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The decision to do a new edition is less about mechanics or balance or anything on the player side. The decision to do a new edition is fundamentally about selling books; specifically when you think you have more or less published all the material that you think you can get people excited to buy then it's time to do a new edition. Like nobody is going to be excited to buy "Milliners and Haberdashers of Golarion" so by the time that ends up on the list of "things we might put on the publishing schedule" it's time to start thinking about the next edition.
By this standard, PF2 has a lot of legs to go since there are like whole continents and meta-regions that deserve books that are not threatening to come out in the near future.
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I'm still trying to figure out why charisma is seen by some as the only way to role-play? I think that notion conveys a deep misunderstanding of the concept of "role-playing."
A lack of charisma only means you'll suck at charisma-based skills. Role-playing is about playing your characters the way you want to play them, nothing else. It's still role-playing when you act like the brilliant wizard or investigator (even if you personally lack in that department, hehe), the dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks fighter (in P2, they aren't really dumb, either), or the wise cleric/druid. Or any other combination of abilities in any class, whether it's charisma-based or not.
If there's any gripe I have about ability scores is their progression: most characters look the same by level 20. I'd prefer to bring back flaws, too, ones that anyone can take during character creation, but that's an easy thing to add into the game.
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No. 3e is neither needed nor wanted at this point and time.
I have advanced education in mathematics and game design.
More than half of what you learn in college is outdated by the time you graduate.
If you have two advanced degrees, then I imagine you're very much behind the times despite your great knowledge and education.
PF2e is a great game that has been killing it for years. Its base design principles place it leagues ahead of the competition and is considered by a great many people to be the best roleplaying game ever made to date. That doesn't mean it can't be improved upon, but there's rarely any incentive to fix something that isn't broken, and attempting to do so may well cause more harm than good.
If you think it needs to be rebuilt anew at this early stage of its life, I suspect you are from an older school of thinking.
The remaster just dropped, so the answer is no and you know the answer is no.
It's STILL in the process of being dropped! It's not even done yet! We still have Player Core 2 to look forward to! LOL.
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I disagree with OP's point #6. Assuming the existence of social stats and/or skills, a RL player's advanced talk no jutsu should NEVER trump a dumped stat/skill in their in-character dialogue's possible improvement of diplomatic results, as that's blatant cheating. Analogically, no one asks for your real life HEMA license to play martials...
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I disagree with OP's point #6. Assuming the existence of social stats and/or skills, a RL player's advanced talk no jutsu should NEVER trump a dumped stat/skill in their in-character dialogue's possible improvement of diplomatic results, as that's blatant cheating. Analogically, no one asks for your real life HEMA license to play martials...
We should frankly roll and then roleplay the result, not roleplay and then roll to see if it is convincing. You try to give a speech, roll a 1, you stutter through the speech. When we try to climb we role athletics and then narrate the success of failure. Should work this way for social checks too
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The rolling ruining great improvisational roleplay I'm never going to do.
RPGs are a creative game. I'm never, ever going to discourage great problem solving or roleplay due to dice rolls. I only like dice rolls to simulate the randomness of combat. In an RPG, the R part should be very dependent on player RP.
I never discourage thinking and interacting by players. In my opinion, it defeats the purpose of these types of games.
I don't mind letting a shy player or someone working on their RP skills relying on rolling, but I'll never let the dice override great RP.
Sitting around a table with players coming up with some amazing RP are some of the most memorable moments in these games. Letting a bad die roll ruin it is not something I have ever liked since they moved to skill and stat based roleplaying in 3rd edition.
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The Remaster didn't reset the clock, though I think it added a couple more years. SF2 moving to the same basic chassis also added a bit more time. Customer reaction is the biggest factor against a PF3 coming any time soon. If Paizo started talking about PF3 now, before the (first phase of the?) Remaster project is done, we would be enraged and they know it.
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Also, to answer Verzen post with what I feel:
1) Dedications are fine, nothing to change here.
2) Partly true. There may be a few things to review. But overall it works fine.
3) Fully agree. I hope they'll make such a book in the future.
4) I would certainly go the other way and include skill feats in skill actions directly. So no more -4 to Demoralize, Battle Medicine included in Medicine, Treat Wounds automatically treating more people when level increases, etc...
Similarly, I find backgrounds a useless complexity that can be removed safely.
