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I have a feeling this opinion is going to be very unpopular in some play groups, but having seen what has happened with the Psychic and Magus after the remaster change, and the discussions around tier lists, a couple of things strike me:
The free archetype variant rule has became a much bigger power booster than it was before you could recover all of your focus points at once, and getting access to a strong focus spell for your play style are a bunch bigger part of optimization than they used to be. It used to be really difficult for non caster classes to ever recover focus points quickly. Focus spells for these classes pretty much stayed 1x encounter from level 1-20, but even for casters, other than once per day, focus spells were still pretty much just once an encounter until mid game and didn’t regularly become 3 times an encounter until very high level.
This was a much bigger change in power balance than most of us realized, probably because many players never caught the focus spell limit in the first place. However, the old, pre-remaster meta analysis of casting and caster tactics was: casting spells from high rank spell slots is highest tier casting potential, and by level 5, with rank 3 spells, you could pretty regularly outpace any martial in damage dealt in most encounters (as long as you kept casting your top 2 ranks of spells through the first 2 turns of combat), and if you instead wanted to devuff enemies, you could do that better than anyone too. Number of top rank spell slots was pretty much what determined how good of a caster you were and player satisfaction with caster classes largely was determined by what lengths players went to to get top slots (like by spending wealth on scrolls), and whether the campaigns players played in tended to force more than 3 to 4 encounters on parties in a day. If you were regularly averaging at least 1 top rank spell per encounter, you were much more likely to find casting unsatisfactory and disappointing.
In that system, focus spells, being worse than top rank spells, were largely a distraction from effective casting, with the exception being one action spells you could cast along side your first or second round top rank spells. Even those were mostly just once an encounter tricks (or out of combat utility options) though, and with enough spell slots, a two action spell slot spell and a one action spell slot spell were just as good, or often better.
Now, the meta for very many tables is get 3 focus spells as quickly as possible, and for first rounds of combat to often be spent without casting any spell slot spell, instead setting up with your focus spells. Both the animist and the Necromancer are getting a lot of hype and I think it is because there definitely are players that would rather play this way. The unfortunate thing, to me, is that these classes could have easily had the same kind of 2 FP recovery system as the psychic (for whom the class was destroyed by this focus spells per encounter limit change), so that they could still improve to 3 FP recovery later, but been ahead of other classes at the start and not been as disruptive to other classes, like the sorcerer and the magus.
Both the sorcerer and the Magus have eaten the focus spell change for breakfast and have nearly broken the ceilings of what casters can do by exploiting focus spells in their own way.
The magus, specifically starlit span, broke it by choosing focus spells where range and being single target were limits on the strength of those focus spells (they were worse than single target close range spell options), but the class didn’t care about with of those limits and getting to cast 3 focus spell per encounter made top slots less of a needed thing for being powerful.
The sorcerer on the other hand had really good one action focus spells and getting to use those 3 times per encounter makes things like imperial sorcerer and elemental sorcerer much more powerful than they were or would be with the old limits of focus spells. I think is where a lot of frustration with the wizard has come from, especially with some players feeling like the class is more like a 3.5 slots per rank caster instead of a 4 spell slot caster, with it harder to find options that provided focus spells to help accentuate that 4 slot casting.
Overall, I think there is still a strong case to be made for rapid top rank slot spell casting to be the top of the food chain as far as winning difficult encounters quickly and decisively, but those options have been narrowed down and surrounded by a lot of other options that don’t do it as effectively. Instead, a second style of “resourceless” casting has become a lot more feasible, however it comes with a set of limitations of playstyle.
Most of these new classes are garbage without 20 to 30 minutes of rest time between encounters. They are a little less dependent on encounters being short than classes like the magus and the poor pathetic psychic, with more tricks to deal with longer encounters, but if encounters start collapsing on each other or even worse, come in 1-5 minute waves. It seems like a lot of groups will now blame the GM for this kind of encounter pacing any time it shows up, rather than having any kind of back up plan like healing potions and scrolls.
Overall, I am not sure what could be done at this point. Adding the old refocus rule back in place wouldn’t be too hard, but would require a lot of errata to give all the casting classes back a well balanced refocusing progression. Animist and Necromancer should get the 2 back right away (or very early) although that would still make them tiers ahead of the psychic. The psychic would at least get a boost back against other casters, especially the magus and the sorcerer who are all kinda competing for the blaster role.
It would also help lower the power level increase that free archetype adds to the remastered game and return it more to being a horizontal game changer than a vertical one, and maybe help make it less immediately desirable to many players than Morse structured archetype rules options, like mythic.
What do other folks think?
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I think this is something the GM can discourage by making it so you can't always spend 20-30 minutes hanging out between fights.
Like in a sequence where the party is "trying to rescue a captive from a fortified manor house" if you fight the guards in the Hall the ones in the conservatory won't wait patiently for you to catch your breath, and if you take 6 hours to get to the captive, they may have been secreted elsewhere.
I think the thing that I don't like about the old refocus is that the "upgrade to refocus" feats felt really bad to take instead of something more directly useful. A middle path I think I would consider is changing focus to the old way (where you can't do it back to back) but making the amounts of focus points you regain scale with your level (and just remove the feats.) If a class needs a steady supply of focus points to function, you build this into the class (like how the Necromancer has a bunch of options for this).
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I think at this point we might be just riding it out until 3e where we get a big reset and probably a huge change to how casting works across the board. I think the issue stems from the fact a lot of players don't like daily resources. It feels like something you have to hoard until the perfect moment, and players I felt were already trying to find ways to lean on focus spells. Changing back would be wildly unpopular, and what to do in the future has me completely stumped
I think that is what I would do too, but definitely let classes that are more focus spell dependent have slightly early increases than others.
Although, if it was mostly limited to one by default, I think the Necromancer class presents a great idea in having focus point recharging once per encounter mode to be possible, and tied to activities that really make sense for that specific class.
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No interest in this. I allow all focus points to return per 10 minute rest. I think throttling focus point regeneration is pointless.
PF2 should make the psychic abilities competitive, not use a low impact negative to make the class seem decent. In my group, the psychic was bad before and after the focus point change because the base psychic abilities are bad. Psychic should be built like the oracle with a separate resource pool for psychic amps.
PF2 is action throttled. There is no need for things like time limits on focus point regeneration to balance classes. You could give the psychic 10 action points a fight, still won't outperform other classes because it's base abilities aren't competitive.
Well built martials physical strikes outperform psychic ability damage with rare exception for nothing. Skills are as good as some of their non-damaging abilities. Their feats are still awful and don't outperform other classes with better feats.
