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I recall the blog saying something to the effect of you could choose to interface with the new oracle curse for greater than normal powers, or don't, and still be perfectly playable.
I'm just not seeing it. All of the cursebound feats and abilities don't look appreciably more powerful than other class' feats to me. To me, it looks like normal feats with extra steps and penalties.
So they stripped the cooler, thematic mechanics and identify, then gave us the illusion of choice. Except their are actually fewer choices now, because most people aren't going to want to interact with the curse penalties for lackluster benefits when they can just archetype out or something.
The oracle is no longer an oracle. But a blank slate scaffolding on which to build your archetype upo. (And not a very good one at that, which is why people are turning to other classes for their oracle needs.)
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We must be looking at different cursebound feats because more than half of them are way more powerful than anything another class gets for equal level feats. Theymight be about equal to something that costs a focus point, but you get those too on a separate resource tracker so you can do both.
Some of the cursebound feats are difficult to use effectively and require very flexible builds to use.
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The Cursebound feats vary wildly in usability and effectiveness, and IMO they're front loaded. That's great if you're some other class taking Oracle Archetype: you can get a couple of useful abilities on a separate resource. It's one of the reasons the archetype is so good now. All four level 1 Cursebound abilities are good and apply to a wide variety of builds.
It's a problem for a full Oracle, because levelling up should give you access to better Cursebound abilities the way other class feats scale up, and that's very much a mixed bag. At the extreme end, there's only two that the archetype can't get, and one of those is very situational while the other just feels unnecessary now that the class has so many resources (both more spell slots and extra abilities) vs the old version.
But point by point...
- Foretell Harm is good if you want to use damage spells. More so if you can hit a weakness. You know who else would love this? A Sorcerer/Druid/Magus/etc with Oracle Archetype with lots of damage type options to hit weakness more often. The Divine List isn't exactly overflowing with damage type options, limiting how often you get the full benefit.
- Nudge the Scales is a ranged 1 action heal that can't miss and doesn't use spell slots. The healing amount isn't huge, but anytime someone needs a quick heal or you have a third action to use and someone is damaged, this is good. Lots of use. The other ability is handy in that "most of the party wants to play Undead and I don't" situations, which isn't really that frequent but is an easy solution.
- Oracular Warning is an Initiative bonus that stacks with the Scout Exploration Activity. An easy +3 to the entire groups initiative is a difference maker. The THP isn't much but every bit helps.
- Whispers of Weakness is just nice. Automatic knowledge that would take multiple Recall Knowledge checks to get (unless you've got a Thaumaturge) and a bonus to attack them. Lots of value here.
- Meddling Futures is an actively worse version of the old Ancestors curse, which wasn't exactly that good to begin with. I just sigh.
- Knowledge of Shapes requires other feats to actually use and is limited to just Widen/Reach, which is... fine, I guess, but it's a pretty significant investment in both feats and resources. It not working with other spellshape feats is also unfortunate.
- Thousand Visions is handy if you need it, though its coming at a double cost with the penalty it imposes on top of Cursebound.
- Debilitating Dichotomy is one I like. Reasonably scaling damage that doesn't use spell slots or focus points is nice extra sustain if you're in a "lots of fights a day" situation, and good to have anyway when fighting low-Will enemies. Extra fun if you have Bon Mot or archetype into Imperial Sorcerer to lower their Will save (or you are a Sorcerer taking it via the Oracle archetype).
- Roll the Bones of Fate would be good except for the 10 minute cooldown making it very limited for a feat this level, and also for the effect on a 4. My DM saw that and just sighed because of all the extra rolling and remembering to do it for every creature in a fight that it entails.
- The Dead Walk is one people really seem to like (and it is thematically cool), but IMO its actual damage output is underwhelming for a level 10 feat, especially since its straight up worse damage than Debilitating Dichotomy even if you hit twice... and since these are spell attack rolls (aka the worst attack roll in the game), that isn't even remotely guaranteed. Yes, you don't hurt yourself, but you're also getting very poor scaling out of the deal so the damage gap just gets worse as you level. I really think I can find better things to do in a fight than use this four turns in a row to get the scaling damage from it.
