Pureblood Azlanti get the +2 to all stats, but the last of those became a god thousands of years ago.
The characters claim to be Azlanti in more recent times do not get those bonuses, they get the standard floating +2 that other humans get.
Azlanti get +2 to every ability score....
thus you've uncovered the Real Reason the (game trope) star stone had to fall and wipe them out...
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Pureblood Azlanti get the +2 to all stats, but the last of those became a god thousands of years ago.
The characters claim to be Azlanti in more recent times do not get those bonuses, they get the standard floating +2 that other humans get.
Sorshen, Belimarius, and any human in the domed city that was stuck in time (Crystilan?) are also pure blood Azlanti.
I'm sure there are others who may have been in stasis or otherwise stuck in time or maybe have been pulled forward THROUGH time who are also pure blood Azlanti.
Seriously, that "Last Azlanti" title for Aroden is completely bogus.
I'd allow a player to play a pure blood Azlanti, but there had better be a darned good roleplaying or character reason for it.
The pureblooded Azlanti is a human variant and gets the bonus feat and skilled racial traits in addition to +2 to all stats. That makes them significantly more powerful than normal humans.
All fair points. I'm more wondering how the Azlanti, with ability score bonuses only, might stack against some of the higher RP player races. Dwarf, Drow, or Aasimar for instances.
possibly on par with the Drow, but ahead of the Aasimar and Dwarf.
+2 with all stats means a 0-point character is the equivalent to a 12-point buy. That makes a character with a 20 point buy equivalent to a 32-point buy.
As a general rule, I don't actually think they're that much stronger. A lot of this is going to come down to the experience of the player building the Azlanti character, and whether or not they're trying to get as much as they can out of those bonuses.
If you imagine a party of all Humans consisting of a Fighter, Cleric, and Wizard, converting them all to Azlanti would have an uneven impact on their functionality. The Fighter and the Cleric would improve more than the Wizard. The Fighter is already inundated with bonus feats, so they won't miss the feat they would have gotten from being Human nearly as much, while they also have the greatest spread of ability score dependencies. The Wizard, comparatively, gains extremely little from the Strength boost (none of them particularly care about Charisma as even the benefits to the Cleric are relatively minor, so that's a wash).
Additionally, one of the most common optimization tactics is finding ways to shift as many thing as possible onto one ability score. For someone using this kind of build, having a small bonus to all ability scores will generally be much less useful in the long run than having an extra feat and an extra skill rank per level (or any of the alternate features those can be traded away for).
Still, if you try to assess this by any direct measure of equivalency, the Azlanti will always appear more powerful on paper. I also believe this is indeed how things will usually pan out in practice — most people aren't playing at tables that optimize to the degree that a bonus to all ability scores would be useless or bad. If you gave me the option to freely make the choice and I was choosing based on what would contribute more power to my character, I'd take the Azlanti far more often than not.
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I played a pure blood Azlanti Oracle of Time in the RotR AP.
Caster Oracles are not very MAD (Multi Attribute Dependent) intensive so the Azlanti superiority was much less noticeable in actual game-play.
Now, if I were playing a pure blood Azlanti Paladin or Monk (notorious MAD intensive classes), its superiority would have been much more apparent, especially at lower levels.
Saying that how powerful something comes down to the experience of the players goes for anything. Using that as a justification for something not being overpowered not really a valid defense. Any character run by a player with good system mastery and tactics will always be more powerful than any character run by a rank beginner.
Even a S.A.D. class will benefit from the +2 across the board. The +2 bonus to all stats helps minimize the negatives of dumping other stats. Assuming a 20 point buy for an Oracle. I max out CHA at 20 (including +2 for being human), put 14 into DEX, 16 into CON and dump STR, INT and WIS to 7. If I am a pureblood Azlanti my CHA stays the same, my DEX and CON are now higher, and I have 9 for all other Stats. All my saves went up by 1, as did my AC. I get an extra HP and skill point per level. All my skills except CHA based skills get a +1 bonus including skills that I don’t have points in. My chance to hit and damage goes up by 1. The increase in my chance to hit also includes spells that require an attack roll. My carrying capacity has also increased. My initiative goes up by 1. My CMD is increased by 2.
Saying that how powerful something comes down to the experience of the players goes for anything. Using that as a justification for something not being overpowered not really a valid defense. Any character run by a player with good system mastery and tactics will always be more powerful than any character run by a rank beginner.
Even a S.A.D. class will benefit from the +2 across the board. The +2 bonus to all stats helps minimize the negatives of dumping other stats. Assuming a 20 point buy for an Oracle. I max out CHA at 20 (including +2 for being human), put 14 into DEX, 16 into CON and dump STR, INT and WIS to 7. If I am a pureblood Azlanti my CHA stays the same, my DEX and CON are now higher, and I have 9 for all other Stats. All my saves went up by 1, as did my AC. I get an extra HP and skill point per level. All my skills except CHA based skills get a +1 bonus including skills that I don’t have points in. My chance to hit and damage goes up by 1. The increase in my chance to hit also includes spells that require an attack roll. My carrying capacity has also increased. My initiative goes up by 1. My CMD is increased by 2.
This is disregarding the fact that system mastery can literally directly interact with how valuable investment into more than one ability score is. If you're playing the Oracle you mentioned, you could be getting CHA to all mind-affecting Will saves and replacing your Dexterity to AC. If you're willing to take a 2 level dip into Paladin as has become quite popular, you could instead be getting CHA to all saves (though would still, of course, benefit from the additional boost of Azlanti since it isn't like Divine Grace replaces the base ability score bonus). When there are so many ways to apply boosts in one ability score (especially Charisma) to other things, the value of being able to obtain a small bonus to everything becomes less significant, relatively speaking.