As far as the sorcerer goes, focus point change like this wouldn't alter them at all. It would just make them the even stronger caster because they have more on demand versatile spell slots than any other class in the game.
Sorcs were the strongest caster before the remaster with the old focus point rule and they are the strongest caster now. It's just wasting time and making unnecessary limitations for something irrelevant.
That's why I changed the focus point rule prior to the remaster. Most focus point abilities are not good enough to compete with spells or martial action abilities. It creates this meaningless time sink that never much came up other than making people want to use focus points less than they already did. This just became worse as the levels rose when people forgot they even had focus points.
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The unfortunate thing, to me, is that these classes could have easily had the same kind of 2 FP recovery system as the psychic (for whom the class was destroyed by this focus spells per encounter limit change), so that they could still improve to 3 FP recovery late...
Although, if it was mostly limited to one by default...
Necromancer does in fact recover 2 focus points per refocus from level 1. A tid-bit of information I'm seeing underdiscussed in the pre-season before the book has come out. The wording is: "If you have a thrall when you begin Refocusing, you can destroy it to regain 2 Focus Points when you Refocus."
On top of the puppeteer necromancer getting a FA recover a focus point 1/day for free at level 1 makes it a much more resilient focus caster in periods of back-to-back fights.If you already understood this then please excuse me. I find your analysis very intriguing and I have to agree that the refocus economy changes were a massive shift in caster power.
PF2 is action throttled. There is no need for things like time limits on focus point regeneration to balance classes. You could give the psychic 10 action points a fight, still won't outperform other classes because it's base abilities aren't competitive.
Gotta be a smart ass here and say that being able to cast 10 void warps in a row for 10d4 damage at level 1 would outpace everyone's damage
If you meant focus points, idk, maybe. Someone would actually have to do the math on that. But 10 focus points a combat would absolutely change things
Deriven, I am not sure how it is a waste of time. Originally you could only recover one FP after any encounter so there was no point in spending more than 10 mins refocusing ever.
The number one thing I don’t like about “any class can recover 1 FP per 10 minutes up to their maximum FP total isn’t really that it makes parties want to rest for 30 mins after every encounter, it is that the “encounter power” feature of focus spells is this hidden meta game where the ceiling is reachable essentially by level 4 to 6 for nearly everyone. It makes low level focus spells much more powerful to gain access to, and nearly obliterates the point of in-class high rank focus spells, as players have rushed out to get focus points elsewhere.
Like just as a hypothetical example, what if every character had 1 focus point at level and there was a free focus spell every class got that was a one action self heal only for 6 points per rank. Now characters might want specific focus spells for doing important class stuff, or to have powerful out of combat utility options, or a special cool attack to do instead of self healing, but archetype diving for extra focus points no longer just made your character stronger than everyone else (as long as the whole party is willing to rest for 20 or 30 minutes every encounter. Default, that would go up to 2 at level 12 and 3 at 18. I would be fine with either the old way of letting new focus spells also giving an additional fiocus point that wouldn’t recharge with refocusing until you had the better refocusing abilities by default at 12 and 18, but I think it might be easier and simpler to just have everyone only have as many focus points as they can recharge, since that was confusing to some players before the remaster. Classes like Necromancer, animist and psychic would break these norms by starting with 2 and advancing to 3 earlier, and that would be a very big, powerful thing because no one else in the game is getting to use 2 focus spells per encounter before level 12.
This would also bring the sorcerer back down to its preremastered design levels by expecting blood magic to primarily trigger off of casting blood magic slot spells, not spamming blood magic focus spells 3 times every encounter on top of casting the slot spells, and let magi balance be entirely centered around their own class stuff, with the focus spell strikes being a one time per encounter thing.
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In the initial PF2 Core rules there were a couple of "mid-combat" refocus feats (mostly for ancestries) but they were limited to 1/day. This was of dubious value, but it's sort of surprising that we didn't get much in this space until the Necromancer gets a couple of options for mid-combat refocus. I wonder if we couldn't build options like this into more classes.
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At my tables I actually go the other way: everyone starts with 3 Focus Points by default, and you get them back after 10 minutes regardless of what you're doing.
I've never actually ran into the problem Unicore describes of people using their Focus Spells and not slot spells during fights, particularly because at higher levels your top ranks start doing stuff your Focus Spells could only dream of being able to achieve. And as enemy capabilities rise, you want to get those off ASAP.
What I did run into a lot was people taking feats to get focus spells they never used, just because the feat gave them another focus point. The most famous example in my group being Force Fang for Magus. Force Fang isn't even that bad, but players were taking it just to bump up their pool, I never saw it cast even once.
And I never understood the old Refocus throttling prior to the Remaster, either. I mean what is it that makes it ok to cast 3 Focus Spells every fight at 18th level, but not 1st, or 5th, or w/e? As the power of your slots increases you're actually less likely (in my experience) to cast Focus Spells, whereas in the lower levels they're actually very useful for extending a Caster's adventuring day.
The Psychic absolutely needs a rework in light of both the Remaster focus changes and the new Magus and Summoner reworks, but we shouldn't be bringing other classes down, we'd be much better off buffing the poor Psychic.
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I agree with Firelion. To me, this isn't a discussion that makes much sense nowadays. And sorry, Unicore, but your arguments claiming the new rule hurts the Psychic and Magus don't really hold water for me; the Psychic's problem was never that focus points are easier to recover now, but rather that the classes themselves fall short overall.
Honestly, the Free Archetype issue isn't even a concern for the designers, since it’s a variant rule. If groups use it freely for any class, some degree of power-gaming is to be expected; if not, you simply don't use Free Archetype, meaning the "race" for focus spells costs class feats as usual.
As for the Animist and Necromancer, they were designed for the current system. If the old rule had remained, their design—and consequently the playtest experience and final outcome—would have been different.
The "meta" you mention—using focus points to save spell slots—already existed with the Sorcerer in the legacy version; people would pick a Draconic or Elemental Sorcerer and spam *Dragon Breath* or *Elemental Blast*. It was never the best DPR, but for players wary of using daily-limit resources, it was the go-to option, even knowing it was weaker. What’s changed now is that you no longer need a level 12 feat to recover 2 points between combats, so those who like saving slots feel much more secure doing so. Meanwhile, those who don't mind spending slots cast *Elemental Toss* or use focus spells for utility.
The trend of the Magus taking a focus spell archetype—especially the Psychic one—was also huge before the Remaster, and the change followed the same pattern I described above. Previously, Magi could only use them once per combat until reaching level 12, when they’d pick up the feat that increased the limit to two. Afterward, they simply had to rest for 30 minutes instead of 10 and focus on acquiring another Conflux Spell. The issue was always the need to chase down these recoverable resources between fights; Conflux Spells simply weren't worth it, and for many players, four spell slots felt like far too few.