5) Hard disagree. The kind of things that would make me stop at PF2. Stats are extremely important to me from an RP perspective. Lacking them would put me in a situation where I have absolutely no indication on how my character should behave in most situations.
6) Where does that come from? Not being the face of the party doesn't mean you can't RP.
7) That would mean reducing the number of choices. Keeping the current number of choices and making them more meaningful would be awful to balance. But I agree we could get rid of some choices (skill feats, backgrounds) and as a consequence make other more meaningful (like skill proficiencies if skill feats are included in your skills).
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I agree mostly with demlin. 2e have some issues that could be improved in a new version but these things aren't part of the main chassis of the game but some secondary design decisions or things made along the way that didn't worked well:
* In order to explain something I made 3 definitions here.
too many archetypes which are purely flavor without a lot of interesting mechanics
This was a bad design decision that the designers made along the way and not a core thing so it not justify a new system.
I agree that designers specially from Lost Omens books and APs added many archetypes that usually just give more flavor and some situational abilities but are "useless" due its competition with more mechanically useful archetype for the players' build. Notice that I put "useless" between quotes because this utility is relative to each player but usually most of them are just "faction" or "profession" archetypes thats competes for the same space that "Combat Style", "Mystical", "Class" and "Multiclass" archetypes and class feats uses.IMO this is not a real problem. Maybe an excessive "bloat" to many people that may difficult an archetype selection but due it's usually optional it's not something that would create more problems than give an extra choice paralises during character creation/progression.
Including some of these "purely flavor" archetypes can be given by GMs to the players as free archetypes or tables with free archetypes could be restricted to them (but this will give some extra GM agency).
too many items and spells with niche applications
I agree here but once again it's not a game chassis problem but a bunch of bad design choices for many items that are too circunstancial or are once per day limited. Most of them I could point as a heritage from PF1 and D&D. But once again its mostly a bloat problem than a real system problem.
consumables feel bad
Yes and no! Yes because specially when you are a low level player all the consumable are just too expensive. It's common to players to avoid to buy or even sell consumables in order to save money for permanents later. The other problem comes from obsolescence of the consumables. For example if a player find a minor healing potion but don't needs it now and the party have a healer and saves it for when it will be really needs (usually when they are in an encounter the healer is down) it's pretty common that this potion had becoming useless due how weak it turned when it becomes needed. This forces most of them to be sell by the players over time.
Other consumable that goes to such a bad situation are talismans that most of them are so situational that most players usually forget that they have one attached into their weapons when its trigger happens. The addition of spellhearts turned the talisman situation even worse because the spellhearts aren't so situation like talismans and are permanents also the talismans needs too much time to be attached what's makes its competitions with spellhearts even more unfair. Basically this turned the entire chapter of talismans in a big bloat in the books.
For other side during mid to high level many lower level consumables becomes WAY more useful specially scrolls. My players makes loves to use low level scrolls as 1 minute buffs and debuffs specially Haste. Thaumaturges in special are exceptionally good with them due how Scroll Thaumaturgy allows to use any scroll of any tradition and draw and consequently carry them in the same hands of their implements and don't needs to use an action tricking them.
But once again. This wasn't a game chassis problem (yet it may be a core problem for the talismans due the general rule of how much time need to attach a talisman is problem IMO) so isn't enough to justify a new edition. Including this time problem could be fixed in some future errata.
items with an ability where the DC does not scale
OK here we have "big" design problem but again not a even a core problem again.
I completely agree that many items need to get their DC attached to players spellcasting DC or Class DC or some skill or other player ability that not comes from the item.The currently fixed item DC just makes the obsolescence problem worse and even takes it to permanents too. Once again I think this as a bad heritage from PF1 and D&D and could be solved along erratas and "unleashed" books revising these items.
It's main problem to the PF2 again its basically that they bloat the game and make the item selection harder but also nothing more.
lackluster skill feats
Another design problem. The skill feat system works fine but many skills are too situational that they many times are forgotten by the players. Other problem is that are some skill feats that allow character to do somethings like Bargain Hunter that allows the player to seek for item discounts something that IMO could be done directly by diplomacy skill check not needing a skill feat to be able to Bargain. This makes some GMs just allow the bargain if you have this feat while others that allows the bargain to happen via checks may turn this skill utility in check.