- Trial by Skyfire is meh except in a specific situation where you can land it on fire weak creatures and have your allies not be troubled by the damage. It also requires you to be in harms way, and I'd really rather not be in melee range at this level.
- Waters of Creation heals all creatures, including enemies, so you need positioning to use it. Compare to Rebuke Death, which has more range, doesn't heal enemies, can be used with a variable number of actions, and can also bring people up without raising Wounded, and this is just subpar. (The flavor text on this says allies, but the actual effect says "creatures". Might be another errata candidate.)
- Conduit of Void and Vitality is cool in a very specific situation where you need to use a 3 action heal and need another action. I rarely use 3 action heal so I don't find this very compelling. The extra healing only works if you're already Cursebound before you cast it, so unless you've got Oracular Warning its not guaranteed to be there and isn't a lot.
- Mystery Conduit just isn't worth it for a level 20 feat with how many resources the class has now. I've got piles of spell slots, focus spells, and Cursebound spells, and probably wands/scrolls/staff/activate items since this is level 20. When am I REALLY going too want to cast a pile of 5th level spells that have no duration? I mean maybe if I could abuse it to cast long duration buffs, but that doesn't work. Meanwhile a 10th level spell slot is also available for this feat. That's a no brainer.
That's not exactly a super impressive list considering the Cursebound cost, vs what other classes can do without that.
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I recall the blog saying something to the effect of you could choose to interface with the new oracle curse for greater than normal powers, or don't, and still be perfectly playable.
I'm just not seeing it. All of the cursebound feats and abilities don't look appreciably more powerful than other class' feats to me. To me, it looks like normal feats with extra steps and penalties.
So they stripped the cooler, thematic mechanics and identify, then gave us the illusion of choice. Except their are actually fewer choices now, because most people aren't going to want to interact with the curse penalties for lackluster benefits when they can just archetype out or something.
The oracle is no longer an oracle. But a blank slate scaffolding on which to build your archetype upo. (And not a very good one at that, which is why people are turning to other classes for their oracle needs.)
You should look again. The cursebound actions are focus spells that don't cost focus points. (And the oracle focus spell feats had some real bangers to begin with.) My old oracle could use oracular warning, whispers of weakness, and debilitating dichotomy in the first round. But then I had no focus points left to use amped guidance, and might have even locked myself out of revelation spells for the rest of the day. Now I can do all that and still have a full focus pool for whatever else. As long as I don't mind whatever penalties my curse has, of course.
That + 4 slots has really given the class a sustainability boost, and things like Oracular Warning and Foretell Harm are just free action power increases. I hate what happened to the battle mystery, but you can't deny the class for some really powerful (but generic) tools in exchange.
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I run a Cosmic oracle, which had (and still has) the mildest downsides to being cursebound. As a pure caster, I don't care if I'm enfeebled and easy to be moved around. But it used to come with floating off the ground and a bit of DR. Used to take Vision of Weakness, Advanced Revelation, Divine Access (Cosmic Caravan), and Rogue dedication for linguistics (It's dumb that people who came through the Thassilon time jump don't have starting access Azlanti).
Still taking Vision of Weakness (basically no change) and Rogue dedication. Not sure if Advanced Revelation for Interstellar Void is worth it. The spell is... ok. Divine Access for my domains... I'll probably drop.
So all told.. I have more spells, and lose my DR. But the cosmic part feels like it lost a lot of flavor.
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As someone posted above, the blog said that they removed the benefits of the curse. But they didn’t. They moved the benefits of the curse (and changed them). They removed the benefit of the Mysteries, and that’s just weird to me.
That is a good point. The blog post was talking about the progressive benefits of being at a higher cursebound level. It didn't mention any reasoning for why the permanent level 1 Mystery Benefits were removed.