As for the Wizard's frustration, it never stemmed from Sorcerers having good 1-action focus spells. Instead, the problem was that Wizards had to take an archetype to get Sorcerer Potency—without gaining bloodline benefits or signature spells—plus one slot had to be used for a school spell or a repeat of a previously cast spell, and—let's face it—Wizard focus spells were garbage!
Returning to the Psychic: it isn't bad because classes now recover focus points up to their limit over time. It's bad because Paizo botched the remaster, and the Necro subclass was definitive proof of that.
Finally, if focus points reverted to the old system, what would "power players"—who dislike daily limits and use Free Archetype (FA) to gain focus spell benefits—do? They’d simply switch to Kineticist Impulses and Runes, which don't even have a three-point cap. It would essentially be swapping *Muscle Barrier* for *Timber Sentinel*. Sorcerer players who prefer the reliability of focus spells would likely move to Kineticist or Runesmith. Magus players would simply switch to Runesmith and spam *Engraving Strikes*—applying *Trace* to *Ranshu*, *Esvadir*, or *Atryl*—and use their *Invocation* every round. In short, you’d just be narrowing options for these players without actually improving the situation for anyone.
What needs to happen is for Paizo to properly fix the Psychic. In my opinion, the Magus has already gained a benefit that competes well with offensive focus-spell archetypes—simply by having more spell slots. Now, the class can truly use its best slots for Spellstrike without being forced to take an archetype; at the same time, if a player *does* want to take an archetype at the cost of two feats, they can save their slots for other spells.
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I feel the original post here is severely blinkered by the underlying assumption that spells, particularly top-rank spells, are meant purely for combat. This is generally true for focus spells now, which are almost always made to be used in encounters, but spells at large are also meant to be used in exploration and other out-of-combat scenarios, including high-rank spells. Focus spells may not be the top grade of power you can output on your turn, but even the two-action ones you get can still be good enough to fill a turn, and give the opportunity to use spell slots on other things. This is an especially large part of the Druid's design, where having an order spell like tempest surge means you can blast capably at low level and use your spell slots to instead do things your focus spell doesn't cover. Thus, the assumption in my experience has not been that the caster will be dedicating their top-rank spells purely to combat, at least not at the levels where they have decent focus spells on the side.
I can, however, agree that the changes to Focus Point recovery have incurred a few knock-on effects: in particular, there's this race to max out one's focus pool that make focus spell feats one of those must-have power-ups that 2e generally tries to avoid. This kind of existed before the remaster, but is exacerbated by the ability to fully recover one's focus pool given enough time. Ideally, I'd like everyone to just have 3 Focus Points and a full replenish on Refocus so that every table is operating on the same standard, but I think at this point this would be powering up casters far more than would be healthy.
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As much as I enjoy my silly little kobold psychic, yeah, the class deserves a buff. I think the wizard could use some extra snort, too. Those two stick out to me as noticeably behind the curve.
Re: Focus points, while focus spells certainly aren't consistently balanced, they do (for the most part) occupy that nice middle ground between a max rank slot and a cantrip: impactful without being encounter-defining. I think people who over-rely on focus spells are nerfing themselves; the top slot trigger needs to be pulled every once in a while in order to break through tough encounters. If someone is managing to get by on focus points alone, then it's likely a sign that their campaign's not especially difficult: they don't feel pressured to use their slots, and they're getting to rest and heal up between every encounter.
I'm currently playing Ruby Phoenix with a small party under a GM who likes to crank up encounter difficulty. We just ran a gauntlet that went boss fight > boss fight > "easy" fight > "easy" fight > chase > boss fight with no breaks. Rationing my resources as a druid was a tough, but satisfying challenge. So, uh... I think it's less of a game design issue and more of a, uh... skill issue, Unicore. You can place a little blame on the game itself for enabling ineffective play patterns, but you can only do so much to protect players from themselves.
the poor pathetic psychic
Be NICE to him!!!
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I think another thing is that how much see a problem in how low level characters can get 3 focus points and spend them every combat, is also sort of related to "how much you focus on low level play."
Like it's obvious that Deriven Firelion doesn't think that "spend 3 focus points per combat every time" is an issue since, as I understand it, the group he plays in mostly does higher level adventures and this the expectation for high level characters (you could have, after all, taken the refocus feat(s).)
If you're someone who primarily plays PFS, where the levels rarely get into the double digits, the remaster was a big change and maybe it's not one you would have liked. So I guess my question is "is it that low level characters with focus spells are getting too much bang for their buck" or "is it that waiting around for a half-hour after every fight is weird and unnatural."
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I agree with the facts presented. The meta shift regarding focus points is real.
I don't agree that this meta shift is a bad thing for the game overall.
Spell slot attrition is one of the few cases of attrition in the system. The other is n/day abilities like Battle Medicine or Halfling Luck. Practically nothing else in the game suffers attrition over the course of an adventuring day. Not even HP.
Attrition is a bad way of handling encounter challenge and providing a sense of actual threat to adventuring. That is a vestige of D&D3.5/PF1 game design - where everything suffered attrition ... which in turn developed the meta of the 15 minute adventuring day.
I don't think the fix for this meta change is to revert the way that focus points work. I, for one, don't want to go back to an encounter balance meta centered around daily attrition. Especially not when only some of the classes are affected by it.
The problem is that there are still classes that are relying exclusively on their spell slots for their casting power. Wizard, most notably. Vancian casting catches a lot of shade. Justifiably so.
So I think that the better fix would be to add to the focus point casting for the classes that are weak at it. For example, Wizard needs better schools printed that have on-par focus spells so that they aren't relegated to mediocre or poor choices for focus spells to use - or pressured into archetypes to get better ones.
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We just ran a gauntlet that went boss fight > boss fight > "easy" fight > "easy" fight > chase > boss fight with no breaks. Rationing my resources as a druid was a tough, but satisfying challenge.
Unless you're quite high level that gauntlet is going to just about destroy the psychic. They have pretty much no non spell mechanism to fall back on.
But if you're a wild shaping druid (especially at the lower levels of Ruby Phoenix) you have a viable back up plan for 3 encounters. Wild shape into a martial and conserve your spells for the other encounters.
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Once-per-day abilities aren't much fun, and focus points beyond the first were effectively once-per-day abilities. The feats to push it past that were unexciting and very late-level for what you got from them. A sorcerer that wanted to use three focus points in their fights was dropping 4 out of 10 feats on that and waiting until 18th. It was a frustratingly nuanced limitation that many GMs ignored and not something that felt worth being level 12 and level 18 to move past.