But once again it is not a system problem. It's something that could be improved along the erratas or some "unleash" books.
acrobatics needs skill actions
I don't really agree here. Acrobatics already have many good actions very useful like Tumble Through and many more situational things like Balance and Squeeze and have some potent feats like Kip Up. We have way more other skills laking of actions like the for magical knowledge skill that are basically used for RK and identification and Performance that outside the Bard is basically a sub skill that no one cares (and IMO could be a Lore skill instead) or Lore that usually something that everyone just have one trained because the background o class give it and usually are unable to compete with other skills.
If there's something that could get a bit revision in a PF3 is the skills and its actions as general. They are clearly unbalanced including how intelligence work for them. It's not a thing that alone justify a new edition.
simple hazards don't mesh well with free healing from treat wounds
I disagree here. The problem aren't in simple hazards itself but in how they are used.
Even in PF1 simple hards just makes the characters use some daily resources to recover they was never a big challenge. But this is when the GM or adventure book use them alone. When used along a more complex hazard, creatures or another pressure situation they could prove a real challenge to PC.It's a question of how do you use them.
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As much as I've been a supporter of paizo, there is something innately broken about the maths and game design PF2E has and I feel like the game itself is beating a dead horse at this point.
For example - I love the idea of having 1 level for the character. This makes things easier to understand. (Instead of how PF1E was, where I was like 2 barbarian, 3 fighter, 1 magus etc) I also love the idea that the maths are significantly simplified.
However, with this stated, there are some obvious issues with the game design.
1) The Issue: Dedications are all but worthless in most cases. If I have wizard dedication, the way the maths work, the spells will be resisted frequently. It makes it so I can't be a fighter with wizard dedication and then be able to cast any offensive spells. They all have to be regulated to support spells. If I try to utilize it for any offensive spells, the turn will almost certainly be wasted, which reduces character tempo.
The fix: Make it so a dedication doesn't feel like a waste of feats. Make it so it feels like the two classes are merged instead of having the dedication feel like it's 1/3rd the power of the main class. Allow for synergy between the main class and the dedication to occur.
2) The Issue: The maths involved in the proficiencies is broken. If I want to wield a Falcata, in 99% of the cases, I can't wield one at high level. The math is very tight in PF2E where even 1 status bonus to attack is noticeable as seen with bard songs being powerful. As it stands, if I wield a Falcata as say a thaum, id be taking a whopping -6 to attack as it wont advance past trained. If I use a feat for heavy armor, if my class doesn't progress to mastery, that's a whopping -4 to AC at high level with that as well. The general feats that allow for proficiency simply don't work when playing a high level campaign, making them useless feats. If there were better feat support later on such as allowing me to take additional feats to increase said proficiency, that would be a different story....
1) Dedications - This has been pointed out by others as being as intended. The designers don't want a Fighter w/ MC: wizard to be as good as a wizard or even as good as a Magus, especially out of the box. The Dedication feats reward you as you get higher levels.
2) Proficiencies - Your example of the Falcata on a Thaumaturge is wrong. If you take the Weapon Proficiency feat to become proficient in an Advanced weapon and become 11th level you become an expert with that weapon so you're not restricted to only trained in your example. Yes you're going to lag behind someone who is Legendary or Master, and yes the math is tight enough that this is noticeable, but being limited to expert is far from useless.
3) Niches and classes - I think you're hyper-focusing on the baseline of classes. I've found the classes to be versatile enough cover many niches. A fighter in one of my games is the primary healer for example.
4) Backgrounds - Every Background offers a free boost that can be used on the primary attribute. That's literally all you need to "maximize" your character. If you want to focus on Skills/feats/other benefits as being a requirement to a build that's on you.
5) Stats are useless - Ok what do you suggest to replace them?
6) Dumping Cha - According to you, "In order to promote RP sentimentality, you put points into charisma. This allows you to deceive, intimidate, or have diplomacy. If you can't do any of that because charisma is your dump stat, the game no longer is an RP game." Based on this I debate on if you know what role-playing actually means. Just because a character is "bad" at social skills does not mean you can't role-play them. Weak stats skills actually make better role-playing opportunities. Having a character who's bad at diplomacy trying to sweet talk a guard, or one who's trained at a knowledge skill, but isn't good at it due to a low intelligence, or countless other examples create amazing role-playing opportunities. It's fun explaining what your character is doing and what happens. Playing super soldiers with no weaknesses isn't the same as playing a character who has both strengths and weaknesses.