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Another point that I think people are talking past each other about:
Several classes have 'subclass' choices defined by which feats the player decides to take. Fighter and Monk being the ones that come to mind to me immediately. Oracle now at least partially joins those ranks. Probably more akin to Druid (Order Explorer feat chain) or Bard (Multifarious Muse) in that you can branch out into the cursebound abilities of other Mysteries.
So to use an oracular themed idiom, it feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy to say that you avoid the curse penalties entirely by not taking or using cursebound actions and then complain that Oracle feels generic because all they have is the standard Cleric Domain focus spells and Divine tradition spell slot spells.
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Note to those looking at Oracle dedication: there's a possible trap there. Unless you also gain a focus pool from somewhere, if you take cursebound feats you don't have any way to bring your curse back down.
Heh. That is actually a bit amusing.
I put this into the 'litmus test for GM compatibility' level of rules glitch. Technically, yes - Refocus requires having a focus pool in order to use the activity. Any GM strictly enforcing that for a multiclass Oracle trying to reduce their Cursebound level is probably a GM that I would avoid playing with.
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...but like a third of the curses are so bad you'll rarely want to risk them.This is exactly where people insisting former oracle was "better" lose me.
All of the new curses are far easier to tolerate in practical campaign scenarios than the former curses are, but there's some kind of mental block making it so that where new curses can be bad because they're hard to deal with old curses are good because they're hard to deal with and that doesn't register as nonsense.
Turning the whole discussion into a kind of No True Scottsman because anybody that had a problem with old oracle's mechanical implementation, and apparently also anyone that thinks the new oracle actually does have the same lore despite mechanical differences, isn't a real oracle fan.
You're doing that thing again where you've dug yourself into a rhetorical hole so deep you can't see the light anymore. Squiggit already commented on the Scottsman baloney, so I'm just going to talk about your other stuff.
First off, no one is saying the old oracle was "better" in an objective sense. We are all talking about personal preference here. Secondly, the old curses didn't require GMs to structure campaigns around them. They required the Oracle player to structure their play around them. And if they did that, the curses did not become universally easier to play in the remaster.
Ancestor: You needed to build your character to be good at strikes, spells, and skill checks so you can use whichever one you roll. In exchange you got juicy bonuses. Now, you get clumsy, which is pretty much just universally bad with no way to mitigate beyond staying out of range.
Battle: the curse itself is actually easier to deal with. In exchange, the mystery was robbed of anything that made them able to wade into battle. You can see why we don't like this trade, right?
Bones: Both take a penalty to fort saves. The old one hurts your max HP (drained) and makes non-magical healing heal you less, in exchange for a litany of bonuses including making yourself immune to ghosts. Now, the heal spell (which is used in combat way more than non-magical healing) and the harm spell alike both hurt you, and you take extra damage from ghosts. Side grade at best.
Cosmos: the penalties of rhe curse are almost identical, and remain negligible on pure casters... but you lost all your physical resistance in exchange for a few extra bad spells in your repertoire.
Flames: Certainly easier to ignore now, though if you used the play style the old mystery pushed (ie moar fire) those penalties didn't exist and you got constant concealment as a defensive buff.
Life: this got way, way worse. Your minor penalty was used to apply to being healed equal to half your level, a neglible amount when compared to the big d12 heals you could apply. (Literally +2 HP per rank increase compared to -1 per rank you lost.) Sure, there was other stuff like others not being able to magically heal you, but who else is bringing magical healing with a life oracle in the party? Now your penalty can literally get eight times as high and you have no d12 heals to compensate for it.
Lore: This one got better, at least until you hit curse bound 4 when it becomes much worse.
Tempest: Neglible before and negligible now, but actually got worse under the remaster.
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One question that has come up a couple times in this thread.
Bones: ... Now, the heal spell (which is used in combat way more than non-magical healing) and the harm spell alike both hurt you,
What part of the new Bones Mystery says that Heal is going to treat the Oracle like an undead creature and try to do Vitality damage?
