A common discussion that crops up in these spaces (and that just cropped up again recently) is that of the Oracle and how they were mishandled in the remaster. The criticisms throughout are pretty consistent:
The question that doesn't get asked very often, though, is: what would an ideal Oracle look like? Different players have expressed different opinions on this, whether it's a revert to the premaster Oracle with some buffs and QoL improvements, a series of adjustments to the current Oracle, or a new model entirely, and I feel it's worth discussing here what players feel is important to them in an Oracle, and what they'd like to see in an ideal implementation of the class. It's worth bearing in mind a few considerations, too:
Effectively, the class is in a tricky situation right now where there are two fairly different communities of players wanting very different builds out of it: ideally, there could exist an Oracle that satisfies both, but could such a class even exist in PF2e? If so, what would it look like?
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What I liked about the oracle was wrapped up in its complexity. Advanced Players Guide classes were much better for advanced players who wanted a more tactical experience without becoming wildly more powerful than the simple core classes. (This wasn't obvious to new players, so it probably didn't matter that they rolled APG into player core, but I still liked that the distinction existed.)
They intentionally removed this element from the oracle according to its remaster preview:
This connection is a double-edged sword, though, as gazing too deeply into these mysteries results in terrible backlash in the form of a divine curse. While this unique relationship with the divine and its “power at a price” theme offer strong and appealing roleplaying hooks that are very Golarion (what is the role of an oracle in a world where prophecy is lost?), the original oracle was often thought of as intimidatingly complex or as a class that made the player jump through hoops to unlock its potential. The Remastered oracle has been changed in ways both large and small to reduce its complexity and pain points, while still allowing players who want to risk fate to draw upon their curse to gain power.
Having there be advantages to higher stages of the curse (beyond the momentary burst from the cursebound action) was hella fun for me. That altered play style was interesting. I'd like that brought back. I think making cursebound actions separate from the focus pool was a fine enough choice, as the focus spells weren't so strong that having the focus poll usage be more limited than other classes made sense. And to balance out the buff of curse boons, I'd be fine losing the fourth spell slot. That never made sense to me.
So take the remastered Oracle, take away the fourth spell slot, and bring back the old curses with their pros and cons for advancing. Maybe do a balance pass through the mysteries. Pretty light touch, really. Easy to house rule of you aren't using Foundry automation.
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What would an ideal Oracle look like?
I think you have covered most of it. The Oracle needs:
Real advantages and disadvantages.
Must be properly play tested, and feedback needs to be sought from a wider circle than looked at either of the last two attempts. In both cases 3+ subclasses were intolerably awful.
I get that the Oracle is a more complex class, but that complexity and trade offs are the point of the class. Don't give us bland sauce. It is better not to do it.
Don't leave the all best Oracle features in 1st level feats. At least make some of the higher level options good. Otherwise you have an archetype not a class.
What other feats in the class are good at level 1-2 other then foretell harm? I am simply a little curious in the end about this but it feels weird. Like they are a class but are so similar to Sorcerer in power and flavor outside of the cursebound part but the curses which do not effect you much is easily like having 4 extra focus points per refocus. This is not exclusive to Oracle because anyone can grab Foretell harm for a 2 feat dip and be able to deal 2/4 extra damage times 4 so 8/16 extra damage, and considering you have 4 slots you most likely be using this on a max spell slot maximizing the damage and now I see why this is stolen. Add this to a Sorcerer and you are basically adding Rank x 3 as damage on any spell, adding 27 more damage to a rank 9 spell which is more then Exemplar at 8 bonus damage.
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What other feats in the class are good at level 1-2 other then foretell harm? I am simply a little curious in the end about this but it feels weird. Like they are a class but are so similar to Sorcerer in power and flavor outside of the cursebound part but the curses which do not effect you much is easily like having 4 extra focus points per refocus. This is not exclusive to Oracle because anyone can grab Foretell harm for a 2 feat dip and be able to deal 2/4 extra damage times 4 so 8/16 extra damage, and considering you have 4 slots you most likely be using this on a max spell slot maximizing the damage and now I see why this is stolen. Add this to a Sorcerer and you are basically adding Rank x 3 as damage on any spell, adding 27 more damage to a rank 9 spell which is more then Exemplar at 8 bonus damage.
The other Cursebound ones. They're all good. Having your team go earlier in initiative stacking with Scout is great. 1 action ranged heal has a lot of applications including "I don't have a lot of good third action things to do" but also "I want to heal the Fighter but also want to cast Slow". Whispers of Weakness gives a LOT of info and an attack roll bonus.