7) Choices - This is highly subjective. A choice is going to vary on usefulness based upon, but not limited to, the player, the character, the adventure, the GM, and the other characters (in no particular order). Just because a choice doesn't fit your normal preferred style doesn't make it less meaningful. Just less meaningful for you.
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A lot of the “too much items/spells/archetypes” stuff isn’t even a design problem, it is a Archives of Nethys presentation problem that players are looking at little, niche, and narrative-focused flourishes in a broad “any character concept might build from these” perspective.
I don’t think the adventure design team has yet fully mastered integrating down time and retraining into their adventures, but an archetype that gives a bunch of bonuses to climbing around in trees, or in complex vehicle chases or social intrigue encounters can be great for a level or two of focused adventure if the party gets the signal it is coming with plenty of warning and knows they will be able to retrain out of it before getting sucked into a book long dungeon with a villain doing some nasty thing that has to be stopped before the party can prepare again.
GMs also share a fair bit of that burden too and if they decide to bypass those sections of an adventure or campaign, that is fine, but it doesn’t make the mechanical options to engage with it bad.
The idea that picking a level 2 class (archetype dedication) feat should change your core class abilities (shifting you down from a 1 to a .8) and give you as much of that other class’ essence as a member of that class who MC’d into another class is why MC casters in 3.x D&D systems were so terribly bad, and only barely made playable through extreme system mastery. It was a huge mistake that essentially ended multiple gaming systems.
There are much better ways to represent characters growing out of one class into another than having class levels be permanent stacking sandbags that result in a handful of useful structures and a bunch of dead weight. A character who is a wizard that dabbles in fighter training should not be the same character as a fighter who dabbles in some wizardry, and a character that truly does both equally is not either a fighter or a wizard as a primary class, but something else…which can probably be best represented by a dual class game where all the players get that option, rather than just one who knows about X special class archetype that is absurdly front-loaded to mix with another one.
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The current archetype system has a "I majored in fighter but minored in wizard" sort of feel. It's not true multiclassing. Paizo could easily have given the archetypes stronger proficiency advancements if they had wanted the latter, and they chose not to. It's a fine choice by them, and I have no issue with it...and honestly it wouldn't be too hard to homebrew stronger archetypes, if some table wanted to. But I do see 'we want stronger multiclassing' as a valid player perspective which goes beyond mere power gaming. One of many perspectives and not one Paizo built to. But a legit playstyle some players like better.
Multiclassing like in other versions of PF/D&D doesn't work at all. Because the designers never thought it much, it was either extremely weak or broken.
For strong multiclassing to work (strong as in impactful) you need to think, as a designer, at each and every potential combinations and determine how to balance them against each other. Considering the number of those (more than 200 in the game currently) it's impossible. So the simplest solution is to use weak multiclassing (as in multiclassing that doesn't affect your main class much) so the variation in effectiveness is not killing the game.
Many games have used strong multiclassing, and in none of them multiclassing is balanced at all. It's no proof that it can't be done but it's clearly a proof that it's not trivial to do it. Unless you don't care about balance, obviously.
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Pathfinder 2 already has a variant rule that easily covers the full fighter full wizard fantasy, which is the dual class rules. It is not something missing from the game.
The thing PF1/3.x pretended to have that PF2 doesn't any more is "I just leveled up, how can I suddenly get a ton of abilities because classes tend to be front loaded to allow for the fantasy of the class to be minimally functional at level 1?"
Assuming that gaining level 1 abilities from different classes equals the fantasy of "I spent x years developing as this class, and am now beginning the journey of learning how to do something else" is represented by PF1/3.x style multiclassing is the flawed logic.
"Hey I just spent a day or two clearing out some goblins out of a cave and now I am as good of a fighter as if I spent years before hand studying fighting instead of wizardry" is not about narrative, it is about mechanical power.
IMO it would be fairly easy to create a balanced system that offered spell-martial crossover by combining free selection of Weapon, Armor, Spell (WAS) proficiencies with level limits. IOW, rather than "level 5, gain expert in weapons" you say "level 5, raise one trained WAS proficiency to expert." Classes get between 6-10 WAS proficiencies total, depending on the class. So start with 2 WAS trained proficiencies at L2 and spread 6 "free pick" WAS proficiency bumps out across levels 2-18 or so, and impose limits such as "minimum level 5 for any expert, 13 for master, 18 for legendary". The players who want to dip into both casting and weapon offense can do so, but at the cost of defense, and no character is going to be able to be best at everything...but you can pick which you are great at, without class imposing it on you.
