How would you remaster the wizard?

[Temperans]

Balancing based on "we have too many of X, so let's not do that" is the worst way to balance a game. If multiple characters are good at using weapons you don't nerf every body because too many characters are good with weapon. So why should casters be punished becaused "too many characters have a strong will"?

Heck the very idea of going out where you might get killed shows strong will. Its even stronger will to go out in robes as a frail person with just a handful of spells.

Also there is no reason why bards should have legendary in will but not wizards.

[Dragonhearthx]

Temperans wrote:

Also there is no reason why bards should have legendary in will but not wizards.

No, wizards should get legendary in fortitude saves, but still have 6 hit points.

Why? Because it would be hilarious.

[R3st8]

wegrata wrote:

Slightly off topic, but related to incapacitation. I was thinking about a condition like 4e bloodied, that lowered your effective level. Like at 75% health you'd get bloodied 1, and it would reduce your level by 1 for incapacitation effects. Would allow martials to do their thing and support casters in a really meaningful way.

That would be interesting since by the time you can cast a save of suck on the boss and succeed he will be low enough that it wont be as much of a bummer specially with how hard it is for them to crit fail, it would also make buffs and debuffs feel better because it would help the party to get the boss bloodied faster so wizards would feel the benefits more directly.

[Unicore]

Is anyone not playing a wizard because of the proficiency caps on their saving throws? Like if they suddenly had legendary proficiency in Fort, Ref and Will, would that really change any of the conversations people are having about wizards?

I mean, a good counterspeller is already pretty much immune to being targeted by spells. I don't know how many people have played with a higher level counterspeller, but the counterspell rules of PF2 are pretty generous to the person rolling the dice. Even higher level enemies, with decently difficult DCs can pretty much only cast spells at the highest level of the counterspeller or higher, and even then, with hero points, it is not uncommon to see spells get shut down.

A high level counterspelling wizard is pretty much a "GM, do not ever count on caster NPCs ever doing anything cool or interesting for narrative purposes." It has definitely been presenting me challenges running Fists of the Ruby Pheonix.

And the defensive magic options at higher levels also get pretty effective for preventing damage and minimizing conditions. The issue here is players not having spells prepared to use these options when they are needed.

As much as scrolls really can cover a wizard having access to almost every rank -2 option available at their finger tips with a little preparation, I kinda wonder if people using APB should consider just letting wizards/any prepared caster just 3 to 4 free and open extra slots of spells who's top rank is 2 under top level.

I do totally understand how much a large section of the community hates scrolls as the best way to spend gold to support casters, but the "spend gold to be better" is such a fundamental part of PF2 that it really hurts casters that don't do it, and wands are absolutely terrible for providing the extra spell power unless it is very long duration spells that stay significantly relevant for many levels of play.

I very strongly believe that most players who play wizards and get discouraged, do so because they feel like they don't have enough spell slots to cast spells from them as often as they would like, especial when it feels like making those spells stick requires actions and knowledge before casting them. And if they had more spells the complaints would all dry up. Boosting anything other than spell casting (including the bump to simple weapons) just feels like energy that will never address the problem.

[Darksol the Painbringer]

Unicore wrote:

Is anyone not playing a wizard because of the proficiency caps on their saving throws? Like if they suddenly had legendary proficiency in Fort, Ref and Will, would that really change any of the conversations people are having about wizards?

I mean, a good counterspeller is already pretty much immune to being targeted by spells. I don't know how many people have played with a higher level counterspeller, but the counterspell rules of PF2 are pretty generous to the person rolling the dice. Even higher level enemies, with decently difficult DCs can pretty much only cast spells at the highest level of the counterspeller or higher, and even then, with hero points, it is not uncommon to see spells get shut down.

A high level counterspelling wizard is pretty much a "GM, do not ever count on caster NPCs ever doing anything cool or interesting for narrative purposes." It has definitely been presenting me challenges running Fists of the Ruby Pheonix.

And the defensive magic options at higher levels also get pretty effective for preventing damage and minimizing conditions. The issue here is players not having spells prepared to use these options when they are needed.

As much as scrolls really can cover a wizard having access to almost every rank -2 option available at their finger tips with a little preparation, I kinda wonder if people using APB should consider just letting wizards/any prepared caster just 3 to 4 free and open extra slots of spells who's top rank is 2 under top level.

I do totally understand how much a large section of the community hates scrolls as the best way to spend gold to support casters, but the "spend gold to be better" is such a fundamental part of PF2 that it really hurts casters that don't do it, and wands are absolutely terrible for providing the extra spell power unless it is very long duration spells that stay significantly relevant for many levels of play.

I very strongly believe that most players who play wizards and get discouraged, do so because they feel like...

Yes, they would, because if pushed too much, people would complain it does too much for the class. Conversely, their saves do too little now, so people are complaining they don't have enough since their features aren't being compensated elsewhere. The idea that there can't be a middle ground is absurd, and I honestly wouldn't mind if spell schools adjudicated your save progression.

Counterspells are trash against BBEG fights due to the ridiculous scaling and requiring to prepare the same exact spells the BBEG has, and those are usually the only spells that you should need to counter as a spellcaster, since countering mook spells is a waste of spell slots. Legit, counterspelling is dead in this edition and only serves as a GM tool to frustrate their spellcaster PCs even more, because at least then their scaling makes their tactics reliable.

Defensive Magic like Impeccable Flow loses luster over time and rank without heightening, whereas proactive spells like Haste or Slow do not. They are just as effective at the levels you get them as they are at the levels you will be playing at later.

Scrolls cover a "I don't want to waste time/money/slots/repertoire space on this niche" option, and aren't really ideal for extending out adventuring days on a regular basis without breaking the bank or having instead saved up for a permanent item. Wands are a bit more annoying due to constant maintenance, but at least they are reliable, and Staves don't scale well and are basically a wand and a scroll put together into one item.