Reach Spell also has a lot of usage, and Widen spell isn't bad either. Honestly level 1-2 is the best level for Oracle in terms of having a variety of good feats.
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You covered the problems pretty much. This was the absolute worst remaster class by the standard of "do currently existing characters feel better after the update?", because no other class remaster broke so many existing characters. And they weren't some rare "you took three archetypes to build something unique and that interaction no longer works" edge cases: they're just core mysteries that flat out don't do what they say they do anymore and took playstyles with them.
My ideal Oracle would throw the remaster Oracle out entirely and start again. Keep the unique curse interactions and mystery benefits. Keep the complexity. Start with the premise of "this is a good concept but has implementation problems, lets fix those." It's going to require some big changes because the class had real issues, but it's going to still play like an Oracle where mysteries and curses are the core of the class and each one has a big impact on how you play. It was big, bold and complex. And that was the point! If people wanted a simple spontaneous Divine caster, Sorcerer was right there. Not every class is for every player, that's why we have so many of them.
That won't happen though, and I'll be blunt: the problem is unfixable where we are today. The remaster changed the design premise of the class, marginalizing the mystery, curse, and the complexity. There is no fixing it for us that like the old version without undoing that, and that would break it for people that do like the new version. It's one class with two fundamentally different designs and there is no sorting that dichotomy out without one group being unhappy.
(And they didn't even fully follow through on it: they said one of their goals was "curse going up is bad" but then put in feats that scale by cursebound or require cursebound to work, so "curse going up is good sometimes" still exists!)
At this point, the best we can realistically hope for is an errata pass that addresses the glaring issues in the new version of the class.
Many PFS players got their Oracle builds severely messed up in the jump.
I want to call this out specifically because it was both infuriating and entirely unnecessary. At the start of the remaster they said people could keep existing characters and use the old class chassis, then they decided "mysteries are errata so you must use those" which created a broken state and forced people onto the new version.
That was an entirely avoidable problem because existing characters working the existing way wasn't hurting anyone, and there was frankly no excuse for how it was handled.
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I like the new curses as the pros and cons are clearer, which is far more in keeping with the rest of PF2e. In what other class or part of PF2e was there as much subjective wiggle room as the original PF2e Oracle's curses?
Being different from every other class or part of PF2 is one of the best justifications for making a class.
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I'm personally quite partial to taking spell slots off the current Oracle if it would let them regain some of their premaster version's unique mystery benefits, as I think that's the kind of tradeoff that would be the least likely to mess up current players' builds (unless those builds entail not making use of those benefits at all or making as much use out of a large spell repertoire as possible, I suppose). A while back, I wrote this homebrew called the Exalted Oracle -- essentially, a set of variant rules where you could trade off spell slots in exchange for varying levels of mystery benefits, and also turn your focus spells into (improved) cursebound actions to lean more into your curse. If you were to take all of those tradeoffs, you'd become a two-slot caster with no focus spells, but lots of mystery-specific cursebound actions and benefits, like full martial proficiency as a Battle Oracle or large spillover heals each time you cast a spell or worsen your curse as a Life Oracle. From what limited playtesting I did, it felt quite fun to play, if not as strong as the current class.
One big question that I suppose the above doesn't really answer is: what ought to happen with the Oracle multiclass archetype? One frequently-mentioned issue is how easily it lets other casters poach cursebound feats at little to no drawback (just pick Cosmos and you might as well not have a curse), but it's also secretly quite janky, because picking the dedication and then a cursebound feat if you're not a spellcaster can leave you permanently cursebound until you obtain a way to Refocus. What should that archetype look like, ideally, and how much of the Oracle's benefits should it offer, if any at all?
Which mystery do you think is the least disruptive to a melee build if I had to ask?
Definitely Time. Your melee attacks generally won't trigger reactions or free actions, so that just leaves the penalty to saves against effects that would make you fatigued or slowed. Still not ideal if you get targeted with a slow spell, but still situational enough that in many circumstances you wouldn't really have a curse.
Reactions like this are why I'm thinking making the good parts of the curse and the mystery benefits subclass unique cursebound actions might be better. People who still just want to run a divine spontaneous caster with that specific batch of granted spells and ignore the curse can still do so.
...
I'd much prefer it if we tie the old benefits to exclusive focus spells that do NOT advance the curse, but simply scale off them, making it a player choice on how much risk versus reward you are willing to commit to .