It doesn't seem like a class based game that you are describing :)
The only thing I really expect from an hyphotetical 3rd edition is for Paizo to drop the armor and weapon categories and plainly have "armors" and "weapons", not light, medium, or heavy armors or simple, martial, or advanced weapons. Armor is pretty much already balanced to make them comparable against each other, though weapons would seriously need to be remade from the ground up to make something like a dagger comparable to a longsword.
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Verzen, I see you post and troll every time the playtests drop, but do you ever play this game? All of your points seem to have little understanding for how the game is played as well as how businesses work.
The last PF1 player coming out of the jungle 22 years after the war ended.
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What I got from your post about the Fighter/Summoner:
It feels like you want PF1 archetypes: losing core class features to acquire unique abilities, tailored to your particular two-class combination. But at the same time, you don't want to lose class feats, even though those are the best analogue to PF1 class features in most cases.
Honestly, I think it'd be cool, but not worth the devs' time to try and implement such specific and niche designs. Be a great 3rd party product, tho.
Like an Ultimate Class Archetypes book that does a bunch of class archetypes for the multiclass dedications.
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My only beef with multiclassing in PF2 is that AFAIK there is no official guidance to retraining your class.
So if you start playing a Fighter and then spend your whole PC's life poring over magical tomes and never training for battle again, you will have only a meager ability for casting but be Legendary at using weapons.
As much as I've been a supporter of paizo, there is something innately broken about the maths and game design PF2E has and I feel like the game itself is beating a dead horse at this point.
I don't know. You kind of lost me right here. For the most part PF2E has very good tight math. Is it perfect? No. But it mostly works. There are a few rough edges but they are things we can live with. Very few people need to play with a list of house rules that is almost as long as the printed rules, as is common with other games.
Some people do. But they do so as a choice, rather than out of necessity.
1) The Issue: Dedications are all but worthless in most cases. If I have wizard dedication, the way the maths work, the spells will be resisted frequently.2) The Issue: The maths involved in the proficiencies is broken. If I want to wield a Falcata, in 99% of the cases, I can't wield one at high level. The math is very tight in PF2E where even 1 status bonus to attack is noticeable as seen with bard songs being powerful. As it stands, if I wield a Falcata as say a thaum, id be taking a whopping -6 to attack as it wont advance past trained.
1: Dedications are not needed. This is different from useless. I rarely need to branch out into a half dozen archetypes in order to make a character viable. But I can branch out into them to make a character flavorful.
Some dedications are power ups. This is where the system has a flaw. It's an unavoidable one because human made math won't ever be perfect. But these power ups are, to my knowledge, never game breaking. You can get a bit of an edge if you combo X with Y. But most of the time you will combo A with B for the added flavor. That is a good thing.
You're calling it broken that you can't be a fighter / wizard who is just as good as any fighter at fighting and also just as good as any wizard and wizarding. I don't see that as a flaw. I see that as balance.
2: So the issue here is you you can't be a thaumaturge + fighter that is just as good as Thaumaturgy as a thaumaturge, and just as good at fighting as a fighter? That's not a problem, that's balance. And you've picked a special weapon that's on the edge of balance anyway. You're asking for one of the fighter's special weapon choices on your thaumaturge. Of course it won't be as good as it would be on a fighter. That's called balance.
The forum quote system snipped the rest of your post so I'm going to have to go back, and edit that stuff in.
The fix: We need far more support released far more frequently for existing classes and make new classes that come out be rarer. I'd rather support what we do have than for new classes to try to fill niches that are already filled by what's currently available.
I agree with this actually. I'd rather see more dedications / archetypes and less new classes. But I'd make that argument even more for new ancestries. There are too many ancestries for any sense of coherent bio-diversity / ecological niche. That gets on my nerves all the time but I recognize that I'm pretty much in the rarity on that position.
As for classes, I'd rather they expand out options for those that exist than create whole new chassis to work with. As we can see in the debate over Guardian new classes risk being over or under powered. The further we get from original PF2E math - the more likely your original point 1 about math issues can become a common concern.
When we put backgrounds behind, say, stat blocks, I tend to look at what backgrounds my character can actually have so I dont fall behind in my party rather than any RP semblance of it.