Casters not needing to wait four extra levels for a new spell slot to rotate out of "must be dedicated to combat" status is why I'm willing to consider actually playing them post-remaster. With something like Necromancer, I can let focus spells, regular cantrips, and the two class cantrips keep me useful and entertained in most combats, and then spend my spells on fun things like illusions, thematic-but-weaker combat options like "attacking enemies with lots of crows", or heist shenanigans like setting up and maintaining a pair of magic mailboxes.
Being annoyed by overly-repetitive Magus meta builds is something I'm used to from PF1. I haven't actually had a "Starlit Span focus spam" at the table, unlike the two or three metamagic discount Shocking Grasp clones I ran into last edition.
This is a very "it's not a problem for me" kinda post, but I do think the focus rules were changed for some good reasons.
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Unless you're quite high level that gauntlet is going to just about destroy the psychic. They have pretty much no non spell mechanism to fall back on.
But if you're a wild shaping druid (especially at the lower levels of Ruby Phoenix) you have a viable back up plan for 3 encounters. Wild shape into a martial and conserve your spells for the other encounters.
No wildshape, just spells, a shield, and some medicine skill investment. I intentionally avoid polymorph stuff because the rules confuse me. We were all below half health and absolutely tapped on resources by the end of it.
But yeah, even though this was level... 17? 18? I can definitely see how a psychic would've been burnt out even then. They'd basically have to develop a really good intuition for how difficult a fight's going to be at a glance. Fight too conservatively, and you either grind down the rest of the party as they pick up your slack, or you get overwhelmed and die. Fight too aggressively, and the next encounter in line makes you regret it. And then you have to correctly predict the pace of each individual fight so you don't Unleash too early or too late. That kind of perfect resource management is unfair to expect of any player. My little dude needs a buff.
While I do think that it is a fairly objective position to say “there are bigger issues raised by the remaster change to focus point recovery than was initially considered in the change’s adoption” I readily admit that my opinion that it was better before is just my opinion.
Responding haphazardly to a lot of people at once:
1. I think focus spells are actually easier to hold for both combat spells and utility spells at the same time than slot spells. They are a lot like top spontaneous spell slots that you get from a shady spell slot dealer instead of an official spell list. There are some real gems in there but a lot of the options are lesser quality versions of their “real spell slot” alternative. If you already have a good combat action spell slot, like elemental toss, then you can go out and pick up out of combat utility options with your second and third focus point choices, because using your focus spells out of combat is usually even easier to recharge from than between intense encounters. You aren’t even really limited by a spells known limit, you just stop getting more focus points at 3.
Spontaneous casters have a harder time putting all but the most generic or broad utility spells in their spells known list because most get very few few free choices for those slots. Prepared casters fare significantly better with learning and memorizing utility spells, but the thing is both are better off getting scrolls of the utility spells they want to be able to cast just occasionally. Some spell lists, like the divine or primal for prepared casters, do provide pretty decent “let’s come back to this task tomorrow” options for sure. One of the reasons I really like spell substitution wizards is that they buy the scrolls, learn the spells, use the scrolls, then switch in the exact right utility spell when it is called for. You can usually walk around with mostly combat spells memorized that way but still do all the utility stuff with 10 to 30 mins of prep time instead of a whole day. I strongly value the overall diversity of options you can use spell slots for.
2. The main reason I don’t like everyone starting at 3 is that makes for no growth with focus spells at all. Why even have 3 of them at that point? With a progressive increase in focus spells you can recover, 3 to 4 works out for a decent gap between growth, but just 3 up front feels very arbitrary and lacking any sense of development around these spells, especially for little one-trick pony options, like a magus poaching an attack roll focus spells.
3. I strongly agree that the high level optimization game is still all about spell slots over the weaker two action combat focus spells for the vast majority of classes. Many players just don’t like making the kind of character choices like investing heavily in expensive scrolls to make the limit of spell slots per day into an illusion holding your character back, but try playing a 15th level caster throwing down 2 or 3 chain lightnings or mass slow, or max rank calm spells per encounter in 3 to 4 encounters and have anyone say that your caster is weaker than a martial.
That said, the design of the sorcerer in particular egregiously exploits the reality that higher rank spell slots are almost always better than focus spells AND one action focus spells can really supliment a caster’s play style by adding in a lot of powerful blood magic options they can use to double the output of their blood magic effects with. No other caster class got nearly the same mammoth boost from the FP recovery change than the sorcerer, although the bard, especially Maestro bard is pretty into it too with all their 1 action Focus Spells. The monk is not a caster, but they really like being able spam one action focus spells in combat too. And then there is the nightmare of what happened to the magus exploit of focus spells that was much less of a deal before.
4.someone brought up preremaster dragon sorcerers “spamming breath weapon” instead of casting spells from spell slots, but that is not what I saw. It was level 12 before you were casting that focus spell more than once per encounter in most encounters per day, so most of the time it was a waste unless you really started running out of spell slots, which doesn’t really happen by the time you get the second tier of sorcerer focus spells. Overwhelmingly, the “focus point maxxing” character exploit is only making stronger characters stronger at low levels and in places where classes whole thing is focus spells and most of those could/should have exceptions for using their own class focus spells.
PF2 is action throttled. There is no need for things like time limits on focus point regeneration to balance classes. You could give the psychic 10 action points a fight, still won't outperform other classes because it's base abilities aren't competitive.Gotta be a smart ass here and say that being able to cast 10 void warps in a row for 10d4 damage at level 1 would outpace everyone's damage
If you meant focus points, idk, maybe. Someone would actually have to do the math on that. But 10 focus points a combat would absolutely change things
I meant focus points. 10 focus points would not alter the fight or rarely.
Fights are 4 to 6 rounds with a group of well built characters trying to kill a group of targets. Each round is action throttled so you can do one two action ability a round.
The enemies generally have too few hit points to last past 4 to 6 rounds, sometimes even less when fighting groups of mooks at higher level.
If you have 10 focus points, do those focus point abilities do better than the spells or other actions you can use? That is a question you ask every round. Is this better than what I can do with another resource?
For martials the answer is usually no. I do not have any focus point abilities better than smashing them with my weapon. Do I have any spells better than my focus point abilities? Answer usually yes in the first round, then maybe in later rounds. By past round one, you've mostly won the fight. So casters have to drop the hammer hard to open a fight before the martials eat the hit points.
Focus point abilities also greatly differ in power. That's why optimizers spend so much time picking the best focus point abilities because they are rarely as good as another option.