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Reactions like this are why I'm thinking making the good parts of the curse and the mystery benefits subclass unique cursebound actions might be better. People who still just want to run a divine spontaneous caster with that specific batch of granted spells and ignore the curse can still do so.
However, in actually trying to play it, I quickly found that the complexity did not feel worth it at all. My AC and attack bonus changing on a round-to-round basis was nightmarish, even with automation. It was extremely fiddly and granular, yet didn't seem to achieve much.
People who want to run a divine spontaneous caster without the curse part still can: that's a Sorcerer. It's pretty good.
Making a class where half the design is "you can ignore the distinguishing feature of the class" doesn't make any sense as a design goal. Doubly so when there's already a class for that. That is a big reason why the remaster Oracle ended up twisting itself into knots removing the interesting parts and leaving it so focused on being a generic spellcaster.
In a class based game, the whole point of adding a new class is to add something that plays differently from what we already have. A class designed around not doing that doesn't make any sense from the start.
Like, could you imagine if they had "fixed" Alchemist by de-emphasizing alchemy into a side thing and the class was built around the idea that not using alchemy at all should work perfectly fine? Or solved Swashbucker's problem getting panache by just removing panache? They didn't do that in either case: they played up the unique feature to make it available more often. Now the changes didn't always work in the case of Alchemist (Swashbucklers seem pretty happy) but the intent was in the right place.
Wizard is probably the closest comparison since spell schools were removed (thought that was forced on them). That resulted in removing something which wasn't really replaced (opposition schools and such with a knockoff effect of making Clever Counterspell harder to use), but remaster Wizard still attempts to play up the "school" theme with curriculums. Wizard remaster wasn't very successful IMO, but it was at least trying to do the right thing given the legal constraints (and new, better curriculums have helped).
I think Oracle is the only case where the design goal was literally "de-emphasize and sideline the unique class theme as much as possible." It's not a surprise that didn't land well since while there are other ways to play a divine caster, there's no real way in the remaster to play what premaster Oracle did.
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I'm personally quite partial to taking spell slots off the current Oracle if it would let them regain some of their premaster version's unique mystery benefits, as I think that's the kind of tradeoff that would be the least likely to mess up current players' builds (unless those builds entail not making use of those benefits at all or making as much use out of a large spell repertoire as possible, I suppose). A while back, I wrote this homebrew called the Exalted Oracle -- essentially, a set of variant rules where you could trade off spell slots in exchange for varying levels of mystery benefits, and also turn your focus spells into (improved) cursebound actions to lean more into your curse. If you were to take all of those tradeoffs, you'd become a two-slot caster with no focus spells, but lots of mystery-specific cursebound actions and benefits, like full martial proficiency as a Battle Oracle or large spillover heals each time you cast a spell or worsen your curse as a Life Oracle. From what limited playtesting I did, it felt quite fun to play, if not as strong as the current class.
Some really good ideas in there! That feels a lot more like the Oracle class than what we have now, for sure.
One big question that I suppose the above doesn't really answer is: what ought to happen with the Oracle multiclass archetype? One frequently-mentioned issue is how easily it lets other casters poach cursebound feats at little to no drawback (just pick Cosmos and you might as well not have a curse), but it's also secretly quite janky, because picking the dedication and then a cursebound feat if you're not a spellcaster can leave you permanently cursebound until you obtain a way to Refocus. What should that archetype look like, ideally, and how much of the Oracle's benefits should it offer, if any at all?
The "you can't remove Cursebound" thing in the archetype was addressed in a PFS clarification IIRC and will probably become errata at some point. (Remaster Oracle sure did need a lot of PFS clarifications, eh?)
First thing I'd do is limit the archetype to Cursebound 1 until higher level or maybe make taking a second Cursebound ability boost it to 2. It's ridiculous right now that the archetype can use these abilities just as many times as an actual Oracle until level 11.
Also buff the higher level Cursebound abilities so there's good ones not available to the archetype.
I think if you can just run an Oracle as a divine spontaneous caster, the class has done something horribly wrong. I pushed back similarly when people suggested that the Starfinder 2e Playtest Witchwarper should be able to ignore its "Quantum Field" ability.
An Oracle's curses are THE fun thing about the class. It's an extraordinarily evocative class fantasy and core ability. The entire class should live and die on the fantasy of "I know it's too much for me to contain... But now...witness my TRUE POWER!"
