I don't think this is true at all, a huge number of Kineticist impulses use basic saves, and even a skill check against the class's DC wasn't enough to prevent Winter Sleet from being an overpowered impulse. Although spell slots do leave room to use a limited number of above-curve abilities in the day, it is entirely possible for abilities to be at-will and powerful, as well as work along the game's four degrees of success. I certainly agree that protector tree is irritating when spammed, but the fundamental problem is that the spell is not terribly interactive, and that by itself ought to be addressed. This doesn't make spell slots a balancing knob so much as a crutch limiting badly-balanced or designed spells from seeing too much play in the same session, and even that's not prevented outliers from being overused long before the Kineticist.
I should have made clear that I did not have damage spells in mind as they, in my opinion, have an opposite problem of having very little design space within a spell slot systems and are better "at-will". In fact I was listening to Mark Seifter on roll for combat once talk about designing burning hands and how for the limited resource despite doing even more damage than in 1e, probably still shoots below what it should be. I think a damage oriented caster like the sorcerer should be slotless and the wizard, a control oriented caster, use spellslots, but designing the same spells for both systems is the issue, as they have different needs and goals
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Yeah, that would be problematic. Diversify a game's systems too much and it just becomes confusing and intimidating for players. The one benefit of the prepared casting as it is, is it works the same for all prepared casters. If you're comfortable playing a wizard, you'll have little friction changing to cleric. And the basic rules of prepared to spontaneous are similar enough that wizard to sorcerer is a jump, but a relatively small jump. Sorcerer to Wizard is also not exactly hard to teach the basics of either. (Like chess, it's easy to teach and learn the basics, but not everyone learns how to play it well). But wizard to kineticist is another story.
So a prospective slotless sorcerer and a slotted wizard are certainly a valid choice, you run into the problem where a wizard player is intimidated to switch to sorcerer, and vice versa, likely to a larger degree than our prepared and spontaneous castings are, because despite the differences, they are similar enough that a player going from one class to the other can make a reasonable guess based on what they have already played. But the same player may have radically different assumptions of what the Kineticist does before they even read the class. (I'm sure some of you all might remember your greener days of playing TTRPGs, where you're reading a class for the first time, and it is initially stumping you, and you are like, 'alright, let me take a moment to actually digest what is going on here' It's a common occurance going from one system to the next, but it's probably a sensation you want to minimize when happening within the same system.)
To Teridax's credit, not to say that slotless spellcasting across the board is necessarily a bad idea. It could work, but it would require a majority of classes to adhere to it to be successfully implemented in a given game for the sake of player coherence.
And one thing that I think is still a popular sentiment for both D&D and Pathfinder, is while some of us do not like the old school prepared spellcasting,...
Well, the kineticist, and the runesmith, are both already slotless casters. Teridax and I had discussed an idea he had for spells being given to classes via feats, the issue is spells that can be used slotless and ones used in slots don't have the same "power budget" for lack of a better term. Slotless casting works in the system very well, but the classes have bespoke abilities, only a few of which have you cast a literal actual spell, such as the one that gives you protector tree
I think a damage oriented caster like the sorcerer should be slotless and the wizard, a control oriented caster, use spellslots, but designing the same spells for both systems is the issue, as they have different needs and goalsI am not sure why. Specifically, I am not sure why a combat buff/debuff spells like haste or slow should be cast lest often than, say, a fireball.
I do think that some design thought has to be given to spells used in other scenes; infinite cast basically means 'always on' for them. So the system would basically need some way to distinguish 'costs resources and effort in the scene' from 'start the scene with it on.'
One thing's for sure, if the sorc went slotless, I would think it would need to get rid of all of it's signature spells. It's already the best caster in most ways; making it infinite recastable should be balanced by a far more limited number of 'what you can cast.'