I'm not going to plan an encounter and run it, if you feel like the exercise run an encounter with a well built party and give the focus point classes 10 focus points. See if it makes much of a difference and when that difference occurs. I've ran and played in a lot of PF2 combats and my players often forget they even have focus points, especially as they get to higher levels.
Deriven, I am not sure how it is a waste of time. Originally you could only recover one FP after any encounter so there was no point in spending more than 10 mins refocusing ever.
The number one thing I don’t like about “any class can recover 1 FP per 10 minutes up to their maximum FP total isn’t really that it makes parties want to rest for 30 mins after every encounter, it is that the “encounter power” feature of focus spells is this hidden meta game where the ceiling is reachable essentially by level 4 to 6 for nearly everyone. It makes low level focus spells much more powerful to gain access to, and nearly obliterates the point of in-class high rank focus spells, as players have rushed out to get focus points elsewhere.
Like just as a hypothetical example, what if every character had 1 focus point at level and there was a free focus spell every class got that was a one action self heal only for 6 points per rank. Now characters might want specific focus spells for doing important class stuff, or to have powerful out of combat utility options, or a special cool attack to do instead of self healing, but archetype diving for extra focus points no longer just made your character stronger than everyone else (as long as the whole party is willing to rest for 20 or 30 minutes every encounter. Default, that would go up to 2 at level 12 and 3 at 18. I would be fine with either the old way of letting new focus spells also giving an additional fiocus point that wouldn’t recharge with refocusing until you had the better refocusing abilities by default at 12 and 18, but I think it might be easier and simpler to just have everyone only have as many focus points as they can recharge, since that was confusing to some players before the remaster. Classes like Necromancer, animist and psychic would break these norms by starting with 2 and advancing to 3 earlier, and that would be a very big, powerful thing because no one else in the game is getting to use 2 focus spells per encounter before level 12.
This would...
I've tried to explain this many times. Understand that PF2 is action throttled. The reason PF2's balance can't and hasn't been broken by anything other than Imaginary Weapon and Starlit Span is because no matter how many resources you have, it will not change the power you have to do exert within the actions given. Each fight is built around the characters starting with full hit points, focus points, and abilities other than spell slots. Even casters are generally built to expend one or two powerful spells, then attack with cantrips or focus point abilities. This is how the game is built.
A level 20 exploit with the sorcerer doesn't change this. The better way to fix that exploit is fix how Extend Blood Magic works.
PF2 is a very balanced game that has multiple levels of balance which prevents breaking the game with focus points. The tight math, the action throttling, the short duration fights all form a balance point that isn't broken by having your focus points back faster.
That's why most classes including the sorcerer could forget they even have focus points and still operate at near maximum efficiency.
The only class that drops off the map and isn't even very good when they have focus points is the psychic. Even for the animist the focus points are only a part of the class as vessel spells are a very mixed bag and there is only one practice that makes the class good. And the animist has to exploit Channeler's Stance just to somewhat compete with the sorcerer for blasting by adding Channeler's stance to persistent damage for Earth's Bile or they drop off big in blasting as well.
So I'm not seeing the problem you are illustrating in my games. I want my players to use focus points. My experience differs from yours in that they forget they even have them if they don't get them back easily.
As I explained in the other thread, it's often better for a caster to build up a weapon which my group does and use that as a one action option with a save spell which is often better than many one action focus point abilities at longer range.
It's just not a problem in my groups. I made the switch to full focus point regeneration before the remaster just to try to get my players to use more focus point abilities. I don't want to go back to a paradigm that will make them forget about them more often than they already do.
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I've been saying for a long time that it's not that big a deal if everyone starts with 3 focus points, and it would make everything easier. Focus powers are made to be the well your class fantasy keeps going back to. They're not supposed to be *so* strong that it's a problem if you get 3 in most fights, because lots of casters can do just that pretty quickly in their careers.
Refilling to full with 30 minutes has been purely a benefit. People get to use their cool toys more reliably, and spell slots have less pressure on them so you get more fun choices.
If you want to shake it up, give em less time between combats. It's not as scary as you have been lead to believe.
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I readily admit that my opinion that it was better before is just my opinion.
I will also readily admit that my opinion that it is better after is also just my opinion.
And again, I am mostly looking at these same undisputed facts and coming to a different conclusion about them.
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try playing a 15th level caster throwing down 2 or 3 chain lightnings or mass slow, or max rank calm spells per encounter in 3 to 4 encounters and have anyone say that your caster is weaker than a martial.
I think focus spells are actually easier to hold for both combat spells and utility spells at the same time than slot spells. They are a lot like top spontaneous spell slots that you get from a shady spell slot dealer instead of an official spell list. There are some real gems in there but a lot of the options are lesser quality versions of their “real spell slot” alternative.
I'm looking at this and thinking - that's exactly the point. Max rank spell slot spells are designed to be more powerful than what martials can put out indefinitely. That is why they are a finite and limited resource.
The purpose and intent of focus spells is to be something that casters can use as their bread and butter - whether that is for combat damage, buffs/debuffs, or utility. The focus spells that deal damage aren't supposed to be as powerful as max rank spell slot spells - so feeling like they are low quality knock-offs of spell slot spells ... is the design working as intended.
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If you already have a good combat action spell slot, like elemental toss, then you can go out and pick up out of combat utility options with your second and third focus point choices, because using your focus spells out of combat is usually even easier to recharge from than between intense encounters. You aren’t even really limited by a spells known limit, you just stop getting more focus points at 3.
Again, this feels like the design working as intended.
How does one Wizard distinguish itself from a different Wizard? Choice of subclass works. But only if there isn't one or two clear mechanical winners for optimization - otherwise the majority of Wizards will pick those top picks and ignore the rest. Choice of spells in spellbook also works - but as you also mentioned, most casters end up putting the same handful of general purpose spells into their list and relying on scrolls to fill in the gaps.
And the same can be said of other caster classes too. Especially when we are looking at a particular subclass. What distinguishes between one Elemental(fire) Sorcerer and a different Elemental(fire) Sorcerer? Or does that end up being the same character mechanically and just different name and backstory?
Remember that focus spells aren't gotten cheaply. Those cost feats for each and every one of them.
How much distinction could we have between Wizards if they had a reasonably large set of focus spells that they had to pick between? How about an Elemental(fire) Sorcerer?
In my mind, the game would be in a better state if there was a book published that gave a pile of alternative Focus Spell options to all of the existing classes. Give some real choice there for players to tailor their characters with.