When I say that it was "fiddly and granular yet didn't achieve much", that's not a problem unique to the Oracle. It's something that I feel was a recurring problem with a lot of Pathfinder 2e options, from consumables to archetypes. It has gotten better with the remaster, but it's kind of the Paizo original sin.
I think the upsides and downsides of curses should be substantial, thematic, and easy to keep track of.
^ This. The issues with premaster Oracle were real, but they were issues a bunch of PF2 classes had. See: Psychic, Alchemist, etc
What it needed was another pass on the idea of how curses advanced and what they did. Something like:
- Life curse going up makes your healing stronger, but...
- Battle curse going up makes your weapon hit harder, but...
- Cosmos curse going up makes you more nimble/mobile, but...
etc. The but is the important part to get right.
I don't hate everything remaster Oracle does. Having Cursebound abilities seperate from focus spells is an interesting idea if they're worth using, so you have stuff you can do that doesn't touch your curse and "I want to ramp up my curse" options. It's not the only way to handle that (letting you cast a normal focus spell or a boosted "cursed" focus spell would have also worked), but it's interesting enough.
But the mystery and curse should be a fundamental part of how the class plays, and that was what we had before. Going into full overdrive Life healing mode was really thematically cool and something unique to that mystery. I want that kind of feeling back for every mystery.
That was the kind of update the class needed: a second pass to apply the lessons learned and refine the ideas.
A question that comes to mind is "ideal for what?"
I do have to say that the animist seems to be a decent chassis comparison. Possibly the oracle could be modified to be similar to a more-focused animist, with the mystery being fixed (instead of chosen during daily preparations as with apparitions) but granting spells of each rank to the repertoire and buffing the revelation spells slightly (maybe just adding a +2 to the spell attack roll/DC, similar to how the fighter is effectively one proficiency better than other martials in one weapon category) to justify the Cursebound drawbacks.
The oracular curses probably also need to be looked at for balance issues between the mysteries.
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As much as I make it a point to lambast remastered Oracle, my take on an ideal one is actually mostly in line with this iteration; I love the new Cursebound mechanics, and I think it was a good change to decouple the potential benefits from the curses themselves. In the curse management aspect Oracle is basically where I want it to be. Likewise, the ways Mysteries were expanded are great for the class, extra granted spells is something every divine class needs, it's nice to have access to a full deity's worth of domains per mystery now,
The dealbreaker for me is the removal of Mystery Benefits, the granted feats they were replaced with by necessity cannot be as impactful which in my opinion is horrible for the class. Battle is particularly instructive here, it used to give you unconditional training with all martial weapons in a chosen weapon group (and actually advanced ones too when you got to expertise), and now... You can give your allies a buff to initiative. Which was their old initial focus spell, actually, the current one attempting (and failing) to fill the same need as the old Benefit, but it's just... Worse. I'm not certain what prompted this change, but it's for the worse, and the class would be better off with reworked benefits instead of granted feats. And also 3 slots, holy hell whey did they choose to give Oracle power by just giving it more slots
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And also 3 slots, holy hell whey did they choose to give Oracle power by just giving it more slots
Interesting perspective! To this last point, I still think it was a relatively last minute change. The text wasn't updated to reflect it (hence the whole "how many spell does it actually have?" mess at launch), and considering how it seemingly comes out of nowhere and warps the class balance so much in favor of "generic spellcaster", it feels like a reaction to running out of time.
PC2 was pretty clearly rushed (they admitted the schedule compression the remaster caused and PC2 is rife with editing errors and obvious mistakes) and a ton of time was obviously invested into Alchemist. It seems likely to me that they simply ran out of time, saw the state Oracle was in, and decided to make a change they could do quickly that would at least let it feel effective in play.
Could you imagine the class as-is right now except without the extra slot? The reaction was bad enough as it is, but the crutch the whole thing leans on is "at least it's really powerful as a spellcaster." Take that away and the reception would have been even worse.
Removing mystery benefits was a huge and frankly baffling mistake. It doesn't line up with their own stated reasoning of wanting cursebound going up to be negative (neither do some of their own remastered feats, for that matter) and there's no apparent reason why they did it. I can't even begin to guess at why they decided to do that, unless that was another victim of the schedule.
Speaking of that, what were the actual problems with the premaster oracle to warrant such a heavy-handed remaster? Paizo at least thought the class was too complicated, which is fair, though I like complicated. I understand that the class wasn't very popular but that it also had some big fans. Sure, they ran out of time, but it feels like such a class could have been fixed with simple QoL improvements. Minor changes should take less time, so, if time was a constraint and they still decided to do such a major revision, they must have thought the issues with the original we're really glaring.