[YuriP]

I also need to point that it's not like the scrolls and wands was exclusive to wizard but every spellcaster can use them. It's hard to defend them as some kind of compensation when the Bards and Druids usem them in the same way.

IMO thats the main reason that scrolls and wands cannot be considered as a patch to wizard flaws because they are never developed to be wizard's exclusive nor to work as a patch.

In the end we always return to the same point. The wizards are weak class with a weak chassis that lacks from versatility and firepower.
Also I don't think that wizards needs a stronger chassis we already have bards, druids, clerics and oracles with way more stronger chassis, feats and focus spells that compensate the limitations of spells from spell slots. It wouldn't be fun to get another class that do the same thing, to get a stronger chassis to compensate the fact that their magical abilities are weak.

What we need is a wizard that dominates the magic! Someone who focuses most part of its live in the study and domain of arcane magic, someone who believes that theres nothing that cannot be solved with magic efficiently instead of look for mundane alternatives. Something that looks like the wizard becomes more and more far from every new edition/revision.

[R3st8]

This might sound radical but how would you all feel about just getting rid of the focus spells, school slots, thesis, arcane bond and just making the wizard a 6 slots caster? I just feel like all those rules about what slot you can cast add what you sacrifice are more complicated than necessary.

[ecgbryt]

I'd come at this from a slightly different angle. The main problem is that wizard is stated in the introduction as being good at 2 things, being a utility caster who counters threats with the appropriate spells, and being good at knowledge skills. They are not the best class at either, especially with power creep. Investigator, rogue and thaumaturge are better at knowledge checks, and anyone can dip into loremaster, bard or dandy to be 90% as knowledgable. Spontaneous casters are better at using niche spells (like Faerie Fire or Earthbind) to alter encounters, and almost all classes can use scrolls as effectively as a wizard.

The class features don't help this intended role. Drain Bonded Item is usually just used to refresh a top level blasting or crowd control spell (for non-universalists), being able to specialize in a spell school narrows the overall utility, and the theses aren't particularly valuable at low level. I think these need to be altered drastically.

I have a wizard in my strength of thousands game. They wanted to play a walking library style caster, so they went with spell substitution. We're 4 books in, and they have used their class feature a grand total of once, it is just not useful when it takes 10 minutes to do. Meanwhile one of the maguses has taken the magus feat Standby Spell, and uses it around every other combat to swap a utility spell for Shocking Grasp as a free action.

I would suggest making Spell Substitution a one action focus spell to swap a prepared spell for something else in your spellbook, and granting this as a baseline focus spell to all kinds of wizards. This would make wizard excel at their stated casting role, making them feel like they always have an ace up their sleeve, without treading on the toes of martials.

[YuriP]

R3st8 wrote:

This might sound radical but how would you all feel about just getting rid of the focus spells, school slots, thesis, arcane bond and just making the wizard a 6 slots caster? I just feel like all those rules about what slot you can cast add what you sacrifice are more complicated than necessary.

Well this will make it better than it's today. But looks like a so boring solution it will make the Wizard the new Fighter, it will end being very efficient at mid and high level but also so boring! But maybe this can be what we need a boring and efficient spellcaster. Yet I still prefer something more cool.

[R3st8]

YuriP wrote:

R3st8 wrote:

This might sound radical but how would you all feel about just getting rid of the focus spells, school slots, thesis, arcane bond and just making the wizard a 6 slots caster? I just feel like all those rules about what slot you can cast add what you sacrifice are more complicated than necessary.

Well this will make it better than it's today. But looks like a so boring solution it will make the Wizard the new Fighter, it will end being very efficient at mid and high level but also so boring! But maybe this can be what we need a boring and efficient spellcaster. Yet I still prefer something more cool.

Ok then what about 5 slots caster + substitution thesis?

[YuriP]

I still prefer 6 slots. 5 slots + substitution looks like a bad compensation to the fact that you aren't a spontaneous spell caster. Also if I had 6 slots I could switch it to 5 slots + flexible spellcasting archetype and will be able to choose the spells on the fly. IMO substitution thesis doesn't worth a spell slot per level.

[R3st8]

YuriP wrote:

I still prefer 6 slots. 5 slots + substitution looks like a bad compensation to the fact that you aren't a spontaneous spell caster. Also if I had 6 slots I could switch it to 5 slots + flexible spellcasting archetype and will be able to choose the spells on the fly. IMO substitution thesis doesn't worth a spell slot per level.

I also prefer flexible casting but I was afraid that it would be too similar to the sorcerer so i wanted to keep some identity so I went for spell substitution, Ok then what about this since you prefer something more cool instead of increasing the number of slots we still remove all of those features and make it a 4 slot caster but now we give the wizard a single very powerful thesis, this would increase the power budged of the thesis and allow for crazier things, would that be better than the 6 slots or 5 slots + flexible?

[Deriven Firelion]

What would make me play a wizard?

1. Interesting feats tied to the schools that give them cool, appropriate boosts for a curriculum.

2. Better intel skill feats.

3. Arcane list including more spells for roles like buffing and debuffing rather than blasting and utility.

4. Maybe a focus spell that allows spontaneous casting of any spell from your spellbook that increases as you level, so by the time you are at your highest level you can cast up to three spontaneous spells from your spellbook up to 9th level per focus point with refocusing opening up that capacity per battle

True spellcasting flexibility showing off the wizard's power.

Then you keep them at 3 slots per level with this sort of floating focus point driven spell slot they can use as needed in battle.

That would be pretty cool I think.

What would I call that ability?

Spell Mastery: Steal from PF1. You have mastered all the spells in your spellbook and can recall them for use as needed a limited number of times within a short period. You recall any spell of 1st to 3rd level by spending a focus point.

Heighten as appropriate up to 9th level spells.

Really let the wizard flex their might like that scene when Gandalf is recalling 100s of spells for opening a door in LotR.