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The magus, specifically starlit span, broke it by choosing focus spells where range and being single target were limits on the strength of those focus spells (they were worse than single target close range spell options), but the class didn’t care about with of those limits and getting to cast 3 focus spell per encounter made top slots less of a needed thing for being powerful.
And then there is the nightmare of what happened to the magus exploit of focus spells that was much less of a deal before.
This keeps coming up. If the balance problem pain is with a particular class, then the fix should be limited to that particular class. Don't fix the one class by nerfing the entire mechanic for all classes.
Yes, it is strange that Magus doesn't get any focus spells in-class that work with Spellstrike. That makes it feel like Spellstrike isn't supposed to work with focus spells - or rather that the class balance wasn't considering focus spells when looking at the Spellstrike mechanics.
The class also has a very limited number of spell slots. So for most of a full adventuring day (barring having the rest of the party buy in to a 15 minute adventuring day again), they are relegated to Spellstrike with Cantrips if not for focus spells.
So it does feel very much like the game devs need to pick a lane. Is Magus supposed to be using Spellstrike with focus spells or not?
If they are intended to be using Spellstrike with focus spells so that they can do it repeatedly for every battle all day - then they should have some focus spell options in-class to do that with.
And if they are not intended to be using Spellstrike with focus spells and are supposed to be using Cantrips for that - then change Spellstrike to not work with focus spells.
Because yes, currently the difference between a non-multiclass Magus using Spellstrike with only spell slot spells and Cantrips, and a Magus picking up a Spellstrike compatible focus spell to throw out three times every fight all day is a very big difference in power level.
But again, that is something that needs to be fixed with Magus - not by taking focus spells away from all of the other classes.
If you already have a good combat action spell slot, like elemental toss, then you can go out and pick up out of combat utility options with your second and third focus point choices, because using your focus spells out of combat is usually even easier to recharge from than between intense encounters.
I'm curious: which focus spells are you regularly picking for out-of-combat use? There are some out there that are for sure useful out of combat, but I don't think they're that common or prominent.
The main reason I don’t like everyone starting at 3 is that makes for no growth with focus spells at all. Why even have 3 of them at that point?
Indeed, why have 3 of them if you're only picking them for the Focus Point? That I think is the issue with focus spell feats as they exist right now: a lot of players don't care about the spell itself, they just want to be able to cast another spell they already have more often in an encounter, and the focus spell that contributes that additional Focus Point is just a means to an end. I don't think that makes for terribly interesting character-building, and as WatersLethe points out, many casters can max out to 3 Focus Points pretty quickly, as early as level 2 if you're a Witch.
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It feels like the main issue here is just that 10m blocks makes for a really awkward timescale... but that's not really new anyways. Premaster people were having this same conversation about medicine checks and lay on hands and normal refocusing.
The actual mechanical effect itself (more staying power in combats) has been extremely beneficial to most circumstances, and makes longer combats especially much less punishing for spellcasters.
The "glory days" you describe of casters falling apart in long combats and having overbearing pressure to make specific purchasing decisions just to compensate for failures in their features was, frankly, trash. The game is much better with a reduced pressure on that.
The characters who've generally been hurt by this change also usually suffering from a secondary problem. Characters with bad focus spells feel worse in a game where focus spells are more accessible, but... like the problem there is the class having terrible options. Obviously that's not going to be great.
It seems like a lot of groups will now blame the GM for this kind of encounter pacing any time it shows up
I mean yeah, if a GM starts running their game in such a way as that certain classes get much worse and unfun to play, people aren't going to be super happy about it. Especially if there's no forewarning about it.
Players might also get frustrated if they bring a barbarian to a table only for the GM to unexpectedly run a game with very few combats or physical challenges.
Or a wizard to a campaign that suddenly spends a huge amount of time in a dead magic zone.
Or an investigator to a campaign they thought would have intrigue but ends up consisting of lots of unconnected encounters and straight forward dungeon crawling.
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I only know the post-Remaster focus point recovery model and I think it is totally okay. Maybe in some future I will be running into someone optimizing his focus points in a way which breaks the game somewhat (seems very unlikely, though), but this idea of limiting focus point recovery back to old standards seems more like some grousing about how the Psychic now sucks.
Also, it seems Free Archetype is, once again, enabling problematic (for some) mechanics. My decision to not use it in my campaigns seems better and better each time one of those problems come up in discussions.
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Free Archetype seems like an online play thing and not so much used in home games according to data I've seen.
I came back to Pathfinder a few years ago to escape the superhero nature of DND 5e, so the last thing I want to do is add a superhero layer like Free Archetype. The Free Archetype optional rule has always pumped up the power level of PCs much more than the online player population gives it credit for.
I'm glad I don't operate in the meta-verse of PF2e, and have players that don't either. But it sounds like eliminating the OPTIONAL Free Archetype rule solves this faster than anything.
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Free Archetype seems like an online play thing and not so much used in home games according to data I've seen.
I came back to Pathfinder a few years ago to escape the superhero nature of DND 5e, so the last thing I want to do is add a superhero layer like Free Archetype. The Free Archetype optional rule has always pumped up the power level of PCs much more than the online player population gives it credit for.
I'm glad I don't operate in the meta-verse of PF2e, and have players that don't either. But it sounds like eliminating the OPTIONAL Free Archetype rule solves this faster than anything.
How high of level do you get in your games? I ask because I think you're the first person I've heard NOT to describe this game as "the power of anime".
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I agree with the facts presented. The meta shift regarding focus points is real.
I don't agree that this meta shift is a bad thing for the game overall.
Spell slot attrition is one of the few cases of attrition in the system. The other is n/day abilities like Battle Medicine or Halfling Luck. Practically nothing else in the game suffers attrition over the course of an adventuring day. Not even HP.
Attrition is a bad way of handling encounter challenge and providing a sense of actual threat to adventuring. That is a vestige of D&D3.5/PF1 game design - where everything suffered attrition ... which in turn developed the meta of the 15 minute adventuring day.
I don't think the fix for this meta change is to revert the way that focus points work. I, for one, don't want to go back to an encounter balance meta centered around daily attrition. Especially not when only some of the classes are affected by it.
The problem is that there are still classes that are relying exclusively on their spell slots for their casting power. Wizard, most notably. Vancian casting catches a lot of shade. Justifiably so.
So I think that the better fix would be to add to the focus point casting for the classes that are weak at it. For example, Wizard needs better schools printed that have on-par focus spells so that they aren't relegated to mediocre or poor choices for focus spells to use - or pressured into archetypes to get better ones.