Certainly, the Bones Mystery curse is going to make it so that the Oracle can get hammered by Vitality Lash (though even that one has a loophole in the spell's targeting line since the Bones Mystery doesn't give void healing by name either). But the curse doesn't say anything about Vitality healing that I can see.
So casting Heal on a Bones Oracle would still cause a Vitality Healing effect that the Bones Oracle is neither immune to nor harmed by.
Unless I am missing something.
Divine Access does this at level 11. I don't really like how it works in that you have to pick a domain, then pick a deity with that domain, then you get spells. Finding what the spell options actually are is a lot of page flipping since some of those domains have quite a few deities (even more if alternate domains are valid).
Yeah, which I wish they just stuck to it if they were going do it later down the line anyway. Especially now that the old Divine Access is no longer available at 4th level. The free spells are truly appreciated but if they are not to your liking, getting a key spell from your domains before 11th level is missed by several mysteries.
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Note to those looking at Oracle dedication: there's a possible trap there. Unless you also gain a focus pool from somewhere, if you take cursebound feats you don't have any way to bring your curse back down.
PFS clarification makes it clear that Oracle Archetype can refocus to lower Cursebound even if they do not have a focus pool. Source is under Player Core 2.
PFS clarifications are not errata, but we're already using them for things like "how many spells per level do we actually get?" since the book contradicts itself on that. So I feel this is pretty likely how the errata will go when it does turn up and is what I'm using.
I was never that interested in the battle oracle, not from PF1 nor onward, but I am very sympathetic to "some specific oracles builds just don't work the same way they used to, and I am struggling to realize a character I was playing before." This has been the challenge of the remaster for very many classes, although I agree that the case is a little different for the oracle because the oracle has been a very Paizo class from the beginning so the changes are all about dialing in the mechanics, not trying to make the narrative of the class different and unique.
I don't think any oracle really wants more than 2 cursebound feats, maybe 3 that you want to use frequently before level 11. It is kind of like continuing to choose focus spell feats when you already have 3. Flexibility is an important part of PF2's design...but spending multiple class feats on things you will rarely use is a way to building a character that has too many options to be practically useful. This is a constant danger of prepared caster classes and their spells known too, and part of why some players have such disappointing experiences with the wizard.
but a second or third cursebound option can play much more like a fighter who has sweep and a single target focused feat. you don't need to use everything all the time, as long as you use everything frequently enough not to feel like it is dead weight on your character sheet. The Oracle is pretty loaded for great feats in house compared to many other caster classes, and the fact that they aren't bound to only one mystery makes them way more attractive to me personally, because you can mix and match and make your oracle's narrative more unique to your vision of your character rather than playing a character that feels more like a video game chassis to me, which is a throwback back to the 1e Oracle.
I think the difficult choice that the developers made was for the mystery to be focused around what focus spells you get and a couple of other small ribbons, instead of tying it to class features that had to be balanced against each other on top of everything else the class chassis gives you. I think it was the right choice, but I can totally understand why a lot of people like more uniqueness per class feature. Characters really can define themselves with their spell selection and their class feats though, especially the remastered Oracle.
One question that has come up a couple times in this thread.
Bones: ... Now, the heal spell (which is used in combat way more than non-magical healing) and the harm spell alike both hurt you,What part of the new Bones Mystery says that Heal is going to treat the Oracle like an undead creature and try to do Vitality damage?
Certainly, the Bones Mystery curse is going to make it so that the Oracle can get hammered by Vitality Lash (though even that one has a loophole in the spell's targeting line since the Bones Mystery doesn't give void healing by name either). But the curse doesn't say anything about Vitality healing that I can see.
So casting Heal on a Bones Oracle would still cause a Vitality Healing effect that the Bones Oracle is neither immune to nor harmed by.
Unless I am missing something.
You're right, RAW. You're not undead, so Heal's damage can't target you and you get healed. Longer explanation:
The Curse says you are vulnerable to vitality and void damage, and can be hurt by both even if one normally has no effect on you. For a living character, you're normally immune to Vitality damage, and now you're not. So something that does vitality damage (like a Jyoti's breath weapon) now hurts you when it wouldn't.