I would personally like to see the sorcerer and the system adopt something akin to this strain based spell point system for 3.5 but designed as encounter based. Essentially each spell you cast builds up strain to your limit (additive instead of subtractive spell points), and then after combat you gonna chill to lower that stress. Then feats can let you go over your limit at the cost of your health, which would be thematic. They both would spend feats for spells, because they're meant to be limited on variety, but abundant in intensity of spells
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If the sorcerer and wizard had exactly the same spellcasting mechanics (except for the sorcerer's spell list being determined by your bloodline, which I think should be something to keep in future editions going forward), the devs would need to make schools and bloodlines have distinct mechanics from each other. Otherwise, one of the two classes would need to go. A much more apt comparison are oracles and clerics, which unlike the sorcerer class which has mechanics that make it different enough to be harder to reflavor as a wizard, an oracle its kinda easy to reflavor as a cleric. If prepared and spontaneous spellcasting weren't a thing, the cleric would likely get something else than a few extra heal slots every day, and mysteries would need to be much more in-depth as well.
The worst part is that I can’t help but see this as a good thing.
The existence of prepared and spontaneous spellcasting as templates shared across multiple classes serves as an excuse to avoid implementing greater mechanical differentiation between classes—such as the wizard/witch versus the sorcerer, or the cleric versus the oracle. In a scenario where all spellcasting were flexible, designers would be forced to give more distinct mechanical identities to classes that are currently divided primarily by whether they use Vancian or non-Vancian casting.
This is a discussion somewhat similar to whether or not classes should have their own unique spell lists. Pathfinder opted to group spell lists into four thematic traditions, whereas D&D chose to maintain individual lists for each class. This significantly influences the decision-making process when choosing a class in either system. In D&D, a large part of the choice depends on whether the specific spells you want are available to a given class (though this is largely mitigated by the multiclassing system). In Pathfinder, however—since classes share the same tradition and casting style (prepared or spontaneous)—the choice shifts toward other mechanical aspects, which helps emphasize a class’s unique identity rather than just which mechanical option is "best."
Interestingly, in my opinion, D&D 5e’s decision to turn prepared casters into flexible casters—while leaving spontaneous casting virtually unchanged—was a mistake. If all full casters were flexible, the designers would have been compelled to create more unique mechanical identities to distinguish the classes from one another—especially considering that D&D uses a universal spell-slot template for all full-casting classes. The designers of Pathfinder recognized this issue and chose to keep prepared spellcasting less flexible, precisely to avoid the risk of it overshadowing spontaneous spellcasting. However, this decision has had consequences for a system that is shifting toward a paradigm in which in-the-moment tactical decisions should carry more weight than prior planning.
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I would personally like to see the sorcerer and the system adopt something akin to this strain based spell point system for 3.5 but designed as encounter based. Essentially each spell you cast builds up strain to your limit (additive instead of subtractive spell points), and then after combat you gonna chill to lower that stress. Then feats can let you go over your limit at the cost of your health, which would be thematic. They both would spend feats for spells, because they're meant to be limited on variety, but abundant in intensity of spells
I didn't catch my typo here which is supposed to be psychic, not system
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We can't make slotless the baseline. Take a look at the difference in design between spells and kineticist impulses. At will abilities do not have the same distribution across the four degree of success as spells from slots. You see far fewer abilities that still affect enemies on successful saves. Spell slots are a power gating knob the designers have that allows spells to have more punch than if they're at will like the kineticist. It's why protector tree is a problem when made at will, it was designed as a consumable daily resource. Slotless spells would *necessarily* have to be weaker than slotted onesI think the issue is that trying to make all available to every class adds a lot of complexity for a system that is really designed around classes being fairly straightforwardWhich system are we discussing? Because that’s certainly not Pathfinder, the game that strives to offer a wealth of character options and currently runs the gamut of spontaneous, prepared, and even hybrid spellcasting alongside slotless magic across dozens of classes. I do personally think making spellcasting slotless by default would make for a simpler baseline than what we have now, but I really don’t think we should be trying to alienate players needlessly in the name of dumbing down a series of systems prized for their crunch.
Here, I have a different perspective and a different critique.
The issue with Timber Sentinel isn't about daily spell limits but rather about per-encounter limits. In fact, in the discussion thread on this topic, many have argued not for a daily cap on uses but for a limit per combat. The reality is that the “daily spellcasting” model carries a classic pitfall—one that systems based on unlimited resources or per-encounter limits attempt to address—namely, that there is very little to stop players from simply deciding to stop and sleep.