Perfectly stated. The system, as written, favors balance on a per encounter basis in the vast majority of its mechanics. I enjoy the focus point change bc it lets casters play the same attrition free game that martials get to enjoy. As far as I'm concerned, I hope 3e kills off the last vestiges of 3.X and does away with spell slots
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Honestly, my issue is that slot spells seem to account for such a large amount of the power budget and takes away from other things.
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Focus spells are an attrition based resource, you have a limited number of them and you have to be able to rest for a set amount of time to recover them. Attrition-less casting looks like cantrips and kineticist powers, not focus spells. I have no problem with different kinds of casting existing side by side, and would love to see more takes on true attrition-less casting. I also really like having casters that can dial it up and go all in occasionally in important situations and find playing slotted spell casters to be the most enjoyable play experience. With a couple of exceptions, focus spells-centric casting classes will never reach the top tier of class power level when it comes to having fight ending/encounter dominating options. Someone with the right top ranked slotted spell, and a framework getting the most out of it will always top focus spell casting in those situations. However, there is definitely a market for other classes that can flexibly do a lot of different and fairly effective things with their focus spells, as we see really high satisfaction with the animist and Necromancer classes. Neither one of these focus spell classes really care about the number of focus points other classes can recover because they would still start off recovering 2. The psychic should fit into this space too, but came from the before times, so the ability to recover 2 focus points right off the bat was a unique power increase for them that got erased in the remaster and never got replacement features like the animist and necromancer got.
But the class that really demonstrates how unbalanced the “everyone can recover all focus points” remaster change is really the sorcerer. The highest tier sorcerer builds do not use focus spells to replace slotted spells, they use them to accentuate slotted spells. (One of the reasons why the animist is better than the Necromancer and a pretty high tier casting classes is because its focus spells at least do not compete with slotted spells and it still gets a decent number of spell slots more than the Necromancer, just not a lot of top rank ones).
Not all sorcerer’s are created equal in this regard, and easily the two that most exploit the focus point change are the elemental and imperial bloodline, with the elemental being the most straight forward for being the best blaster in the game (specifically fire and metal elemental bloodlines), so I will look at it specifically.
At level 1 most elemental sorcerers are going to have just one focus point, so their ability to double exploit focus points doesn’t matter, but as soon as they can get 2 and then three focus points, they are not just benefitting by getting an additional one action damaging spell they can use every round through the important first rounds of combat, they are getting one that auto-heightens which is significant because its focus spells sets off blood magic at the top rank possible. This means that getting more focus points is more powerful than any of their possible in class feats until they have maxed that out, because double tapping that bonus damage each round with an elemental toss and a max rank thunder strike (or better spell as you level up) is really powerful. Then you go back later to get anoint ally after or around when you can pick up explosion of power. The way the sorcerer’s blood magic affect stack additional power onto the ability to spam as many focus spells as possible took the refocus change and super charged what they can do with it. It is not every sorcerer build that can really exploit it, but the fact that the sorcerer sacrifices no slot spell casting to get the most out of focus spell casting as well really makes other remaster changes (or lack of changes) to other spell casting classes stand out as being weaker.
Other sorcerer builds eventually get the explosion of power exploit as well and so can catch up with the elemental sorcerer’s exploitation of focus points, but the elemental isn’t can be getting a lot out of this by level 6 and never want to touch their own later focus spells (even if the 2nd one is a good example of having a focus spell that can give you a good out of combat way to exploit your focus points). The sorcerer probably isn’t ever going to be casting their archetype focus spells in combats, unless the advantages of doing so can outweigh the extra juice the sorcerer gets from using their own one action focus spells, so this is where utility focus spells can really shine and archetypes like cleric, champion can be really good. Obviously FA compounds this, but isn’t necessary for pointing it out.
Edit summary: the refocus change went and gave the biggest exploit to the class that got the most boosting from other remaster changes and needed the least amount of power increase in the first place.
The magus is another class that seriously exploits the the focus point recovery change in ways that were clearly not a part of the class’ original design and feel cheap to me, but I think a lot of people feel like that exploit is the only thing making the class playable, where as no one was complaining about the sorcerer before
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"The new refocus rules feel exploitable alongside the remastered Sorcerer" or "Sorcerer should probably get two-action damage focus spells instead of one-action because of blood magic and their bonus damage" is probably a colder and more targeted take than "the remaster refocus rules were a mistake".
For myself, it's just too much of an improvement to the idea of playing a caster in general to consider walking it back overall.
The sorcerer is the obvious red flag to me, but it also completely changed the magus into a class that fully requires archetyping for a lot of players to be willing to play it, and something that never got fixed, it has pretty much broken the psychic’s entire class design, and it misleads players because it has a very big impact on the game at low levels and relatively minor impact at much higher levels as there is really no way to build into the advantages you get from focus spells at lower levels as there is no room for focus spell growth, except occasionally with really weird, completely broken unintentional exploits like the imperial blood line 1 action focus spell that is a spell shape and is worthless to cast except for the fact it can be cast as a free action at 20th level.
The monk is one of the only classes that can get a few real power boosts from picking up higher level focus spells and that is largely because they don’t have spell slots.
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I just don't see a benefit to changing the game back towards stricter daily attrition, when that specifically hurts casters more in a system where casters are already reeled in to be in line with their martial contemporaries......relative to other systems of course. If the argument is "it makes 2 or 3 classes subject to cheese" I firmly don't believe the answer is "make the game worse for every caster". That's like sawing off your leg to medicate a scratch
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Another point is that I think Paizo's designers are moving away from per-day resource limits.
We’ve seen this trend since the Kineticist, the remaster’s changes to focus point rules, and the Animist—where focus spells are a defining class mechanic—leading up to the Necromancer and Runesmith. The general impression is that they are gradually stepping away from mechanics based on daily resource attrition.
And my sense is that this has been very well received by most players (obviously, I don't have hard statistics; this is based on the general impressions of people I interact with). Even *Magic+*—a third-party supplement for PF2e—was warmly received by the community precisely because it offered a well-tested option for playing spellcasters without worrying so much about resource attrition.
From this perspective, Paizo reverting to the old focus spell rules would seem counterintuitive.
I even have a theory that newer TTRPG players—influenced by video games where resource management exists but recovery is easy (via automatic post-combat healing or cooldowns)—are more comfortable with these types of mechanics than with the long-term micromanagement required by daily resources. I believe Paizo's designers have noticed this as well.
I feel like it wasn't really a major power difference, it was useful and it changes the way players interact with encounters, and it incentivizes picking up focus spells more rapidly. But ultimately most tables are doing short adventuring days (1-4 overwhelmingly as per reddit polls with large samples, and I can't imagine online spaces are less hardcore than the rest of the pf2e playing population) and real spell slots / scrolls are dramatically more powerful.
