Staking effects that eat enemy actions is the easy and most generally applicable one. Slowed/Stunned, prone, grabbed, moving away...
I like turbo buffing a magus with attack bonuses or a Flurry Ranger/Agile Grace Fighter with Haste and damage bonuses and watch them go to town.
Mixing difficult terrain and speed reduction effects is a great CC combo as well.
I also like a lot a strat me (Barbarian) and an Alchemist are pulling off in our current campaign (currently level 17). She provides me with Troll Hides and Numbing Tonics just so I can face-tank all the solo/double bosses in our way for a couple turns. I just move into melee range and knock the enemy prone with either Improved knockdown or Awesome blow, and then check them with Reactive Strike. Between the regen, the temp HP, her healing bombs and my massive health pool it is easy to stay alive at melee, and having all the damage concentrated on a single ally makes healing easier. For the toughest encounters I also have a Soulforger dedication for extra hp regen and bonuses vs magic. I Like the strat cause it is super dumb and it allows the rest of our allies to do whatever they want. It is also useful against several enemies, cause I can allow myself to position "badly" so they gang up on me and she can just start throwing bombs ast them.
About the best we've mustered runs along the lines of: trip, attack, step away.
That's one character's routine for the round, yes?
Teamwork among the party is very much useful.
Things like the Gymnast Swashbuckler grappling and tripping enemies, then the Rogue can Sneak Attack them with ranged weapons. And the enemy has to spend more actions if they want to charge at the squishier Rogue or spellcasters instead of attacking the Swashbuckler.
Sorcerer with Bless already active moves into a flanking position and uses Aid and Demoralize so that the Fighter ally is attacking with a +1 status bonus and a +1 circumstance bonus to attack against an enemy that is off-guard (-2 circumstance) and Frightened 1 (-1 status). So Fighter gets +2 over their usual excessive accuracy against an enemy that is at -3 AC.
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What are the encounter tactics you've been happy with?
The best I've found is to adapt to the encounters. Against good encounter design, you shouldn't be able to use the same tactics over and over again (or at least they will have sometimes subpar efficiency).
With PF2 there's a significant shift toward tactics & teamwork rather than the character-building that characterized PF1. And the significant decrease in attacks of opportunity has radically reshaped mobility.
What are the encounter tactics you've been happy with?
About the best we've mustered runs along the lines of: trip, attack, step away.
Cheers
I have a table where my martial melee players loves to dominate the enemies. One of them Trip and the other Grab forcing the target to accept -2 to attack, defense and DC 5 flat check to fail most spell casting abilities or wastes a one or more attack actions to just free and another to standup (when they use to give it some [s]Attack of Oportunity[/b] Reactive Strikes) while the eldritch archer rogue uses the off-guard condition to make a Eldritch Shot + Sneak Attack vs the target.
Its a simple strategy but is brutally efficient vs a target. I loose the account of how much encounters they almost trivialized the bosses doing this.
PF2e heavily rewards team tactics.
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I think one really useful for the party to learn (so, all the players) is to use the Delay action for fun and profit.
The Delay rules aren't super complicated, but they enable some neat tricks, such as:
* The martials delay until after the bard has used Inspire Courage/Courageous Anthem or Dirge of Doom, or the cleric has cast bless, or Haste has been cast, so that they benefit rightaway.
* If someone is going to use Demoralize or a Fear spell, other characters delay so that they can benefit from the debuffed enemy.
* The rogue delays until the other martial has moved in, so they can always get a flank.
* If the fighter likes to use Knockdown or Combat Grab to debuff enemies, the sorcerer who wants to use a ranged spell attacks waits until the fighter has gone. So that the spell can be cast against a flat-footed target.
* If the wizard is in melee being threatened by a monster with Reactive Strike, maybe the wizard delays so the fighter can first provoke it but take the hit on his shield. Then the wizard is free to walk away and cast.
* If the enemy's too smart for that, maybe wait until the bard has cast Hideous Laughter.
It's all pretty obvious when you think about it. Know what your teammates can do; should you wait until they've done it?
But how long should you wait? The other part of understanding the Delay rules is knowing that you shouldn't be waiting until after the enemy has had a turn.
I think the broader lesson here is to really talk with your friends about what each character can do and what they others can do that really helps you. PF2 classes have a lot of hidden synergies for this kind of cooperation. For example, rogues can take the Dread Striker feat, but after someone's been Demoralized with Intimidate, they become immune to that person for a minute. However, fighters can take Intimidating Strike which doesn't make monsters immune. The fighter can make enemies scared every round.
The fighter class is actually a really good teamwork class with feats like Snagging Strike, Combat Grab, Knockdown and Intimidating Strike. All of those require the fighter to hit, but they're good at that. And then the enemy becomes easier for the rest of the party to attack. Fighters are can openers in this edition. If you look at things like ranged rogues, that looks really difficult. Getting sneak attack on ranged attacks means the enemy needs to be flat-footed for a reason other than flanking. But fighters can make that happen.