I wish I knew. The changes are so drastic and jarring that maybe it was a different designer entirely working on this than the ones who did the first version and they just had a totally different concept of what an "Oracle" is.
It was a totally different designer. In fact, most of the lead designers at Paizo had changed by the time the Remaster occured. I think everyone but Adam and Jason left. Lyz Liddel wrote the OG Oracle and left Paizo shortly after the APG was published.
As to why they remastered it this way, here is the blog post that shows their reasoning.
https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6v7rn?Player-Core-2-Preview-The-Or acle-Remastered
Tridus: I just want to note saying they didn't succeed at their stated goal doesn't quite track, because of this line: "Now, oracle players who want to opt into this complexity can do so, and oracles who want more straightforward benefits can keep it simple."
Keeping some curse bound feats which improve based on the state of your curse is pretty consistent with this bit. Opt in complexity is one of the biggest design philosophies of PF2. Unfortunately, they didn't succeed in the opt in complexity being nearly as satisfying as the old class.
It was a totally different designer. In fact, most of the lead designers at Paizo had changed by the time the Remaster occured. I think everyone but Adam and Jason left. Lyz Liddel wrote the OG Oracle and left Paizo shortly after the APG was published.
As to why they remastered it this way, here is the blog post that shows their reasoning.
https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6v7rn?Player-Core-2-Preview-The-Or acle-Remastered
Tridus: I just want to note saying they didn't succeed at their stated goal doesn't quite track, because of this line: "Now, oracle players who want to opt into this complexity can do so, and oracles who want more straightforward benefits can keep it simple."
Keeping some curse bound feats which improve based on the state of your curse is pretty consistent with this bit. Opt in complexity is one of the biggest design philosophies of PF2. Unfortunately, they didn't succeed in the opt in complexity being nearly as satisfying as the old class.
Probably not what they meant but you can also opt into the complexity by playing the premaster oracle.
For me it reminds me of when gunslinger was first coming out. The write up for the playtest feedback posed an interesting design philosophy, that being that the class could lose its direct power of higher proficency and have that power shifted to feats, or it could keep its direct power but gain less impactful features as a cost.
It sticks with me because I can't help but feel that's exactly what happened to oracle. It gained direct forward power in becoming a 4 slot castsr, and so lost power in its quirky features which meant they needed to become less defining for the class compared to the premaster.
It was a totally different designer. In fact, most of the lead designers at Paizo had changed by the time the Remaster occured. I think everyone but Adam and Jason left. Lyz Liddel wrote the OG Oracle and left Paizo shortly after the APG was published.
As to why they remastered it this way, here is the blog post that shows their reasoning.
https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6v7rn?Player-Core-2-Preview-The-Or acle-Remastered
Tridus: I just want to note saying they didn't succeed at their stated goal doesn't quite track, because of this line: "Now, oracle players who want to opt into this complexity can do so, and oracles who want more straightforward benefits can keep it simple."
Keeping some curse bound feats which improve based on the state of your curse is pretty consistent with this bit. Opt in complexity is one of the biggest design philosophies of PF2. Unfortunately, they didn't succeed in the opt in complexity being nearly as satisfying as the old class.
But they also said this:
Because the classic oracle’s curses boosted some stats while lowering others, it could be unclear whether being cursed was a benefit you were trying to get ASAP or a price you had to strategically work around. In the Remaster, they’re always a price, which lets us significantly dial up the power that you get for paying it and keeps the trade-off simple to understand: “Cheat the rules of creation for power, and you get cursed.”
They talked about how the old design had people trying to figure out if being cursed was good or not and how the new design is not that... and then kept that on some of the feats so "curse go up is actually still good sometimes." One of those is Oracular Warning, which some mysteries start with, so it's not really something that is only on feats you can just not take unless you also avoid those mysteries. So yeah, I don't think they fully stuck to their own goal.
It wasn't even a very good idea IMO for other reasons, since actually being cursed when using Oracular Warning is going to be unusual, and The Dead Walk scales so poorly because of it that you have to use it for multiple rounds in a row before any scaling kicks in.
And like Ryangwy said: they cut the straightforward mystery benefits.