I actually agree on this point as well. I'd again expand it and have no game mechanics behind ancestries AND backgrounds BOTH. Which I imagine would be heresy to most tRPG fans, but is something I've come to greatly appreciate in more modern MMOs where the tiny 'racial abilities' they had a decade ago have gotten nerfed to the point of being meaningless - thus freeing people up to make choices based on roleplay / flavor / art / etc rather than special abilities.
Stats are redundant and outdated at this point.
Maybe, but they're a sacred cow of the game format. Even diceless RPGs tend to have them.
The Issue: Choices aren't meaningful enough.
I find the opposite. That PF2E's more tactical combat and out of combat subsystems both work to strongly reward good choices. That said, random dice still play a large impact. If it was me tRPGs would all be diceless and work through a complex system of modifiers based on choices. But I know most people would not like that.
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Gandalf fought the Balrog with his sword and lit pinecones on fire.
Sounds like a PF2 Fighter MC Wizard.
Nah, Gandalf is just an NPC built with monster rules. He's the equivalent of a demigod in its verse. Though if I had to put a class to him, I'd say he would probably be a fighter in a setting that uses the Pervasive Magic rules and took light or ignition as his free cantrip (he was specialized in fire magic if I'm not wrong, and his biggest display of it were...some fireworks).
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Weird to assume we're never getting any new options for existing classes when we're literally getting double digit new class archetypes and subclasses by the end of the year.
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some obvious issues with the game design.
Everyone is going to want something different as it is a huge design space. I could easily list a dozen issues that bug me. They don't overlap your issues much. Perhaps 4) and 5) are of some concern to me but for different reasons than you.
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Absolutely not - I would not want PF3E for several long years, if that.
Also, are you currently employed as a game designer? Have you ever designed or contributed to designing any game? Because having a degree =/= applied experience.
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Is it just me or half of these complaints just a function of not knowing how the game works meaning they aren't even issues in the first place,?
Like technically speaking falcatta proficiency progresses to expert and wizard dedication can in theory start off legendary.
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I removed several posts that were baiting, and off topic. If this thread continues to be a problem it will be locked. Please try and be civil in your discussions.
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Verzen, baby, I think 99% of your problems would be solved by running a dual class game, homebrewing away the "advanced" weapon trait, and allowing players to use different skills to overcome social challenges besides just the charisma-based ones. So, one official, alternative rule that already exists, one quick houserule fix, and one thing that has always been an option already. These aren't "new edition" fixes, these are "current edition a little to the left."
EDIT: Also, backgrounds follow an easy formula to allow you to make your own, so you don't have to feel beholden to the list or choose between flavor and optimization. A background (usually) gives you two attribute boosts, a lore skill, and a regular skill with a skill feat attached. There's no reason you can't just make something up, unless you're in an environment that forces pure RAW and limits player options (PFS).
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While I do think 3e is more likely to happen in several years rather than right now, particularly given Starfinder is getting brought to 2nd Edition, I also do believe (and hope) we will get a 3e eventually. I don't know if it will address all of OP's concerns, but I can find myself agreeing with some of them:
Adding to this, I'd like to see a system that does away with vertical progression entirely: there's currently a lot of complication around making different effects like weapons, spells, and monsters scale at higher levels, and a lot of that complication was artificially implemented just to provide the illusion of power progression to fans of 1e. I don't know if this is something we'll see in 3e, but a game where progression was as horizontal as possible (which inevitably does incur some vertical progression, as more options do mean more power) is a game that I think could deliver the same gameplay in a way that'd be much easier to handle for everyone. It'd be less crunchy, and that's fine, as there'd always be 1e and 2e for fans of crunch.
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I would be incredibly concerned if Paizo announced PF 3e now, after slating all of their big releases, their remaster, and everything else they've done.
It is inevitably that PF 3e will someday arrive. Hell, as some pointed out, its possible it'll be in the next few years at 2029. However, while I could see the Developers making some changes to the games balance, perhaps loosening the math slightly, or perhaps not at all. What I can I say I cannot see is them returning to the PF 1e dark days of "I'm just your class but better" era of class design.
I remember the days when Rogue got all of its features poached by other archetypes cannibalizing it, fueled by the need to always be making more options, than it had to be given a complete overhaul in Unchained. Archetypes where the fighter could just give up some features and be a better gunslinger than the gunslinger class. Hell, when casters could replicate some of their martial counterparts with just a wave of their hand and a proper spell cast, while still having their entire arsenal of spells to rely on.