[Temperans]

Do not make Wizards an spontaneous caster, don't make them into just a 5e wizard clone. Those would both be bad ideas.

Do copy from PF1. Paizo had a lot of great in that system and it is a real shame that they are not taking inspiration from all the work that they did.

Do make Wizard's feats about modifying how spells work and how magic items work, not just random inconsequential things. Wizards are not known for having the most spells, they are know for all the crazy BS they can pull if you just let them modify their spells.

[YuriP]

R3st8 wrote:

YuriP wrote:

I still prefer 6 slots. 5 slots + substitution looks like a bad compensation to the fact that you aren't a spontaneous spell caster. Also if I had 6 slots I could switch it to 5 slots + flexible spellcasting archetype and will be able to choose the spells on the fly. IMO substitution thesis doesn't worth a spell slot per level.

I also prefer flexible casting but I was afraid that it would be too similar to the sorcerer so i wanted to keep some identity so I went for spell substitution, Ok then what about this since you prefer something more cool instead of increasing the number of slots we still remove all of those features and make it a 4 slot caster but now we give the wizard a single very powerful thesis, this would increase the power budged of the thesis and allow for crazier things, would that be better than the 6 slots or 5 slots + flexible?

Instead of give the wizard a single very powerful thesis why not give to it some more options of stronger thesis. Like:

Flexible Spell Casting Thesis working like the class archetype but without the dedication and the spell number reduction (you are using your thesis subclass instead).

Spell Mastery thesis like thesis like suggested by Deriven Firelion

Spell Focus Thesis being a thesis that allows you to choose up to 3 spells that you know to turn into your focus spell. You choose one spell at level 1 (must be a rank 1 spell) another at level 5 (must be up to a rank 3 spell) and a last one at level 9 (must up to a rank 5 spell). As normal these focus spells are heightened to half of your level.

Ancient Spell Thesis allowing you to invert the heightening/DC relationship allowing the wizard to cast heightened spells in lower spellslots (but cannot prepare spells with higher rank requirement in a lower slot) at cost of diminishing your DC proportionally (an incremental -2 status bonus per level reduced in this way) and only works with spells that uses saves or spell attack rolls.

Cross Tradition Thesis that allow you to take spells from other traditions. You can learn any spell from any tradition that shares the same trait of your school. If you are an universalist you must choose one tradition different from arcane at 1st level, you can only learn 1 spell from this tradition per spell rank.

The main idea of have strong thesis that changes how wizards can use their magic is that makes every wizard way more unique instead of thesis just try to patch something meh.

About schools IMO the best option is this:

Secrets of Magic pg. 166 1.1 - Creating a Personal Staff wrote:

Establishing magical pathways to turn a simple piece of wood or metal into a staff is no simple matter. Without some structure to bind multiple disparate spells to a single staff, the magic would surely fail. Thus, a custom staff must always be created around a single trait. For example, an elemental trait (air, earth, fire, or water), energy trait (acid, cold, electricity, fire, sonic, positive, negative, or force), alignment trait, the detection trait, the light trait, and so on. The staff and its spells must have the trait. A few traits are too broad to use, including incapacitation and the traits for spell schools and traditions. The GM might add others to this list.

So change every "staff" word in the bolded sentence above to "school" and thats your school choice! Simple that!

Instead of give a locked spell slot the school would give you +2 status bonus in your spells DC and spell attacks making your school to work like your specialization showing the results of your expertise over it.
While universalist will get Drain Bounded Item in the same way it currently is.

[Unicore]

Trait-locking wizard schools would be a much worse choice than I think many folks would first think it to be. I understand the appeal of being thematic, but singular traits related purely to mechanics is bad for overspecialization. People are already complaining about the limited number of spells per school, but imagine if you were facing a creature completely immune to every single spell in you school. Now it is not just one spell from your school that is bad in that encounter, it is all your school spells. Certain traits would just universally be terrible for a school: Mental, Poison, Death, Emotion. Meanwhile, others, like force, would be good when you have them, but you would have almost no spells in them. It would mean that a lot of very thematic, very appropriate spells for a specific vision of a school would be forced into getting a mechanical trait that might make no sense for the actual spell. This wouldn't be a small thing to make work, it would redesigning every spell with the purpose of trying to fit it into a possible wizard school. This was one of the biggest advantages of dropping schools of magic from D&D. Haphazardly trying to fit it back over the arcane list will lead to a very big headache.

[Darksol the Painbringer]

Unicore wrote:

Trait-locking wizard schools would be a much worse choice than I think many folks would first think it to be. I understand the appeal of being thematic, but singular traits related purely to mechanics is bad for overspecialization. People are already complaining about the limited number of spells per school, but imagine if you were facing a creature completely immune to every single spell in you school. Now it is not just one spell from your school that is bad in that encounter, it is all your school spells. Certain traits would just universally be terrible for a school: Mental, Poison, Death, Emotion. Meanwhile, others, like force, would be good when you have them, but you would have almost no spells in them. It would mean that a lot of very thematic, very appropriate spells for a specific vision of a school would be forced into getting a mechanical trait that might make no sense for the actual spell. This wouldn't be a small thing to make work, it would redesigning every spell with the purpose of trying to fit it into a possible wizard school. This was one of the biggest advantages of dropping schools of magic from D&D. Haphazardly trying to fit it back over the arcane list will lead to a very big headache.

Nobody is really talking about trait-locking, though honestly, it seems Paizo is already on board with it based on their example Mentalism curriculum. Not saying every curriculum is going to be that way, but suggesting that it won't happen doesn't exactly seem fair to say either when it's already currently happening.

Of course, you also have some spells where the traits don't matter and they're just that good (such as Haste and Slow), or spells that are being completely changed away from what they used to be (such as Longstrider being turned into an Air-based spell) that the traits are starting to be as relevant as the OGL Schools of Magic are, which is that they are wishy-washy at-best, or multicongruent at-worst.