Yeah, I'm generally not a big fan of speculation, but it does really feel to me like the extra spell slot per rank was a last-minute decision to cover the omission of mystery benefits. There were similar printing errors with the daze cantrip, which was described as having a lot of new effects but ended up with its basic mechanics unchanged in the final product: my suspicion in both cases is that the developers were testing out changes, in the Oracle's case to their mystery benefits, but didn't have the time or resources to complete the process due to the compressed schedule and so had to go for a simpler and safer, if far less satisfying final implementation. I wonder what the class would've looked like had it been worked on without those same constraints.
For what it's worth, I personally quite like the Oracle gaining benefits based on how heavily cursed they are, as I think that's a great way to incentivize increasing the cursebound condition. This isn't to say that every effect that does this now has nailed the balance, but I think it's a good thing to have, and had it been incorporated more consistently into cursebound effects, that could've probably helped the Oracle stand out better when leaning into their curse.
One thing that puzzles me as well is why the Oracle was given cursebound feats and focus spells: cursebound feats are effectively pseudo-focus spells in that they can be used every encounter and then replenished by Refocusing, with the added effect of being stronger than focus spells and increasing your curse. When you can use up to four of those every encounter, that to me doesn't leave much room for other resourceless abilities, especially on a four-slot caster who can comfortably use plenty of high-rank spell slots without worrying too much about running low. Had those focus spells been changed into mystery-specific cursebound feats with better effects and lessened action costs (which I suppose would just bring us back to the premaster Oracle and their cursebound focus spells), that I think could've pushed the class to use their curse more, while leaving room to opt into domain spells for those wanting safer, if less effective fallback options.
Daze ended up unchanged, but Oracle ended up really changed - I wonder why they didn't just leave the curses be and put in the band-aid fixes to the most pressing issues (Divine Access, Gifted Power, granted spells, letting domain spells not up your curse) since those don't touch the cursebound thing at all
My guess is that daze is an atomic mechanic, whereas the entire Oracle class is not -- if you're playtesting changes to a single cantrip and don't have the time to finalize the results, you'd just revert to the cantrip's last approved iteration for the final product. By contrast, if you've finalized multiple components to a class (such as the new curses and cursebound feats) but haven't finalized others (such as mystery benefits) then the reversion process becomes more complex, as you wouldn't want to do a full revert and leave the entire class in the same state as it was before. In this respect, discarding the stuff that's not finalized and shifting that power to the class's spell slots per rank sounds like a plausible compromise, as spell slots constitute "safe" power that has been playtested in identical form before on other caster classes.
What puzzles me is that several of the more poachable cursebound feats look like they could've been easily adjusted to scale with cursebound value: specifically, Whispers of Weakness's status bonus could have been equal to your cursebound value + 1, and Foretell Harm could've similarly added damage equal to a multiple of the spell's rank times your cursebound value + 1. Had this been implemented, not only would this have made the Oracle's feats less likely to offer the class's defining benefits in full to multiclass characters, especially if the MC archetype capped your cursebound value at 1, it would've also allowed the class to shine even more when taking their curse to dangerously high levels. With those two feats in particular, you could make some pretty meaty Strikes or produce some exceptionally good blasting at higher level, and so specifically when leaning into your curse.
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My ideal Oracle was my pre-remaster PFS Ratfolk Ancestors Oracle. So much flavor and backstory, all made unplayable by remaster. I'm still a bit salty about it. I've considered rebuilding as a Medium Animist but every time I start the process I find my heart's not in it.
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I don't really have a specific ideal in mind, but I liked old Oracle a heck of a lot more than the new one. I think the remastered Oracle tried to adress a lot of legitimate issues with the old one. Genuinely, the old Oracle had a lot of fiddly little bits and in general felt a little weak compared to other casters. Lots of variance between curses as well, in terms of power. As others have mentioned in this thread, I suspect the remaster simply did not have enough development time, and a "milquetoast" design was chosen as a way to make sure the class didn't come out as a flaming mess.
I think there are ways to tweak both new and old oracle, but I would always start with reducing the spells back down to 3. At 4 spells per level, Oracle has incredibly limited "design buy" for to get interesting and powerful abilities before it becomes a strictly better divine sorcerer.
One idea I had for creating a "middle ground" between the old and new Oracle is giving the Oracle some kind of potent benefit when they reach the maximum level of their curse. The old Oracle had granular drawbacks and benefits associated with their curse, and I think that ended up being very fiddly a lot of the time. Making the drawbacks granular (and simplifying them a bit compared to premaster Oracle) while having a binary upside attached to the curse could give the class back some "oomph". You would probably have to cursebound abilities if you went this route as well.