Heal does Vitality based healing. We're going with a living creature, so you can be healed by it. Nothing changes here.
Heal is capable of doing Vitality damage. If someone does a 3 action Heal and you're in the area, what happens? Well... Heal's damage version only targets undead. You're not undead, so even though you're vulnerable to Vitality damage and the spell is doing Vitality damage in the area, RAW you don't take any of it because you're not a valid target.
The problem is... is that what's supposed to happen? Is the intention that damage from Heal SHOULD be able to hurt you because you can now take Vitality damage? Almost all sources of Vitality damage in the game have wording to the effect of "target undead" or "against an undead". You're not undead, so none of these affect you. Vitality Lash also says "void healing", which you don't have, so that doesn't affect you either.
So, RAW this curse makes you vulnerable to a damage type while almost every source of that damage type doesn't treat you as a valid target, hence it usually does nothing. I don't know if that's the intention because if it is, they could have made the curse's wording a lot simpler by saying "you gain weakness 2 to Vitality damage if you have Void Healing, or weakness 2 to Void damage if not." No need to talk about if you normally take it or not. All that extra wording kind of implies they wanted Vitality damage to hurt you as well but if so, they didn't actually do that very effectively.
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Tempest: Neglible before and negligible now, but actually got worse under the remaster.
It was not negligible, you are forgetting out of combat. As you were unable to reduce your Curse under minor you were permanently shuffling things around with crazy winds, which was very much of a big issue for a lot of out of combat stuffs (stealth, social encounters, searching rooms, etc...).
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As someone posted above, the blog said that they removed the benefits of the curse. But they didn’t. They moved the benefits of the curse (and changed them). They removed the benefit of the Mysteries, and that’s just weird to me.That is a good point. The blog post was talking about the progressive benefits of being at a higher cursebound level. It didn't mention any reasoning for why the permanent level 1 Mystery Benefits were removed.
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Another point that I think people are talking past each other about:
Several classes have 'subclass' choices defined by which feats the player decides to take. Fighter and Monk being the ones that come to mind to me immediately. Oracle now at least partially joins those ranks. Probably more akin to Druid (Order Explorer feat chain) or Bard (Multifarious Muse) in that you can branch out into the cursebound abilities of other Mysteries.
So to use an oracular themed idiom, it feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy to say that you avoid the curse penalties entirely by not taking or using cursebound actions and then complain that Oracle feels generic because all they have is the standard Cleric Domain focus spells and Divine tradition spell slot spells.
The cursebound abilities are generic within the class. Even the starting ability is shared by at least two mysteries. Yes, they help differentiate an Oracle from another class, but they lost their ties to the mysteries, because any Oracle could have them.
Nothing about Foretell Harm is specific to Tempest, other than Tempest granting it. It combines well with Tempest, because you get a lot of energy spells. But there is no Tempest flavor in the feat. Nor is there Flames flavor in the feat. It’s a generic Oracle feat that those Mysteries happen to get for free.
What Mysteries should have been is structured the way that elements are for Kineticist. Kineticist can have 6 subclasses with 15 unique feats each, plus the composite feats. Oracle Mysteries can’t have 1 feat that is unique to them (excepting Bones which has some legacy feats from a different book). The only things that define a mystery now are the three focus spells and the curse.
EDIT: Honestly, if they had left the Mystery Benefit and made the old Minor Curses always on (the small flavor effects, not being cursebound 1), it would have gone a long way towards keeping the flavor. Even if they couldn’t write a bunch of new feats. Instead it feels like they went to the other extreme in pulling the majority of the flavor out of the class, just because people didn’t like being forced into major curse effects.
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As someone posted above, the blog said that they removed the benefits of the curse. But they didn’t. They moved the benefits of the curse (and changed them). They removed the benefit of the Mysteries, and that’s just weird to me.That is a good point. The blog post was talking about the progressive benefits of being at a higher cursebound level. It didn't mention any reasoning for why the permanent level 1 Mystery Benefits were removed.