Casters did get a buff from one action focus options being more spammable, but mainly at low levels given how focus points worked before.
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R.E everyone in the thread grousing about magus and focus spells for the 10 millionth time, I’ve done the damage calcs on this and fighter wins handily. And that’s under the ideal whiteroom conditions where magus gets to spellstrike every single round, real non-whiterooms are not so kind to the easily disrupted magus action economy.
Go complain about fighter instead please.
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Another point is that I think Paizo's designers are moving away from per-day resource limits.
We’ve seen this trend since the Kineticist, the remaster’s changes to focus point rules, and the Animist—where focus spells are a defining class mechanic—leading up to the Necromancer and Runesmith. The general impression is that they are gradually stepping away from mechanics based on daily resource attrition.
And my sense is that this has been very well received by most players (obviously, I don't have hard statistics; this is based on the general impressions of people I interact with). Even *Magic+*—a third-party supplement for PF2e—was warmly received by the community precisely because it offered a well-tested option for playing spellcasters without worrying so much about resource attrition.
From this perspective, Paizo reverting to the old focus spell rules would seem counterintuitive.
I even have a theory that newer TTRPG players—influenced by video games where resource management exists but recovery is easy (via automatic post-combat healing or cooldowns)—are more comfortable with these types of mechanics than with the long-term micromanagement required by daily resources. I believe Paizo's designers have noticed this as well.
The class which convinced me of 2E, after years of being very resistant to it, was the Kineticist, because I had never seen which was so elegantly constructed around actions as its main resource. Hence I have also become convinced that daily spell slot resource management is kind of a thing which better belongs in the past rather than the present.
R.E everyone in the thread grousing about magus and focus spells for the 10 millionth time, I’ve done the damage calcs on this and fighter wins handily. And that’s under the ideal whiteroom conditions where magus gets to spellstrike every single round, real non-whiterooms are not so kind to the easily disrupted magus action economy.
Go complain about fighter instead please.
I don’t think magus focus spell spell striking is too powerful a thing by itself. I think that a lack of good damage spell attack roll slot spells, and a class design that pushes players outside of their class make it clear that the magus class isn’t doing what it is supposed to be doing. I think, given the remaster changes to the game, the original playtest magus is really just a better design, with maybe letting cantrip spell attack roll spells work with the one roll for spell attack roll and weapon strike.
The focus point recovery change just made it super clear that “the right way” to play a magus is against its class design. Like the class should not be getting evaluated on the assumption that every magus is going out of class to get access to focus spells, and it is a bad sign that automatically recharging spell strike and doing something else doesn’t feel better than blasting with out of class focus spells for the vast majority of players. I just don’t see why having magi use focus spells for spell striking would be better than just having spell strike do its own kineticist like infinitely repeatable options that could be picked up as feats.
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R.E everyone in the thread grousing about magus and focus spells for the 10 millionth time, I’ve done the damage calcs on this and fighter wins handily. And that’s under the ideal whiteroom conditions where magus gets to spellstrike every single round, real non-whiterooms are not so kind to the easily disrupted magus action economy.
Go complain about fighter instead please.
I don’t think magus focus spell spell striking is too powerful a thing by itself. I think that a lack of good damage spell attack roll slot spells, and a class design that pushes players outside of their class make it clear that the magus class isn’t doing what it is supposed to be doing. I think, given the remaster changes to the game, the original playtest magus is really just a better design, with maybe letting cantrip spell attack roll spells work with the one roll for spell attack roll and weapon strike.
The focus point recovery change just made it super clear that “the right way” to play a magus is against its class design. Like the class should not be getting evaluated on the assumption that every magus is going out of class to get access to focus spells, and it is a bad sign that automatically recharging spell strike and doing something else doesn’t feel better than blasting with out of class focus spells for the vast majority of players. I just don’t see why having magi use focus spells for spell striking would be better than just having spell strike do its own kineticist like infinitely repeatable options that could be picked up as feats.
I think the focus spell magus thing isn't really the 'right way' to play a Magus, I think people just find it intuitively comfy because there's a fear of wasting spell slots on whiffed spellstrikes and the imaginary weapon variant of it performed pretty well. But its still objectively higher performance to use Slotted Spells and Striker Scroll for spellstrike, and conflux spells (especially Force Fang) for recharge. This is even more the case for the remastered Magus, where you have more spell slots to fall back on overall.
The class which convinced me of 2E, after years of being very resistant to it, was the Kineticist, because I had never seen which was so elegantly constructed around actions as its main resource. Hence I have also become convinced that daily spell slot resource management is kind of a thing which better belongs in the past rather than the present.Another point is that I think Paizo's designers are moving away from per-day resource limits.
We’ve seen this trend since the Kineticist, the remaster’s changes to focus point rules, and the Animist—where focus spells are a defining class mechanic—leading up to the Necromancer and Runesmith. The general impression is that they are gradually stepping away from mechanics based on daily resource attrition.
And my sense is that this has been very well received by most players (obviously, I don't have hard statistics; this is based on the general impressions of people I interact with). Even *Magic+*—a third-party supplement for PF2e—was warmly received by the community precisely because it offered a well-tested option for playing spellcasters without worrying so much about resource attrition.
From this perspective, Paizo reverting to the old focus spell rules would seem counterintuitive.
I even have a theory that newer TTRPG players—influenced by video games where resource management exists but recovery is easy (via automatic post-combat healing or cooldowns)—are more comfortable with these types of mechanics than with the long-term micromanagement required by daily resources. I believe Paizo's designers have noticed this as well.
This has happened before, and while there was noise, it wasn't liked.
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This has happened before, and while there was noise, it wasn't liked.
Yeah, but sentiments in the RPG gaming community change over time. A few years back, I would have defended Vancian casting against all comers.
Nowadays I ask myself, it it really good or necessary? What exactly is the benefit of shortening adventuring days to "two hours at most, then let's go home to recover our spell slots", if the action economy of the game already limits how much you can do and only high level slots are worth it for damage spells, anyway? If the answer is "Well, then we'd have to rebalance damage numbers and encounter strengths", why not do that?
2E clearly showed that you can balance things at all levels, you just have to find a new balance for resourceless casting in a hypothetical 3E.
It wasn't liked because they took a style unique to a class (warlock and dragonfire adept) and applied it to everyone, taking away from the uniqueness.
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It wasn't liked because they took a style unique to a class (warlock and dragonfire adept) and applied it to everyone, taking away from the uniqueness.
Honestly, "uniqueness" is not a word something I'd associate with spell slot casting. That normally goes to the rest of the class flavor, at least for me.