To the frustration of many GMs who prefer a more continuous or tense narrative flow, many adventuring parties will simply halt everything the moment their primary resources—in the case of Pathfinder 2e, their highest-rank spell slots (or, at lower levels, all available spell slots)—are exhausted, effectively disregarding the story's momentum. Even when this carries potential consequences—such as the risk of being attacked while resting (a risk significantly mitigated by setting up watches or using spells to create shelters)—the benefits of having one's full spellcasting capacity restored often outweigh the drawbacks. Conversely, when spellcasters choose to pace themselves to avoid this, they frequently feel as though their class carries an burdensome weight—a sense that they are being penalized whenever the situation creates attrition. This is, in fact, one of the primary reasons why many players end up preferring classes like kineticists, runesmiths, or spellcasters who can rely on focus spells, rather than playing full spellcasters. The situation is such that most of my GMs prefer and recommend that players use alternative systems—like the essence-based spellcasting found in Magic+—precisely because it avoids the excessive narrative interruptions caused by resting. Even pre-written adventures are frequently ill-equipped to handle these interruptions, and when they are designed for them, they sometimes end up favoring parties that don’t rely on spellcasters with daily resource limits.
Right now, I do not fully understand what people dislike about Vancian casting.
Is it the flavor of forgetting spells once cast ?
Is it the tediousness and "wild guessing" of preparing each spell for each slot you can cast ?
Is it having daily resources that do not regenerate between encounters ?
I fell Vancian casting is used as a too broad umbrella in these discussions.
I don't think the flavour is an issue, in my experience. The core problem with Vancian casting in PF2 is that the rest of the system has largely moved on from it.
If you look at PF1 and earlier, spellcaster gameplay really revolves around having the right spells for the situation. The silver bullet and problem solving spells were incredibly strong in their situation. They could outright win encounters, solve problems, or just bypass entire sections of narrative. So, good spellcaster gameplay was to get yourself access to those things when they were useful. If you did that well, you'd be hugely powerful.
"Forgetting spells" and having limited spells per day was spellcaster attrition, but a lot of classes had daily limited abilities and downtime recovery was a lot more limited (by spells, wands, or usage of Healer's Hands if you had someone with that). More classes had some kind of attrition than not, and even classes you wouldn't immediately think of like Rogue could have some (stuff like Shadow Duplicate).
So, a lot of the game works in a way that makes Vancian casting fit well into the game world. Preparing spells correctly matters a lot, but you also get so many spell slots that you can take a flyer on one or two and it doesn't hurt that badly if you guess wrong. Like if you decide to prepare Dispel Magic and don't use it, that's a 3rd rank slot. Not so costly at level 13.
Most players have attrition, and the party itself has recovery attrition.
The real problem with Vancian prepared casting in PF2 is that the rest of the game moved on from it:
- Spellcasters are the only...
I really like how you’ve grounded the discussion here.
Vancian magic is, in fact, the most notable casualty of a system that is moving away from attrition. It’s likely that much of the anti-Vancian sentiment arises almost instinctively; it is a relic of an era when resources were more limited and preparation was far more critical. Today, it comes across as something far more alien and anachronistic.
This idea that having a couple of characters in a party not rely on character build based attrition means the game has move passed attrition is dangerously untrue. The very obvious example of this is emergency healing but it applies equally to everything else you can do with spell slot, once per day abilities and consumables.
Parties that ignore attrition based resources and don’t use spell slots and consumables with some frequency vastly under perform parties that don’t unless the campaign is nothing but isolated, individual encounters usually not pushing even too close to severe. I played in a party with 2 kineticists that tried to cover striking and healing/tanking as primary roles and it was easily the weakest party I’ve ever played with.
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We can't make slotless the baseline. Take a look at the difference in design between spells and kineticist impulses. At will abilities do not have the same distribution across the four degree of success as spells from slots. You see far fewer abilities that still affect enemies on successful saves. Spell slots are a power gating knob the designers have that allows spells to have more punch than if they're at will like the kineticist. It's why protector tree is a problem when made at will, it was designed as a consumable daily resource. Slotless spells would *necessarily* have to be weaker than slotted onesI don't think this is true at all, a huge number of Kineticist impulses use basic saves, and even a skill check against the class's DC wasn't enough to prevent Winter Sleet from being an overpowered impulse. Although spell slots do leave room to use a limited number of above-curve abilities in the day, it is entirely possible for abilities to be at-will and powerful, as well as work along the game's four degrees of success. I certainly agree that protector tree is irritating when spammed, but the fundamental problem is that the spell is not terribly interactive, and that by itself ought to be addressed. This doesn't make spell slots a balancing knob so much as a crutch limiting badly-balanced or designed spells from seeing too much play in the same session, and even that's not prevented outliers from being overused long before the Kineticist.