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Another point that I think people are talking past each other about:
Several classes have 'subclass' choices defined by which feats the player decides to take. Fighter and Monk being the ones that come to mind to me immediately. Oracle now at least partially joins those ranks. Probably more akin to Druid (Order Explorer feat chain) or Bard (Multifarious Muse) in that you can branch out into the cursebound abilities of other Mysteries.
So to use an oracular themed idiom, it feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy to say that you avoid the curse penalties entirely by not taking or using cursebound actions and then complain that Oracle feels generic because all they have is the standard Cleric Domain focus spells and Divine tradition spell slot spells.
The cursebound abilities are generic within the class. Even the starting ability is shared by at least two mysteries. Yes, they help differentiate an Oracle from another class, but they lost their ties to the mysteries, because any Oracle could have them.
Nothing about Foretell Harm is specific to Tempest, other than Tempest granting it. It combines well with Tempest, because you get a lot of energy spells. But there is no Tempest flavor in the feat. Nor is there Flames flavor in the feat. It’s a generic Oracle feat that those Mysteries happen to get for free.
What Mysteries should have been is structured the way that elements are for Kineticist. Kineticist can have 6 subclasses with 15 unique feats each, plus the composite feats. Oracle...
I know the kineticist is a popular class, and I can understand why. It is innovative and really built well into many features of PF2. At the same time, it is a bit of a nightmare class from a development perspective. Nothing in it interacts very well with anything else in the game. It took the space of two classes to publish in a book and publishing new stuff for the kineticist basically either requires just focusing on one specific element, or publishing 6 times as much material as providing bonus feats for another class. Even publishing an entirely new element (like making a void or vitality kineticist) would mean needing to publish hybrid blasts for how those elements interact with every other element...and that makes it a bit of beast to ever do any further development.
I personally would not want the Oracle falling into the same trap of having to publish 1 or two feats for every single mystery at every level, as that really leads to less useable content in any book that supports it. Especially when you don't have means of poaching options.
Edit: The bonus spells known from the mystery pull more weight now too, especially with the extra slots to cast them from.
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I understand the designers deciding they can’t write 15 unique feats for every Mystery. 1 unique feat for every mystery would be an improvement over what is in the remaster. They also threw out material they had already written, both from the APG Oracle and from 1E.
The bonus spells are nice, and again, it’s not an issue of the new version of the class being less powerful. It is arguably and probably even objectively more powerful. It’s certainly simpler to run. The issue is the parts of the flavor that were inexplicably removed, and things like what happened to Battle which are plain bad and more complicated than what they replaced. Simple: You’re a Battle Oracle. You get to use a Martial weapon. Complicated: You get to use a Martial weapon after you cast a focus spell, which you have to sustain, unless you hit someone that round, in which case it sustains for free. But out of combat, you forget how to use that weapon.
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edit: actually scratch that. They would need to errata Nudge the Scales too if their intent was to cause an undead/dhampir to not be harmed by vitality damage. Because Nudge the Scales only says you're healed by vitality healing effects, not unharmed by vitality damage. At least aligning with void straight up gives you the void healing ability, which includes immunity to void damage. But still no immunity to Bones' curse
Ideally, Nudge the Scales should just say you either lose or gain the void healing ability to save up on word count since having no void healing implies you heal with vitality anyway. Although, yes, I’m sure this is what they intended with Nudge.
Void healing should really just have a line on how it changes targeting or not. It needed it yesterday when it was still negative healing. Maybe then we can productively begin to figure out what is intended by the Bones curse.
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Yeah this a bad argument.
In the distance a what seems like a pack of frenzied goblins is charging in your direction the sound of off key singing with nonsense lyrics can also be heard.
Flames oracle: Oh Oh do I see it? cause I want to fireball them. (dont even know if they can use fireball)
GM: well not exactly you just see smoke and a bunch of figures moving closer from farther away. Do you still want to fireball? You dont know they are goblins or what they are doing and no one else in the party has said they wanted to tell you that information.
