Assured Ritualist allows you to assist a ritual's secondary casters by buffing a secondary check.
Flexible Ritualist allows you to forgo 1 secondary caster by performing the secondary check they would have done yourself.
Assured Ritualist lists Flexible Ritualist as a requirement. This seems to imply that you, the primary caster, can use Assured Ritualist to buff a secondary check that you performed through Flexible Ritualist. Is this correct?
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Is this correct?
Seems so. Assured Ritualist modifies a secondary check and Flexible Ritualist allows you to make one of those.
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It's weirdly worded because there's multiple things going on. Flexible Ritualist says this (emphasis mine):
When you cast a ritual, you can reduce the number of secondary casters by 1. When you do, you must fulfill any requirements for the secondary caster, and you attempt the secondary check normally performed by that secondary caster. You can't replace a secondary caster who is the target of the spell (as in the atone ritual).
So this means two things are happening:
1. You're not functioning as a secondary caster because there's fewer secondary casters. If this ritual required 1 secondary caster, it now requires 0, for example, and it doesn't make sense that you're a secondary caster when there are 0 secondary casters.2. You are rolling a secondary check, as it says that quite specifically.
Assured Ritualist says this:
You can cover for a secondary caster's error. If you are the primary caster, after all the secondary checks are rolled, you can choose one check that was a failure or critical failure, and improve the result to one degree of success better than what the secondary caster rolled.
So again, this is referencing two things:
A. You did roll a secondary check so the rest of the text would let you do it, except...B. You're not a secondary caster, so the part about rolling better than what the secondary caster rolled would seem to exclude changing your own result.
RAW, I think that means it doesn't work because of B.
Personally I'd ignore that and let it work because this is a situation where if you want to use Assured Ritualist, you may not be allowed to use its prerequisite due to that prerequisite invalidating Assured Ritualist. And I think that's silly and probably unintended, because PF2 usually has prerequisites in that new feats build on them to do extra things or change how they work. Making a prerequisite that invalidates the feat that requires it doesn't make sense.
(That said, I house ruled secondary checks out of my games entirely because the math on them is absolutely brutal for PCs and rituals are hard enough as it is. The whole mechanic is really titled against the players.)
Don't forget the Familiar Sage feat that allows you to use a familiar to outright nullify one secondary caster slot from a ritual via Familiar Ritualist.
Super sucky that it's only in that archetype and not any of the other familiar archetypes or Witch, and tbh permissive GMs kinda should add it to those archetype pools.
A L8 class feat is a big ask, but in this case it is legit worth it if you want to do rituals.
For fun, I had my Stolen Fate PC do some retraining after the campaign to decide how they would end up, and they re-jiggering things to use Sage for Enhanced Familiar so they could get that feat. Checking again, it looks like they did need to swap something else to Fulu Familiar to end the lockout, which as a feat does make fulus as useful/appealing as they are ever going to be, though the existing option are still meh.