Attempts to compress the value of having a +2 in all ability scores by comparing that to the cost in feats to obtain them are useful, but doing so without the acknowledgement that all feats are not (and created nowhere near) equal will lead to strange conclusions. Dodge and Toughness, last I checked, were not topping many people's lists of the strongest feats to take. You can stack up every benefit provided by being Azlanti for a Wizard to a +1 to the DC of Stinking Cloud, and it wouldn't be insane to argue that Spell Focus is better than the lot of it (also enabling faster access to Augment Summoning if you're taking conjuration like in the example I just provided).
What is the value of having the final piece of your build come online two levels sooner than it otherwise would have? Is that better or worse than a handful of miscellaneous defensive and utility bonuses? The answers to these questions will vary, but the bottom line is that any given character is already specialized at being good at what is most important to them. This is not to downplay the value of getting all the benefits of the Azlanti boost. I think they're crazy, and would certainly pounce at the chance if a GM told me that this was a viable options at character creation. There is no build that won't gain some amount of benefit from receiving the racial ability score boosts of Azlanti, but there are certainly cases where they will be largely insignificant or poorly-weighted against alternatives.
System master can allow an experienced knowledgeable player to dominate the game no matter what character he plays. If I have enough system mastery, I can play a chained rogue with a lesser point buy and be more powerful than a wizard with a higher point buy played by a beginning player. That is the reason I do not buy the defense of the something not being overpowered because it requires some system mastery.
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They're just different degrees of overpowered. (Ab)use and knowledge of Pathfinder 1e mechanics is a continuum. The ability score bonuses to Azlanti will, in many cases, allow the creation of more effective characters, especially in scenarios where players either aren't aware of certain optimization methods, or aren't using them.
Allowing a player to create a pureblood Azlanti character over a core race will be much less impactful than allowing or not allowing things that are already much more prevalent and accepted at a wide variety of tables, like allowing vs. not allowing Stinking Cloud, Teleport, Phantasmal Web, Grease, Emergency Force Sphere, and any number of other "modest" powerful spells and abilities that don't completely deconstruct the world like a painter Wizard, but are far more significant than a character gaining an extra hit point per level and being 5% more likely to make their saving throws and most skill checks.
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I do understand where you're coming from based on the substance of my posts, but it would be more accurate to characterize my thesis statement as, "The difference in power between a character making optimal use of the increased ability scores from pureblooded Azlanti vs. the power of any given core race is significantly lower than the difference in power created organically by simply playing the game 'normally' due to circumstances that are generally considered acceptable despite creating far greater disparity."
You could argue that, "No one is asking for this comparison," but I feel like advice under the circumstances is best characterized by further trying to give an impression of the degree of the unfair advantage, which is going to result in subjective interpretation and disagreement, but should also be possible to reach a range of general consensus over given time and debate.
If one envisions two 1st Level characters who are otherwise identical, and then one of them is given a single CL 1 Potion of Cure Light Wounds, there is no debate that one of those characters has an objective advantage over the other, but I doubt many people would spend a great deal of time trying to convince others that this difference will be impactful or meaningful over the course of each character's adventuring career, given that the item will long be forgotten before reaching 3rd Level.
This difference is obviously much more substantial than that; I am not trying to characterize the difference in power between a CRB race and Azlanti as being that minor. I am saying, though, that I think allowing two different players to bring a Barbarian and a Wizard into the same party is already far more egregious mark against intra-party balance than any that will be caused by the existence of one or more Azlanti. There simply is not that much to optimize about the bonuses provided by the Azlanti as hard as one tries.
If I think about characters who would gain the most benefit from being Azlanti, using the racial bonus to its utmost, in general my mind goes to certain Monk setups, frontline Clerics and Druids, and frontline Shamans (or Spirit Guide Oracles) that want to make use of their Charisma-based (Wisdom-based) features (especially Lore as a Wandering Spirit). Certainly, Cleric, Druid, Shaman, and Spirit Guide Oracle are not classes/archetypes in need of any help, though assuming the option is one that it offered to players across the board, Azlanti will still provide the greatest comparative benefit to a martial over a caster (even though most casters would still be quite happy to take the option), since martials are almost invariably dependent on finding ways to nurture a greater spread of higher ability scores (the same logic and circumstances under which it can be shown that reducing Point Buy has a lower impact on most full casters than the impact on most martials).
A strong, well-built character already has a mechanism for obtaining a racial boost to the ability scores that they care the most about simply by selecting the race that will boost those ability scores. By extending that logic, you could compare it to the value of a mechanic that already exists; spending gold to buy belts and headbands. Everyone will prioritize their single most important physical and/or mental ability score first (obviously). Eventually, with enormous amounts of gold available in middle and high levels, players may go about seeking out belts and headbands that also apply to their less relevant ability scores (especially with boosting saving throws in mind), but many times these will still get neglected even when both the gold and the item(s) are present and available simply because they're comparatively a very inefficient way to spend wealth until very late. If it was so desirable to obtain these increases to less used ability scores, I would expect Belts and Headbands of Physical/Mental Perfection to be far more popular pieces of equipment than what experience shows me people value them at. You can literally see the degree and comparative value/urgency players place on upgrading secondary ability scores through this same lens.
Compared to the next best racial option for a particular build, Azlanti sacrifice all other racial abilities for a +2 racial ability score bonus to the four or five less valued ability scores (from the creating player's perspective). This is definitely still desirable from a power optimization standpoint, but it isn't going to split the game apart mechanically. It really depends on how important maintaining intra-party parity is to the GM and to the table in the first place...but if it was really that important, I would say that a table that cares deeply should be examining many other assumptions of the game first, and would likely possess the analysis skills required to draw their own subjective conclusions. At that point, it would be far easier to choose a different game system altogether that actually values parity.