Flames oracle: Oh im casting fireball at the goblins!
GM: you dont know they are goblins.
Flames oracle: right yeah, I cast fireball at them.
Some time later....
GM: well as the party digs graves for the goblin song troupe they ponder how they can get another act to perform at the coming festival.
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That description can end up providing information different than what a character would reasonably have
When my character somehow has a strange perception of things, I put the burden on myself of translating the GM description into what my character perceives.
I won't shoot at you but having played 2 Oracles I really haven't seen any adaptation from the GMs I've played with.
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Mmkay. Yeah, "everything's concealed" doesn't mean you're blind.Ah yes... because the GM needing to change how they describe things (the thing I said) is the same as your character being blind (the thing you're putting in my mouth).
Nuance really is dead on the internet.
My point is that the GM, especially if running an AP, has a way they intended to describe an area. That description can end up providing information different than what a character would reasonably have, whether it's "there's a green hand painted on the white flag" that should actually be "there's a hand painted on the flag" because darkvision isn't in color (except for when it is), or it's providing details that should be less certain to have been noticed because the flames oracle is cursed to perceive the world differently.
And since the curse is such an integral part of the identity of the class, it seems weird to me if anyone was satisfied with not having it impact the game in every way the mechanics implied that it would. Especially if those people are complaining about the impact of curses being reduced with the remaster version.
I mean... Thousand Visions exists on Remaster Oracle, so the problem you're so overly worried about didn't actually go away. It's still a thing.
Lots of things cause concealment anyway for various reasons. This is not even remotely a game breaking problem or even a thing the GM has to work that hard to work around. You just tell that player "due to concealment you can't make out these details."
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Sorry for the delays responding, but... yeah. The Oracle still has issues. xD I'd like to have kept some form of mystery benefit, myself, even if you were forced to pay a feat tax for the basic functionality; I'd prefer it without the feat tax, of course, but I hear premaster basic functionality replication feats are part of the CUP, not the ORC, so they're covered by the Infinite license ;3 they'd probably have made it a tax so they could genericise them.
That said, I really wouldn't have wanted to see Life's extra 2/level HP be turned into something like "Your Hit Points increase by 9 for every level, instead of 8. If you are cursebound 3, they instead increase by 10 for every level, instead of 8." And I wouldn't have wanted to see Ancestors' extra ancestry feats get nerfed into "You gain the benefits of a Lv.1 ancestry feat if you're Lv.20 and cursebound 4. We choose which one, apply now and wait 6-8 business days for our decision." (I'm not even sure if I'm joking or not, the first one seems in line with how they nerfed the other stuff they carried over.)
Someone upthread said something about only two of the remastered mysteries having been playtested. What were the two, and where can I read that myself? So much about this book keeps making me think it got rushed, not just in the oracle (but definitely especially in the oracle) but other extra text that showed the care for clarity that went into the APG is just missing from PC2
There's no official confirmation, as far as I can tell, but it was a pretty common initial impression when PC2 came out. The class came across as them playtesting Cosmos & Flames, finding them satisfactory, and then just making everything else "similar" to them without actually testing anything. Notable standouts that support this are the Ancestors Curse being outright suicidal (and the feat that apes the premaster curse being mathematically incompatible with Ancestors Oracles)¹, the Battle Curse forcing no less than two feat taxes to restore the premaster form's basic functionality², the Bones Curse having a major ambiguity that either renders them unhealable or lets you ignore half the curse⁴, and the Tempest Curse being given a domain spell that explicitly does not work while Cursebound³. And, of course, the well-known spells goof, where one part of the class description says they get three spells per level, but another says four; it's been confirmed to be 4, but the error even being there reeks of "too rushed for proofreading." (The consensus still seems to be that Oracle suffers from not being playtested, though some people might be opening up a tiny bit to some of the other Curses. Most of them are poorly designed, though.)
...but like a third of the curses are so bad you'll rarely want to risk them.This is exactly where people insisting former oracle was "better" lose me.