Surprising how many see Remastered Cosmos as a specifically Remastered problem when old Cosmos was also the best Mystery to have.
Cosmos being a pretty trivial curse was already recognized as an issue given how it was mostly irrelevant, but it could occasionally pose a problem. Back when I was playing Kingmaker, my little Gnome would have issues if the curse got to moderate because I now count as tiny for weather effects, and Kingmaker had a habit of throwing extreme weather at us. I definitely would not want to have the curse up when a severe storm whipped up because being 15 pounds soaking wet and tiny risks severe wind being a rather awful (and hilarious) situation.
Still, it was recognized as a pretty trivial curse to manage and the one you play if you don't want to actually deal with much curse, especially compared to something really difficult like Ancestors.
You'd expect the Remaster to address that, right? And yet, the remaster made it worse! Remaster Cosmos' curse is basically completely irrelevant. It impacts me so little that I often don't bother removing it in Foundry.
I literally can't be bothered sometimes to right click the debuff because it makes so little difference.
And that's one of the beefs with Remaster Oracle: it didn't address some of these known issues. Mystery/Curse disparity got worse because you no longer have mystery benefits and curse upsides to counterbalance the curse challenges. You just have "this curse does basically nothing" and "this curse will get you crit into the ground."
Like this took away the unique things I could do (wading into melee, being blown away by a strong wind) and replaced it with "might as well spam Debilitating Dichotomy because being cursed doesn't matter at all", while keeping the massive disparity between curses that was already recognized as a problem and should have been something the remaster addressed.
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I thought I’d add one voice of someone who was never intrigued by Pre-Oracle (but did stay informed), yet absolutely fell in love with the RM-Oracle. (Coz I know Paizo does look at these boards).
Overall, I think 1) divorcing Revelation/Curse level, 2) Cursebound abilities, 3) Negative Curses, and 4) Curse as a resource poll were all great ideas (I really like James Case’s class designs). I love having these pocket powers available (separate from typical caster resources) that I can tap into for a cost. But I do feel pretty feat starved with the RM Oracle.
Admittedly, I do think not all Mysteries are equal and Paizo should take another pass at them. Examples being: Ancestors/Life/Battle need some tweaking to either their curse (Ancestors/Life), granted spells (Ancestors/Life), and revelation spells (Ancestors/Battle). Generally, Tempest, Bones, and Lore look good. I think Flames and Cosmos need a tweak to make their Curse more impactful.
If I could make some general tweaks, it would be:
•Major/Extreme Curse earlier (maybe lvl. 7 and lvl. 15, not 11 and 17). I don’t think using the original levels from the Premaster Curse class features make as much sense in the new system, especially since Overwhelmed isn’t a thing anymore and these are active powers, not passive powers.
•Divine Access at 9, not 11. (Getting both Major Curse and Divine Access at lvl. 11 feels very…back-loaded).
•Major/Extreme Curse grant a free Cursebound feat choice.
•Maybe a free lvl. 1 Cursebound feat of our choice (on top of our Mystery granted feat) at lvl. 1.
•Maybe a free domain revelation spell at lvl. 1, but drop Oracle back down to 3-spell slots.
On a selfish note: I do love my RM-Battle Oracle. I like Weapon Trance conceptually (and intent), but it is a (functionally) bland focus spell. I think they can thematically incentivize it by 1) also auto-sustains whenever you use a Cursebound ability or Mystery spell (granted/accessed/focus) and 2) a status bonus to weapon damage rolls equal to your Cursebound value.
Overall, I’ve enjoyed the RM Oracle. Contrary to some online discourse I’ve seen, I do think it has its own niche amongst the Divine casters and if taken another pass at, I hope Paizo solidifies its place in that niche further. Coz, the die has been cast and the decision has been made on what the Oracle is now.
However, with Paizo finally doing actual class-class archetypes, I really hope they listen to the passionate Pre-Oracle players here and cook up an Oracle class archetype to bring back some of that beloved legacy Oracle playstyle.
I think PF2e is big enough for both RM and Pre-Oracle players to exist.
Paizo might look at these boards and forum posts but... We all know where that sometimes goes, look at all the Errata we dropped for the Spring 2025 Errata this year. We got 1 page and about maybe a dozen at best answers to the Errata we posed? One of the posts if asking Paizo to look at the last Errata Suggestion (Spring 2025 Errats Suggestion Thread)
Little chance that Paizo will see this and put into their schedule "Fix Oracle Mysteries. We would be luck if we get any new cursebound feats which are useful at higher level seeing as some classes still have yet to receive new feats. I am looking at you Kineticist. Also with them Remastering Oracle we would have a better shot unfortunately seeing Magus & Summoner class Remastered before we see Oracle touched again.
