ level). To be honest, other than a handful of general feats that only apply to specific classes/progressions (e.g., True Perception for the few that gain Legendary in Perception), there aren't many choices that are "must haves" mechanically; which is probably a good thing, since it encourages players to take feats based on the concept instead of focusing on "optimizing" (although "optimizing" to realize the concept is also encouraged).