With the new streamlined focus point changes, the Oracle's perk of improved focus point recovery becomes largely ineffectual. Without that perk to balance the curse mechanic, it inadvertently makes the Oracle the most limited in casting focus spells than any other spellcaster with no further adjustments. How do you think the Oracle's focus point features will change and adapt in the remaster?
I really had no clue how to even guess how they would approach this so I never gave it too much thought. That is until looking through the Oracle playtest. I came across an interesting quirk Oracles used to have and made me mull over this topic.
Oracles did not have a focus pool at all and simply advanced their curse to use a focus spell. I could see this being revisited for the remaster and incorporating it with the current focus point mechanics. So imagine, the Oracle will now have the gimmick of being able to use focus spells in two ways. Either they pay in advancing their curse or spending a focus point, instead of paying both like they currently do. What I personally like about this the most is having more control on when you advance your curse, literally "focusing" to repress the curse when using a focus point. On the other hand, this is could be a huge amount of extra focus spells Oracles could cast per combat that could step on the Psychic's shoes a bit, so that may not be okay if nothing else changes. Also, maybe not? Especially if many of the curses stay as punishing as they are, this might be what it takes to make those curses worth the price.
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I'm not overly concerned about speculating what the Remastered Oracle is going to look like.
What is mildly a problem is the time between when the Remastered Player Core rules come out and when the Oracle gets released in Player Core 2.
As it sits, Oracle2.4 is pretty bad under the Pathfinder2.5 rules. But I think the only tweak that it needs is to allow Refocus to put them back down to the trivial permanent level of curse instead of lowering only to stage 1 of curse. That gives them the 'perk' of automatically having and being able to use 2 focus points all day from level 1. Which is the same as Psychic. But that is fine - it is two classes that have a lot of their power tied into their focus point spells. They can share that spotlight a bit. Especially for a temporary patch for the time between Player Core 1 and Player Core 2.
No longer being minor cursed for the rest of the day is such a huge deal more several mysteries by itself. It also tackles that oddity of being locked to one revelation focus spell per encounter after the fact no matter how many focus points you have left because of the curse limits. It made the focus point perks seem artificial until major curse access.
I am interested to see if the Psychic’s class feature to recover 2 focus points early on will remain as is or not. At the very least, for sure that Psychic focus point recovery ‘exploit’ will no longer be relevant with the new changes.