It doesn't help that they are also releasing 4 new classes. Commander, Guardian, Necromancer & Runesmith. Which would also be possibly slowing down any chance of Oracle Errata even!
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I think that regardless of what Paizo chooses to do with the Oracle in the future, it's still worth asking for better. Not just being mad about it (though that's valid too), but actively expressing what we'd like to see from the class in the future. Perhaps the developers might errata the Oracle accordingly, perhaps they might square the circle and find some way to reintroduce mystery benefits, or perhaps they might leave the class forever unchanged: in all cases, it's worth not only criticizing something that could've been done better, but channeling that into something constructive.
To take a recent example: Paizo recently launched a playtest package for Starfinder 2e. One of the classes in that playtest, the Technomancer, drew heavy criticism for a number of reasons. Playtesters didn't just express frustration over the class, however, many also gave clear indications of what they expected the class to be, even if it meant a shift in design direction. After the playtest period closed and Paizo collected all of that feedback, they released a summary detailing the next steps... which included a directional shift for the Technomancer, exactly what players had asked for! Not only did players channel their criticisms into workable suggestions, Paizo heard that feedback loud and clear and applied it to their work. This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened either, and that's the kind of behavior that inspires hope and goodwill.
And that's why I created this thread, I guess. Social media unfortunately makes it very easy to keep ruminating on things that make you unhappy, yet that dissatisfaction can still translate to positive feelings, even positive outcomes, when expressed as a motivation to see things improved. There's a ton of threads out there ruminating on the Oracle, and there's a bit of that rumination here, but there's also a lot of constructive feedback that's actually turned out to be fairly harmonious: mystery benefits for instance seem to be a popular and unopposed idea, and there seems to be a general agreement as well that some mystery curses could use a rebalance. Players sitting on either side of preference for the pre-versus-post-remaster Oracle seem to be finding common ground that some focus spells and class features could use a touch-up, with certain specific points like weapon trance or Divine Access coming up often. All of that, in my opinion, is workable feedback, and if nothing else shows we all seem to share certain points in common when it comes to imagining the ideal Oracle.
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Even if they don't actually touch Oracle ever again, this thread is still full of useful feedback for the next time they update a class. It's pretty clear that this change was very disruptive in a way that the other remasters weren't (aside from perhaps Wizard). Alchemist got a major revision as well but it doesn't seem to have garnered the same kind of strongly negative reaction, probably because it didn't downplay "using Alchemy frequently is the core class identity".
So it's still a useful discussion in that regard. If they do touch Oracle again, then it's pretty clear that there are some things people broadly agree are needed no matter their opinion of the remaster Oracle itself: mystery benefits, curse balance (which mystery benefits would help since they're a package), and distinctive cursebound actions. That stuff can be addressed without drastically changing the class again.
Like, if Battle was updated so the mystery grants Medium armor, a Martial weapon group, and Weapon Trance was changed to a +status attack/damage bonus, that would immediately feel way better.
Like, I don't realistically expect they're going to revert the whole thing and redo it. They just don't go back and update things like that, no matter how much I think it needs it. But even without that, there's stuff they can do that has broad support that would help fix up what we do have and make it a lot better.
Like, if Battle was updated so the mystery grants Medium armor, a Martial weapon group, and Weapon Trance was changed to a +status attack/damage bonus, that would immediately feel way better.
Wouldn't this change just make battle oracle the best oracle?
Wouldn't this change just make battle oracle the best oracle?
Like, if Battle was updated so the mystery grants Medium armor, a Martial weapon group, and Weapon Trance was changed to a +status attack/damage bonus, that would immediately feel way better.
If that was the only thing you did to the entire class, probably... but presumably every mystery would get a mystery benefit. It could also be tweaked if it's too much, but it's an example of a change that dramatically improves the feel of the mystery.
It's just showing that it doesn't take another massive rework of the class to fix some of the major pain points that exist now. Battle effectively needing multiple feats to be functional at the thing people want it to do (be a gish) feels lousy.
Life has the same problem, really. If it got back a bit of what it did before, like "you roll healing effects one die higher" so your Heal is d10, it's now suddenly doing something unique at the thing it's supposed to be good at.