Nobody on the team looks back to those times and goes "Yeah, this was when pathfinder was great." and that's just an immutable truth. As others have said, what you want is accomplished via variant rules. They are kept variant for a reason, and there is where they should remain.
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If anything, I see Paizo down the line releasing a "PF2e Essentials" that simplifies the system by a decent margin (incorporating stuff like ABP, or rather removing the need of magic items for the math of the game, proficiency without level, simplified skill feats, simplified ancestries, probably removing ability scores though I wouldn't really like that one, simplifyng armor categories from light, medium, and heavy to simply "armors", simplyfing weapon categories from simple, medium, and heavy to simply "weapons", etc). This wouldn't replace the current PF2e, but rather work as an introduction into the system.
Unless a new system appears that radically changes how TTRPGs are played, I see PF2e lasting for many many years. PF1e lasted 10 years and it didn't even have content that covers all the continents within the setting, so assuming PF2e could eventually cover everything plus explore all the regions in the continents we do already know, we easily have system for 10+ years. At least assuming we get playable content in these books.
With that said, I do agree with Verzen that advanced weapons are just bad for the most part. You have to invest into a weapon that's marginally better than a martial weapon (if its better in the first place, because spiral rapiers and daikyus are a thing) and that eventually is fated to be relegated to a worse proficiency which effectively makes it worse than any similar simple or martial weapon. Advanced weapons are worth it only if you are a human or you happen to be from an ancestry that can get access to them, and out of the current 49 (as per AoN) I'd say the only worth advanced weapons are the aldori dueling sword, chain sword, falcata, karambit, nodachi, sawtooth saber, and some of the ones with the repeating trait, and I even have doubts about some of these.
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Pathfinder 1e wasn’t really a new system when it dropped in 09. It was more like remastery of 3.5, which was a revision of 3rd edition D&D. So that system really had a 19 year shelf life. I’d be surprised if we stop using the core of ORC remastered system within a decade, barring significant changes in the desires of players for table top RPGs that becomes incompatible with the current system.
other games build on completely different design priciples. What I don't understand is why should you demand these completely different principles from a continuation of pf.
For example, pbta exists right now (and still has stats, lol).
The real question is why you would take surprise, let alone offense, at the thought of Pathfinder reinventing itself. Pathfinder 2e made radical departures for 1e that benefited the new system significantly; there is no reason a 3rd edition wouldn't be able to similarly innovate. To be clear, I'm not holding my breath for 3e to feature everything listed in the OP or my post; I just think it's rather silly to get up in arms over being open to the prospect of big changes in a new system.
So, first? No. By my read, we're somewhere in early late PF2, or perhaps late middle PF2. We still have a solid bit of road left to enjoy, and it's going to keep spooling out as long as people are enjoying the game enough to buy appropriate numbers of books. PF3 will come eventually, sure, but the longer we keep PF2 viable, the better. It's longer to enjoy the resources that have been built up, and it's longer to accumulate lessons learned so that yet more things can be fixed when PF3 does come around.
2) The Issue: The maths involved in the proficiencies is broken. If I want to wield a Falcata, in 99% of the cases, I can't wield one at high level. The math is very tight in PF2E where even 1 status bonus to attack is noticeable as seen with bard songs being powerful. As it stands, if I wield a Falcata as say a thaum, id be taking a whopping -6 to attack as it wont advance past trained. If I use a feat for heavy armor, if my class doesn't progress to mastery, that's a whopping -4 to AC at high level with that as well. The general feats that allow for proficiency simply don't work when playing a high level campaign, making them useless feats. If there were better feat support later on such as allowing me to take additional feats to increase said proficiency, that would be a different story. To further complicate the matter, without an understanding of the maths involved and the underlying complications this creates, people new to the system wont understand how these are trap options and will select them and then they'll end up getting screwed in the end.
At least for the armor, the fact that it isn't useful at high level doesn't make it useless. Feats to grant armor proficiency are great for letting you survive lower levels with low dex. Then as you raise levels, you raise dex as one of your four, and by the time the scaling proficiency starts to be a thing you have the dex to swap back down to light armor anyway... at which point you retrain the feat.
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So far I assume that the Remaster was a reset button on the next edition, i.e. expect it in ten years.