(I'm actually more surprised that Paizo didn't implement inter-school spells; that is, spells which fall under two spectrums of schools, and therefore count as both. They already have Universal, which means all schools, so I don't understand why this wasn't possible before.)

[Deriven Firelion]

Temperans wrote:

Do not make Wizards an spontaneous caster, don't make them into just a 5e wizard clone. Those would both be bad ideas.

Do copy from PF1. Paizo had a lot of great in that system and it is a real shame that they are not taking inspiration from all the work that they did.

Do make Wizard's feats about modifying how spells work and how magic items work, not just random inconsequential things. Wizards are not known for having the most spells, they are know for all the crazy BS they can pull if you just let them modify their spells.

PF1 is done.

5E spontaneous or flexible casting made the 5E wizard much cooler. They had some pretty cool school powers.

As a former PF1 player, I like what 5E did with the wizard to lower its power and still make it very cool.

Schools powers were generally good.

Rituals were useful in 5E versus the joke they are in PF2. Rituals are not even usable in PF2. Total waste of page space for the vast majority of groups who aren't interested in some 1 or more day ritual requiring 2 or more casters to do anything useful.

My group literally wonders why rituals are in the game since it would require the entire group to coordinate to do once decent ritual. What were the Paizo designers thinking when they made rituals? Did they think groups would all do rituals together? Did they think people would waste time and cash on something that is exceedingly difficult to do and not really worthwhile?

They should have just put a disclaimer on rituals: These are spells we don't really want anyone to use any more, but we didn't want to take them out of the game. So we made them rituals few groups would ever bother to use so we could slowly remove them from the game as they fall into disuse in PF2 and we just remove them in PF3.

I would love to see data on ritual use in PF2 and see if there are any groups investing the resources including money into making rituals work.

What a wasted design space that 5E did much, much better.

And 5E casting took D&D into the 21st century, not stuck in Vancian prepared casting world that isn't well simulated in any books I know of other than maybe Jack Vance's books which I've never read.

I'd like to see PF casting move into the 21st century and not stay in what feels like some anachronistic throwback to the initial game which has long since felt like magic stuck in the mud. 5E casting much, much better.

If only 5E hadn't missed on many of the other parts that 3E improved on over the years to move to a simplistic advantage mechanic that becomes stale very, very early in play.

PF2 is refined 3E with better balance, but stuck in the mud prepared Vancian casting for certain classes that makes those classes feel bad comparatively. The wizard and witch being the two big examples of how bad Vancian prepared casting is and how much it feels like a caster using a land line phone versus sorcerers, bards, and spontaneous casters using smartphones.

[Pronate11]

From personal experience, of the three main tables I've been in, the two that played non AP games have used rituals a ton if the GM gives them access, particularly at levels 7+. Like, they created like 20 awakened animals, and two unseen custodians, and hero's feasts when they had the spare gp and time (or needed to remove a disease). APs tend to use rituals when required, and tend not to give to many in the first place. Most of them are downtime activities basically, but they are a pretty good use of downtime. So campaigns without downtime won't be able to use them much.

[Deriven Firelion]

Pronate11 wrote:

From personal experience, of the three main tables I've been in, the two that played non AP games have used rituals a ton if the GM gives them access, particularly at levels 7+. Like, they created like 20 awakened animals, and two unseen custodians, and hero's feasts when they had the spare gp and time (or needed to remove a disease). APs tend to use rituals when required, and tend not to give to many in the first place. Most of them are downtime activities basically, but they are a pretty good use of downtime. So campaigns without downtime won't be able to use them much.

What did the Awakened Animals do since they are no longer minions? Was this some role-playing thing someone wanted to do or was there a mechanical reason for it?

Why did they use Heroes Feast? The healing skill would have healed so much faster and done so much better for less time than heroe's feast?

What was the mechanical reason for using these rituals? I don't see the reasoning for either.

Do you have any examples of mechanically advantageous rituals like 5Es Tiny Hut ritual?

[Pronate11]

Deriven Firelion wrote:

Pronate11 wrote:

From personal experience, of the three main tables I've been in, the two that played non AP games have used rituals a ton if the GM gives them access, particularly at levels 7+. Like, they created like 20 awakened animals, and two unseen custodians, and hero's feasts when they had the spare gp and time (or needed to remove a disease). APs tend to use rituals when required, and tend not to give to many in the first place. Most of them are downtime activities basically, but they are a pretty good use of downtime. So campaigns without downtime won't be able to use them much.

What did the Awakened Animals do since they are no longer minions? Was this some role-playing thing someone wanted to do or was there a mechanical reason for it?

Why did they use Heroes Feast? The healing skill would have healed so much faster and done so much better for less time than heroe's feast?

What was the mechanical reason for using these rituals? I don't see the reasoning for either.

Do you have any examples of mechanically advantageous rituals like 5Es Tiny Hut ritual?

The awakened animals crewed the ship they where running. They probably could have just got normal crew, but rats and tigers do have some unique advantages. And they used heros feast for the temp hp. It wasn't a ton, but its only 25 gp. If time isn't an issue, you might as well.

[R3st8]

Deriven Firelion wrote:

They should have just put a disclaimer on rituals: These are spells we don't really want anyone to use any more, but we didn't want to take them out of the game. So we made them rituals few groups would ever bother to use so we could slowly remove them from the game as they fall into disuse in PF2 and we just remove them in PF3.

Yeah I know what you feel like, the same could be said of the rarity system, anything other than uncommon is basically npc exclusive and uncommon can be quite distressing for introverts like me specially playing online with strangers, if you have a good gm it will be great but a anything is great with a good gm.