All of the new curses are far easier to tolerate in practical campaign scenarios than the former curses are, but there's some kind of mental block making it so that where new curses can be bad because they're hard to deal with old curses are good because they're hard to deal with and that doesn't register as nonsense.
Turning the whole discussion into a kind of No True Scottsman because anybody that had a problem with old oracle's mechanical implementation, and apparently also anyone that thinks the new oracle actually does have the same lore despite mechanical differences, isn't a real oracle fan.
The big difference is that the original Oracle's curses had both upsides and downsides, but the remastered version's are purely negative. This applies both to the mechanics, and to the fluff.
The original was designed so that engaging with your curse meant changing your playstyle, which made the class interesting and flexible; you were incentivised to engage despite the negatives, because it had a silver lining and a ton of flavour potential. Being unable to reduce the curse below minor also meant you were intended to spend most of the day with it active, which furthur encouraged you to push it harder so the benefits would kick in, too. It may not have been the ideal way to get you to interact with the feature, but the way it was designed did mean that you would end up engaging with it and the new playstyle if you picked the class. (Notable standouts include Life making you a superhealer that empathically siphoned harm away from their allies, Lore potentially being able to circumvent combats entirely if you used the knowledge well, and Ancestors being Ancestors.)
The new version, however... not so much. Each curse is now a strict downside with no benefits, and Cursebound feats only provide a fleeting benefit that'll last a turn or two at most. The curses hamper your "intended" gameplay while active (e.g., the Life Oracle is still designed to take damage for your allies, but has lost the higher HP and potent self-healing that makes it viable; you just end up taking more damage than your chassis can support), and in some cases run a very high risk of killing you outright (i.e., Ancestors, by turning you into a crit magnet). And importantly, you're no longer incentivised to aggravate them; bonuses tend to scale half as quickly as the curse, if at all, so increasing Cursebound is purely detrimental. (There isn't even a flavour reason to engage, since the flavour is anemic at best; the Curse tend to run contrary to the Mystery's flavour, with no silver linings. Case in point, the Life Oracle's flavour was originally that they're essentially an overflowing font of life force, and the curse represents how much is bursting out of them; the new Life Oracle's flavour, conversely, is that they're spending their own life force to heal people, and the curse represents how dead they are inside from spending their own life energy.) The end result is that while the original's curses gave you a bonus for engaging with them, and also had fun flavour potential to offset the mechanical penalties, the new curses have neither; they both make you perform worse, and are written to make playing your character feel worse, the more you engage your curse.
So, it seems weird, but there's a subtle but big reason: The old curses just felt better to engage with, since you got token benefits and neat flavour out of them, while the new curses just feel bad to engage with because the more you engage them, the harder they screw both you and your flavour.
Old curses were having strong impact but were coming with strong bonuses.That's the problem, though.
The bonuses you were supposed to want came alongside the penalties that prevented the class from actually being functional - without the whole of the campaign being skewed to account for it, at least.
Meanwhile, the new Tempest curse imposes a -10 penalty to all of your speed at Cursebound 4, literally slowing your entire party down if they don't want to leave you behind. Might just be me, but that sounds like it skews the campaign to account for it a lot more than any of the old curses did.
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Late to the "party" here, but boy, do I have some thoughts! I'll spare you them, though.
To be brief, I still check the internet every day in the hopes of finding Paizo announced they're going to take back the remastered oracle for a proper remastering. The design flaws in this class are staggering. Something I'd expect from certain wizards on a distant shoreline, but not from the likes of Paizo. The whole thing feels very, very rushed, and poorly proofread/playtested. I'm honestly surprised it made it into production looking like it did.
Bottle the storm functions by giving lightning resistance, and then absorbing the damage the resistance blocks to let you throw it back at an enemy, but the Tempest Curse gives you a weakness to lightning while active. And since you can't mitigate your curse, you can't gain lightning resistance, thus rendering the spell non-functional while Cursebound.
Are you one of those people who thought the APG battle oracle wasn't allowed to wear armor?
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Yeah misread part of the spell my bad.