Champions are also a teamwork class. A lone champion doing the front line of the party on their own isn't that great. They can shield block, but they have difficulty preventing enemies from just walking past them to attack the back row characters. And if their allies are standing too far back, they also can't use their special reaction. So a champion tanking alone is not really getting to use some of their most powerful class abilities.
But put a champion and a fighter next to each other and you have magic. The fighter punishes anyone who tries to walk past or walk away. Hitting the champion is just going to run into a shield block. Hitting the fighter is going to be punished by a champion reaction. So no matter what the enemy tries, you're punishing them.
My players had no shift in teamwork and tactics from PF1 to PF2. Teamwork and tactics work even better than character optimization in PF1, too, but most people did not realize that. My players did realize it and considered teamwork to be more fun than powergaming.
For example, in my PF1 Iron Gods campaign, Iron Gods among Scientists, the party ran into Kulgara, the cover girl of Lords of Rust early because I had moved her to the Scrapmaster’s Arena. The Lords of Rust had challenged the 7th-level party to a battle of champions and the Lord's selected combatants had lost. The fighter Kheld, a newbie player who wanted to powergame but never mastered the skill, had wandered away from the center of the arena and encountered Kulgara, female orc barbarian 8 with a technological chainsaw. She was an actual lord in the Lords of Rust and decided to continue the challenge with herself as the new challenger. Kulgara took out two-thirds of Kheld's hit points in one round. I was secretly satisfied to watch the overconfindent fighter run away yelling for help.
The best friends gunslinger Boffin and bloodrager Val stepped up to deal with Kulgara. Boffin had taken the Experimental Gunsmith archetype which traded away the powergame-worthy Dexterity-to-Damage Gun Training ability for the ability to make toy-like firearms such as a grapple gun. Boffin grappled Kulgara with the grapple gun and then ran around a smashed wagon in the arena so that Kulgara would have to take the same roundabout route to get closer to Boffin. And Val cast her 1st-level Mudball spell to tempoarily blind Kulgara. They kept Kulgara too busy for a full-round attack, so her ability to deal massive damage was impaired. Both the gunslinger with high AC and the bloodrager with high hit points could deal with her occasional standard attacks. Meanwhile, two other members of the party made ranged attacks against Kulgara.
The tactic they used was nullifying Kulgara's strongest attack so that she was on a more even footing with the party. Optimized-damage Gun Training would have lost against Kulgara, but tactical grapple gun won against her.
My players used similar nullification tactics in PF2 games. I give examples in Each encounter is its own creature, comment #12. However, their iconic tactic was exploiting terrain. For example, the gnome rogue Binny had the thief racket, which gives Dexterity-to-Damage in melee with an agile or finesse weapon, and she almost never used it. She was a sniper. She would Hide behind a tree in the forest or a crate in a storeroom or some other obstacle. That made the target of her shortbow flat-footed for sneak attack damage. And by Hiding between turns, she was relatively same from counterattacks. The weakness of her tactic is that an enemy could run up adjacent to her so that she would not hide. But because the enemy was dealing with the rest of the party, who were closer and easier to reach, this weakness never mattered. The party also liked to ambush enemy patrols from the forest.
With PF2 there's a significant shift toward tactics & teamwork rather than the character-building that characterized PF1. And the significant decrease in attacks of opportunity has radically reshaped mobility.
While searching for other examples I wrote about my players' tactics, I found an old, long thread that discusses this shift: Is it just me, or is it way too easy to get hit in this edition? and later gives tactical suggestions.
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I think one really useful for the party to learn (so, all the players) is to use the Delay action for fun and profit.
I fully agree but I think the Delay action has much more uses than those you are describing. You mostly focus on buffs/debuffs.
But another obvious use of Delay is to force the enemy to use actions getting to you instead of you using actions to get to the enemy (mostly first round considerations).
Another great use of Delay is to not play when you don't have much to do. I've seen a lot of players taking their turn when they were unable to properly impact the fight, a classical example being the Fighter drawing a bow because there's no one that can be attacked in melee. Sometimes, by just waiting a turn or 2, the situation changes and you suddenly have an impactful action to make or just another player/character asking you to help them performing their impactful action.
Delay also has another great use: Removing uncertainty.
Here's an example: the Fighter is at melee range of an enemy which has already taken quite a beating. Instead of acting now it's better to Delay, let the Fighter take their turn and then decide what to do. Your actions may be very different between a fight where an enemy is down (and as such certainly slowly snowballing to a victory) and one where the enemy can act despite being at low hp (where maybe you should try to finish them off).
I find Delay to be an excellent metric of tactical acumen: I've rarely seen bad uses of Delay, I've seen countless situations where Delay would have been a better idea.