[Deriven Firelion]

Pronate11 wrote:

Deriven Firelion wrote:

Pronate11 wrote:

From personal experience, of the three main tables I've been in, the two that played non AP games have used rituals a ton if the GM gives them access, particularly at levels 7+. Like, they created like 20 awakened animals, and two unseen custodians, and hero's feasts when they had the spare gp and time (or needed to remove a disease). APs tend to use rituals when required, and tend not to give to many in the first place. Most of them are downtime activities basically, but they are a pretty good use of downtime. So campaigns without downtime won't be able to use them much.

What did the Awakened Animals do since they are no longer minions? Was this some role-playing thing someone wanted to do or was there a mechanical reason for it?

Why did they use Heroes Feast? The healing skill would have healed so much faster and done so much better for less time than heroe's feast?

What was the mechanical reason for using these rituals? I don't see the reasoning for either.

Do you have any examples of mechanically advantageous rituals like 5Es Tiny Hut ritual?

The awakened animals crewed the ship they where running. They probably could have just got normal crew, but rats and tigers do have some unique advantages. And they used heros feast for the temp hp. It wasn't a ton, but its only 25 gp. If time isn't an issue, you might as well.

Awaken Animals was for a roleplay situation the GM allowed.

Heroes Feast for some temp hit points. Not a terrible waste of 25 gold and 4 hours if time is not an issue.

There are a ton of rituals. It's very hard to use them in play. They can be overly costly. And feel like not worth using.

Where 5E rituals feel more usable in real time. Much faster casting times and far more of use than PF2 rituals. Definitely like 5E rituals more than PF2 rituals myself. And a caster could do them on their own without needing multiple casters.

[Squiggit]

Deriven Firelion wrote:

PF1 is done.

5E spontaneous or flexible casting made the 5E wizard much cooler. They had some pretty cool school powers.

As a former PF1 player, I like what 5E did with the wizard to lower its power and still make it very cool.

Schools powers were generally good.

Rituals were useful in 5E versus the joke they are in PF2.

Honestly this. As much as I generally find some problems with how 5e works, their version of the wizard just does everything PF2 wanted to do with the wizard but better. Schools have evocative abilities (balance could be hit or miss but that's every TTRPG) that induced specialization without forcing it, rituals help extend longevity and utility, the class is not accuracy gated into feelsbad territory, flex prep is both easier to understand and generally more fun for most players and decreases the odds of bricking yourself.

The 5e wizard is too strong, especially at very high levels, but a lot of that comes down to spell design rather than core design.

A marriage of some of those cooler design elements + cool PF2 things like focus spells and theses would have made for a very evocative and cool class that could be as powerful or weak as Paizo wanted but at least would have some cool stuff padding it out.

Instead the PF2 is very safely designed, and I think that creates a worse experience for everyone.

[Calliope5431]

Yeah the 5e wizard gives flexible casting for free. Which I do think is the way to fix it.

5e wizard rituals do definitely have the risk of being a little too strong, though not enough for most people (in my experience) to actually notice or care. At high level it's silly, but mostly due to a small subset of spells (mass suggestion, forcecage, simulacrum, feeblemind, clone, and most 9ths). The actual chassis is fine at high level.

Do not steal from PF 1e. That comes with its own (very large) set of problems, and I'd rather have a weak wizard than "everyone should play a wizard," which was (inadvertently) the main theme of 3.x and PF 1e.

[Unicore]

I think “make this class more like 5e’s version” is probably not a very likely design choice at a time where potentially getting sued out of existence is a very real threat for the company.

[DrSnooze]

To me, the big problem with the "silver bullet" idea is that saving throws are too high. The worst feeling as a player is having the perfect spell for the exact situation you're in, and then watching it fizzle because the bad guy made a saving throw. As a martial, missing still isn't fun, but if you miss you can just swing again next round. With a Wizard, you only have a certain number of spells, and you probably don't have that exact spell prepped more than once. It's incredibly disappointing to experience this as a player.

The tradeoff is supposed to be that you're doing subpar damage most of the time, but a few times a session it's your time to shine. When these moments are rare, not being able to shine is a bad feeling.

[YuriP]

Unicore wrote:

Trait-locking wizard schools would be a much worse choice than I think many folks would first think it to be. I understand the appeal of being thematic, but singular traits related purely to mechanics is bad for overspecialization. People are already complaining about the limited number of spells per school, but imagine if you were facing a creature completely immune to every single spell in you school. Now it is not just one spell from your school that is bad in that encounter, it is all your school spells. Certain traits would just universally be terrible for a school: Mental, Poison, Death, Emotion. Meanwhile, others, like force, would be good when you have them, but you would have almost no spells in them. It would mean that a lot of very thematic, very appropriate spells for a specific vision of a school would be forced into getting a mechanical trait that might make no sense for the actual spell. This wouldn't be a small thing to make work, it would redesigning every spell with the purpose of trying to fit it into a possible wizard school. This was one of the biggest advantages of dropping schools of magic from D&D. Haphazardly trying to fit it back over the arcane list will lead to a very big headache.

Yet you have way more options than current remastered 2 school spells per level. And isn't like the Paizo option wasn't best, it still have big problems like low level spells that becomes useless at high levels.

I also think the inverse of you. If Paizo made school traits for the spells instead of use that lazy solution all this conversation about currently curriculum system is bad than pre-remaster would never happen. They could do this, simple reclassifying spells into new schools with new names that wouldn't even need to be tied to the 8 cap to prevent problems with WotC. They could be more or less up to. But instead was choose to use the easier and the worst possible solution, just copy the bloodline stat block.

Turning back to traits. Without school there are dozen of trait options to select. Some really won't be good but many others like the energy types are way better than restricted options of many curriculums. But to solve this another good solution is instead of limit it to just one trait, make the school system similar to kineticist's gate, every X levels you can add a new trait to your school spells options.

In the end this is just one of many examples of how the school system could be recreated less limited and interesting than the current curriculum.

