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This will be an issue with compatibility going forward. Corpse Fleet Officers (and skeletons as part of a corpse fleet) are something you could reasonably fight at low level. Umbral Echoes, a weakened version of the Shadow, are in A Cosmic Birthday. Both have resist 5 to many forms of damage.
For the Soldier, it’s really quite bad. Their only real option is the Screamer, an advanced weapon, against skeletons. They don’t get to combine PT/AF damage like Flurry of Blows.
The Solarian gets stung by resist because their bonus damage from Photon is fire, so they’re hitting for d8-1.
But I also think this is part of a much larger issue with low level ranged damage, and should be solved by adding a general flat bonus to ranger damage for starfinder.
What's becoming apparent is that the much lower damage floor of ranged weapons means it's quite easy to have your damage reduced to 0 with 2e's resistances, even with level-appropriate enemies. A few classes sort of mitigate this, chiefly the Envoy with Get 'Em!'s flat damage bonus and the Solarian with their melee attacks, but in general rolling low against a resistant enemy is going to reduce your damage to a much smaller fraction of what you'd otherwise get with a melee attack.
Just within Starfinder, I think this ought to be a signal to lower the resistances of enemies, just as I think they should also have their HP lowered overall. The listed minimum resistances per level should probably be the default, and there could probably be an even lower minimum in Starfinder that could correspond to roughly one-third of the creature's level. Creatures should never have the listed maximum resistance to anything, and if they're meant to negate that damage they ought to be immune instead. More broadly, I feel the developers should be more careful with resistances in Starfinder, as they shut down ranged attacks quite easily, but could probably play more with weaknesses, which add a comparatively far meatier bonus to damage.
As for including Pathfinder monsters, that's almost certainly going to be a compatibility problem as Exocist mentions, and I'm unfortunately not quite sure what could be done to mitigate that, besides cheap access to mechanics that let you reduce or ignore resistances. One thing that did help in my playtests was the inclusion of a new universal action that provided a flat damage bonus, which I'll list here:
The intent was to mitigate entrenchment in cover and incentivize units to clump together, which it did, but in this particular case the flat damage bonus should also help raise the damage floor of some ranged Strikes, and allow them to more easily go through resistances. The bonus doesn't start out massive, but it's better than nothing, and I'd encourage trying it out.
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Magic and melee are certainly still options, and personally, I am not so sure the ranged meta will work out like that. I see a lot of references to the take-cover action and I doubt players or NPCs will be super keen to embrace that.
Personally, I think that giving enemies plenty of nasty melee abilities will give players plenty of reason to delay entering into melee, but of course, not every fight will be the same.
Especially at lower levels, it seems viable to have a backup weapon and cover different damage types.
The problem is not backup weapon it's the sheer amount of MADness one requires. It's basically do you want melee beyond D6 then you better have STR but if you have STR you probably won't have high DEX if you're class does not support either I.E a Operative or Solarian. Then you will have lower CON so less Hit Points so melee enemies can knock you down faster. If Finesse weaposn added 1/2 Dex to damage it would not be as bad but still would not solve the issue fully.
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Thinking about it, how's this for a set of helpful changes:
So with this, you'd get a few benefits:
I'm reminded of how weapon fusions work in 1e. 1e weapon fusions aren't damage adders. Instead they change the damage type of your weapon or add critical effects. The damage adder in 1e comes from the kind of insane damage dice progression on high level weapons. A level 20 longarm could be rolling something like 9d10 or 16d6 for its damage dice while also adding the user's level to damage. Of course that exact progression shouldn't be copied over for 2e since that scaling was designed for 1e characters with two health bars.
If the energy damage modules just gave your weapon the versatile or modular property that would drop their power level to bring them in reach of lower level characters and at the same time make them much less mandatory for high level characters.
A tangentially related idea hit me a minute ago that if damage at low levels seems too low across the board we could try rolling two dice at level 1. This is admittedly a radical change but it does have some benefits. It dilutes the Strength to damage advantage that melee gets and makes the first striking upgrade a less dramatic power difference. Upgrading your lasgun from tactical to advanced currently doubles your damage whereas going from 2 to 3 dice is only +50%. It does however make things substantially more lethal at low levels unless other numbers are adjusted across the board.
So I was looking at one of the playtest feedback and they mentioned having a couple of parties struggling with enemies with resistance at low level.
Unlike Pathfinder, you don't buy Runes in Starfinder, you buy new weapons. So you will be forced to have backup weapons with nearly the same stats as your main weapon (just one less "rune"). So it's very easy to switch damage type (as long as you avoid buying weapons with the same damage type).
Also, Starfinder weapons tend to deal much more diverse damage than Pathfinder weapons. In Pathfinder, martials are stuck with physical damage and very often forced to choose only one of them (Fighter can't switch weapon types, most ranged damage is piercing). In Starfinder, you'll deal tons of very fancy damage types.
Overall, I expect resistance to be much easier to overcome in Starfinder. The first level may be an issue but once you get to level 2 you should have at least 2 weapons. Also, remember that for the playtest characters are created at the level of the adventure, they don't level up organically. So they don't have these backup weapons and as such it creates an issue where there should be none.