Unicore wrote:

I think “make this class more like 5e’s version” is probably not a very likely design choice at a time where potentially getting sued out of existence is a very real threat for the company.

So remove the spell slots. There's nothing more d&dist than this. Just use MP like any other game or a cooldown system like monsters breaths are. Also both are way more familiar to current players generations that already understand how a MP/Cooldown system works and its a lot more flexible.

DrSnooze wrote:

To me, the big problem with the "silver bullet" idea is that saving throws are too high. The worst feeling as a player is having the perfect spell for the exact situation you're in, and then watching it fizzle because the bad guy made a saving throw. As a martial, missing still isn't fun, but if you miss you can just swing again next round. With a Wizard, you only have a certain number of spells, and you probably don't have that exact spell prepped more than once. It's incredibly disappointing to experience this as a player.

The tradeoff is supposed to be that you're doing subpar damage most of the time, but a few times a session it's your time to shine. When these moments are rare, not being able to shine is a bad feeling.

This isn't a problem of saving throws but a problem of the daily limited usage specially for prepared spells. Have a failure chance is fair but fail in your precious scarce daily resource is very frustrating. This high frustration doesn't happen to kineticists for example.

In the end, this frustration comes from having kept the casters complicated, limited and too situational for the current times while solving the main problems of the martial ones.

[Deriven Firelion]

Unicore wrote:

I think “make this class more like 5e’s version” is probably not a very likely design choice at a time where potentially getting sued out of existence is a very real threat for the company.

They don't have to make it like 5E exactly. They already have spontaneous casting, so make them like a spontaneous caster who can change out spells. PF2 has so many balance layers with spells, this changes nothing for the game.

Even if a caster has the perfect spell for a monster or encounter, they still only have a 40 to 60 percent chance of working.

The incap trait still applies.

Any resistances still apply.

The damage is still limited.

The end result is just allowing wizards to truly feel like versatile casters without affecting what any other class is doing as they all have focus spells and class chassis abilities much better than the wizard.

All making a wizard a spontaneous caster who can change out spells does is make the wizard feel like a wizard meaning the most versatile caster in the game without affecting their power.

How do I know? I did it. And it changed nothing for players making wizards more often because the wizard chassis is still not very fun and the Arcane list lacks role versatility or uniquely impactful spells.

It made the wizard slightly more fun to play so they didn't feel completely terrible once they used a spell like fireball and an arcane bond to cast it more than once. They could keep casting like it a sorcerer who makes it their signature spell.

There are so may layered balance limiters in PF2 that it's a real hard game to break. The old balance limiters like Vancian prepared casting are just an anchor that weights those casters down on top of the other balance limiters already in place.

[Errenor]

Deriven Firelion wrote:

Where 5E rituals feel more usable in real time. Much faster casting times and far more of use than PF2 rituals. Definitely like 5E rituals more than PF2 rituals myself. And a caster could do them on their own without needing multiple casters.

While I agree with you on impracticality and inaccessibility of PF2 rituals (and with a lot of what Squiggit said), you mislead people here who don't know what you are talking about.

5E doesn't have rituals. At all (or expect DM-made plot ones). It has spells you can ALSO cast for free but for much longer (but reasonable) times. So, they are just common spells and so can only be cast by spellcasters.
PF2 rituals are much closer to things which are called rituals in culture: collective, demanding ingredients, taking really a lot of time. And even not demanding any spellcasters at all.
So you are comparing apples with carrots.

[R3st8]

Unicore wrote:

I think “make this class more like 5e’s version” is probably not a very likely design choice at a time where potentially getting sued out of existence is a very real threat for the company.

You are correct and man I really hate copyrights do they even serve any purpose?

[YuriP]

Errenor wrote:

Deriven Firelion wrote:

Where 5E rituals feel more usable in real time. Much faster casting times and far more of use than PF2 rituals. Definitely like 5E rituals more than PF2 rituals myself. And a caster could do them on their own without needing multiple casters.

While I agree with you on impracticality and inaccessibility of PF2 rituals (and with a lot of what Squiggit said), you mislead people here who don't know what you are talking about.

5E doesn't have rituals. At all (or expect DM-made plot ones). It has spells you can ALSO cast for free but for much longer (but reasonable) times. So, they are just common spells and so can only be cast by spellcasters.
PF2 rituals are much closer to things which are called rituals in culture: collective, demanding ingredients, taking really a lot of time. And even not demanding any spellcasters at all.
So you are comparing apples with carrots.

I agree with you at same time that I agree with Deriven.

5e rituals are basically long casting spells while in PF2 they looks like rituals but the PF2 rituals is more like a GM tool to use and to allow some players to use than really something accessible (unless you get Ritualist Archetype).

But in general I prefer the PF2 rituals because most rituals are things like resurrection and long duration and non-minion summons. Things that usually the GMs usually want to keep their access restricted for many stories.

For example the difficult of have access and the cost of a resurrection ritual helps to not allow to use resurrection as an easier tool to save the day when the things goes wrong and the NPC that you have to protect died or someone in the party has died the group maybe have to abandon the current quest to resurrect the ally.

[Unicore]

R3st8 wrote:

Unicore wrote:

I think “make this class more like 5e’s version” is probably not a very likely design choice at a time where potentially getting sued out of existence is a very real threat for the company.

You are correct and man I really hate copyrights do they even serve any purpose?

Intellectual property, creative/academic integrity and the invention of ideas is my academic area of focus. Don't even get me started. But I will say that Paizo is fascinating as a company because their choices reflect a desire to respect the intention of intellectual property and is going way beyond the letter of the law around it.

[Argonar_Alfaran]

DrSnooze wrote:

To me, the big problem with the "silver bullet" idea is that saving throws are too high. The worst feeling as a player is having the perfect spell for the exact situation you're in, and then watching it fizzle because the bad guy made a saving throw. As a martial, missing still isn't fun, but if you miss you can just swing again next round. With a Wizard, you only have a certain number of spells, and you probably don't have that exact spell prepped more than once. It's incredibly disappointing to experience this as a player.

The tradeoff is supposed to be that you're doing subpar damage most of the time, but a few times a session it's your time to shine. When these moments are rare, not being able to shine is a bad feeling.

This exactly.

That is why I suggested a mechanic to enforce a hit basically once per combat. I'm sure there would be other methods as well, like Recall Knowledge giving a status bonus. School spells having a bonus to to hit is another one.

This is not a problem of having too little resources as others have suggested. You could double the spell slots and still run into the same problem. The only difference would be the increase in work of book keeping your slots, especially for those of us that still play with pen and paper. And losing the specialties along the way doesn't feel good as well. This would just make every wizard ever the same and wizards are already too samey to begin with.

Making the Wizard into a spontaneous spell caster is not the solution either, because at that point, wizards would be simply better sorcerers. No Sorcerer's core mechanics wouldn't justify playing them still.

Besides it completely misses the point of the fantasy about the frail person that is very efficient/powerful, but only for a limited amount of time. Preparation, knowledge and silver bullets need to matter. Specialty and focus need to matter as well.

To fill a niche in the game, Wizards already give up a lot. They don't know their whole spell list by default, they need to prepare their spells in advance, they have the worst base stats and progressions in the game, they are limited in what they can use their 4rth spell slot for. They need something only they can do and having the arcane spell list is not the answer to that.

[R3st8]

YuriP wrote:

I agree with you at same time that I agree with Deriven.

5e rituals are basically long casting spells while in PF2 they looks like rituals but the PF2 rituals is more like a GM tool to use and to allow some players to use than really something accessible (unless you get Ritualist Archetype).

But in general I prefer the PF2 rituals because most rituals are things like resurrection and long duration and non-minion summons. Things that usually the GMs usually want to keep their access restricted for many stories.

For example the difficult of have access and the cost of a resurrection ritual helps to not allow to use resurrection as an easier tool to save the day when the things goes wrong and the NPC that you have to protect died or someone in the party has died the group maybe have to abandon the current quest to resurrect the ally.

The problem is that for some players the ability to do things like creating demiplanes and revive the dead is what made them want to play so when you make their one favorite thing optional you are cheating them out of their moment to shine, honestly I personally dislike the notion of a gm removing the pc's ability to "tell a story", it feels like a video game when you have a 99 phoenix downs in your pocket but you cant use it on Aerith, that is too much railroading for my taste.

[Shisumo]

I'd give the wizard the 1E version of arcane bond back. That 1/day "pull anything from your entire spellbook" ability did so much to make wizards feel like the ultimate toolbox casters.

[Karneios]

My limited experience with rituals were the two that have shown up in my current strength of thousands game where we failed them and felt that the mechanics of them just made them too difficult and too much of a pain to really care about and ended up just generally ignoring that rituals exist

[Dragonhearthx]

I would be glad to give up all weapon proficiency if it ment faster spell proficiency.

[Squiggit]

"Too difficult" suddenly reminds me of abomination vaults giving players a DC39 ritual at level 10.

[Deriven Firelion]

Errenor wrote:

Deriven Firelion wrote:

Where 5E rituals feel more usable in real time. Much faster casting times and far more of use than PF2 rituals. Definitely like 5E rituals more than PF2 rituals myself. And a caster could do them on their own without needing multiple casters.

While I agree with you on impracticality and inaccessibility of PF2 rituals (and with a lot of what Squiggit said), you mislead people here who don't know what you are talking about.

5E doesn't have rituals. At all (or expect DM-made plot ones). It has spells you can ALSO cast for free but for much longer (but reasonable) times. So, they are just common spells and so can only be cast by spellcasters.
PF2 rituals are much closer to things which are called rituals in culture: collective, demanding ingredients, taking really a lot of time. And even not demanding any spellcasters at all.
So you are comparing apples with carrots.

What are those spells called? I thought they were called rituals.

[Deriven Firelion]

Unicore wrote:

R3st8 wrote:

Unicore wrote:

I think “make this class more like 5e’s version” is probably not a very likely design choice at a time where potentially getting sued out of existence is a very real threat for the company.

You are correct and man I really hate copyrights do they even serve any purpose?

Intellectual property, creative/academic integrity and the invention of ideas is my academic area of focus. Don't even get me started. But I will say that Paizo is fascinating as a company because their choices reflect a desire to respect the intention of intellectual property and is going way beyond the letter of the law around it.

A business doesn't exist if intellectual property rights aren't protected. Paizo knows that, so does WotC. Copyrights protect the work of the creator.

If everyone can take work for free, no one can turn it into a business with all associated benefits.

Paizo doesn't even exist without copyright laws or WotC for that matter.

So yes, copyrights serve a purpose.

[Errenor]

Squiggit wrote:

"Too difficult" suddenly reminds me of abomination vaults giving players a DC39 ritual at level 10.

Oh, yes. In the end our GM just has overriden these DCs or something. He definitely did something so that rituals would become possible.

Deriven Firelion wrote:

Errenor wrote:

Deriven Firelion wrote:

Where 5E rituals feel more usable in real time. Much faster casting times and far more of use than PF2 rituals. Definitely like 5E rituals more than PF2 rituals myself. And a caster could do them on their own without needing multiple casters.

While I agree with you on impracticality and inaccessibility of PF2 rituals (and with a lot of what Squiggit said), you mislead people here who don't know what you are talking about.

5E doesn't have rituals. At all (or expect DM-made plot ones). It has spells you can ALSO cast for free but for much longer (but reasonable) times. So, they are just common spells and so can only be cast by spellcasters.
PF2 rituals are much closer to things which are called rituals in culture: collective, demanding ingredients, taking really a lot of time. And even not demanding any spellcasters at all.
So you are comparing apples with carrots.

What are those spells called? I thought they were called rituals.

No, they are called 'spells'. They have a tag 'ritual'. Yes, this word is really there. No, it isn't the same thing, and doesn't mean the same thing in PF2.

[3-Body Problem]

Deriven Firelion wrote:

A business doesn't exist if intellectual property rights aren't protected. Paizo knows that, so does WotC. Copyrights protect the work of the creator.

If everyone can take work for free, no one can turn it into a business with all associated benefits.

Paizo doesn't even exist without copyright laws or WotC for that matter.

So yes, copyrights serve a purpose.

Copyright has gotten way too long specifically to serve corporate interests. I think it should revert to a far shorter period so companies are forced to make new IPs instead of churning the corpses of old ones for all eternity. There are also all the issues with lost media, especially with videogames, because nobody knows who owns the rights, music rights can expire, etc.

In general, copyright as currently enforced in the US is too heavy-handed and far too corporate-favored to be of any use to anybody who isn't a corporation.

[Sibelius Eos Owm]

I confess I would like it if rituals became somewhat more robust. We understand that rituals should be difficult to execute, but right now if we want to do an at-level ritual it's a bucket of money with a considerable failure chance which while technically is difficult, doesn't carry the feeling of difficulty as much as it just makes it incredibly draining to try until it works.

First thing I would advocate for is a more robust concept of "if you do the ritual in the proper location with this or that rare ingredient that you found in such a place, or you brought an appropriate artifact, the difficulty of the actual roll scales down so that you can actually reasonably expect the ritual to succeed, but it's still difficult, only the challenge is in assembling the ritual conditions rather than the % chance it'll fail once you do it.

[Calliope5431]

Yeah I'd also appreciate more plot centric stuff (human sacrifices! Ancient shards of star metal! Only being able to be performed during an eclipse in winter!) and less "you rolled a 12, that's not good enough, you fail"

[Deriven Firelion]

Errenor wrote:

Squiggit wrote:

"Too difficult" suddenly reminds me of abomination vaults giving players a DC39 ritual at level 10.

Oh, yes. In the end our GM just has overriden these DCs or something. He definitely did something so that rituals would become possible.

Deriven Firelion wrote:

Errenor wrote:

Deriven Firelion wrote:

Where 5E rituals feel more usable in real time. Much faster casting times and far more of use than PF2 rituals. Definitely like 5E rituals more than PF2 rituals myself. And a caster could do them on their own without needing multiple casters.

While I agree with you on impracticality and inaccessibility of PF2 rituals (and with a lot of what Squiggit said), you mislead people here who don't know what you are talking about.

5E doesn't have rituals. At all (or expect DM-made plot ones). It has spells you can ALSO cast for free but for much longer (but reasonable) times. So, they are just common spells and so can only be cast by spellcasters.
PF2 rituals are much closer to things which are called rituals in culture: collective, demanding ingredients, taking really a lot of time. And even not demanding any spellcasters at all.
So you are comparing apples with carrots.

What are those spells called? I thought they were called rituals.

No, they are called 'spells'. They have a tag 'ritual'. Yes, this word is really there. No, it isn't the same thing, and doesn't mean the same thing in PF2.

They were called rituals last time I played. I like the way they were handled in 5E better.

I don't recall you having to use them in a slot in 5E.

So I don't consider them apples and carrots. I just think 5E handled the idea of ritual spells better and made them far more useful and usable.

You are pushing the idea they are very different, when the only difference is the design and usefulness. Which is why I vastly prefer 5E ritual design because the spells are far more useful.

They don't use spell slots.

They have reasonable casting times.

They don't require a bunch of other casters.

Whereas PF2 ritual design is overly complex, requires far too much down time, and isn't particularly useful save for RP or if you want to invest cash in a minion you'll quickly out-level unless you are already max level.

[Deriven Firelion]

3-Body Problem wrote:

Copyright has gotten way too long specifically to serve corporate interests. I think it should revert to a far shorter period so companies are forced to make new IPs instead of churning the corpses of old ones for all eternity. There are also all the issues with lost media, especially with videogames, because nobody knows who owns the rights, music rights can expire, etc.

In general, copyright as currently enforced in the US is too heavy-handed and far too corporate-favored to be of any use to anybody who isn't a corporation.

Copyright laws make businesses like Paizo viable and writing, music, and the like a viable profession for many who make their living off creative work that should be protected.

And I'll leave it there as the topic is too broad and inappropriate for this thread.

[Calliope5431]

I admit when I first saw PF 2e rituals I was like "finally!"

PF 2e rituals are very nice, because they give the GM the ability to lock some plot abilities behind them if the GM doesn't want them there, and they mean that plot-relevant abilities don't take a single spell slot, maybe some money, and [some small amount of casting time] to use. It can be a real pain as a GM to have to design around "and every 17th level cleric can cast true resurrection , so why don't we just resurrect the legendary champion of the light who died 200 years ago and defeated the villain back then?" or figure out why everyone of political importance can't just get cloned and thus never die. Or why all high-level wizards didn't just hide out in personal demiplanes astral projecting when they needed to.

Because PF 1e definitely had plot-warping spells like that. I don't really want to see them come back as part of the wizard's (or any other caster's) bag of tricks.

[Deriven Firelion]

You still have raise dead. The cost is more important to moderate than the ability. They made is costly enough to bring someone back that you need a real gold commitment from the players. I do like that aspect.

I don't like having to do it with several other casters. Why should it take so many casters so summon a creature or what not. Where exactly is a caster who wants to do these things get them from? The other party members who may not have any interest? Hire them?

[nicholas storm]

I was thinking what if prepared spell casters could cast any prepared spell of that level like spontaneous casters currently can and spontaneous casters have all spells as signature spells.

That would certainly increase the power of prepared spell casters more.