It’s a curious detail I often see among critics of the kineticist.
Many people focus on pointing out how weak or limited the kineticist is when it comes to damage and healing, while completely ignoring its core chassis and its utility, buff, and debuff impulses. Yet, these same critics will then argue that the true strength of prepared spellcasters lies precisely in spells that *aren’t* focused on damage or healing! In reality, what I most often see prepared spellcasters actually doing is preparing damage and healing spells—because that highly touted “preparation” to solve a future problem almost never happens, or, if it does, the party has already found another way to handle it, or the issue could simply be resolved with money.
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I am not sure why. Specifically, I am not sure why a combat buff/debuff spells like haste or slow should be cast lest often than, say, a fireball.
I do think that some design thought has to be given to spells used in other scenes; infinite cast basically means 'always on' for them. So the system would basically need some way to distinguish 'costs resources and effort in the scene' from 'start the scene with it on.'
This is my thinking as well. Designing at-will abilities entails a few considerations to make the ability interactive even when always-on, which is why several duration-based impulses are Sustained, and would likely need to separate out abilities meant to be used out of combat, but those I think are things that would be good to have happen anyway. Given how a high-level spellcaster can spam slow every turn in combat and still be fine, I don't think spam is the exclusive domain of at-will casters as it's made out to be, and we could still have at-will effects that do the things we want out of spells. As much as making this the default would be a shift from slot-based spells, it would still enable slot-based spellcasting better than the latter enables at-will magic.
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As for your comment on them being silver bullet casters. That only works if the GM and the adventures consistently give you that information. It works if they do, but you don't always get that information. Which means a lackluster GM or adventure actively sabotages the whole class. At that point, if you're not supposed to be a silver bullet in the average game, you know who does that better? spontaneous casters. Think of how 1E rangers fell apart if the adventure did not cater very specifically to them. then 2E rangers had those abilities removed from default.
The idea that you'll always get advance foreknowledge and time to research opponents unless you have a "lackluster GM" is certainly a take.
"We're going into an ancient tomb that has been sealed for millenia and no one knows what to expect" is a pretty common fantasy trope. Likewise with any case where ambushes can happen, the enemies can actively move against the players, or events are happening quickly and there's no time to scout ahead.
A class that doesn't function correctly when any of that happens and requires advance foreknowledge to work properly is a class with a fundamental design flaw.
Just like it shouldn't have needed to be on GMs to work around Rangers in the past, it shouldn't be on GMs to be so constrained in the type of stories that can be told to work around prepared casters.
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This idea that having a couple of characters in a party not rely on character build based attrition means the game has move passed attrition is dangerously untrue. The very obvious example of this is emergency healing but it applies equally to everything else you can do with spell slot, once per day abilities and consumables.
There's very few once per day abilities in the game at this point and a lot of those are spellcasting related (like Quicken Casting), which just gives the only mechanic with attrition even more attrition, rather than spreading it out.
And at this point it's often "most characters". My AV group has 5 players. Only one of them has ever had to stop an adventuring day due to attrition. The other four (Rogue/Thaumaturge/Monk/Alchemist) basically stop adventuring for the day when the Bard runs low on spells, when they get an affliction that they need to go back to town to deal with, or when they want to buy & sell. I guess technically it could happen if the Alchemist ran out of Advanced Alchemy resources, but so far that's never happened before the Bard, and the Alchemist still has their vials infinitely recharging so they can keep going for a very long time.
The game HAS moved past attrition in pretty much every mechanic except spellcasting. Even consumables are a thing you bust out in specific situations (because on-level ones are so expensive) or can spam freely (because you've out levelled them enough that the price is functionally irrelevant).
Parties that ignore attrition based resources and don’t use spell slots and consumables with some frequency vastly under perform parties that don’t unless the campaign is nothing but isolated, individual encounters usually not pushing even too close to severe.
I think you're misunderstanding the discussion, because no one suggested that parties should just ignore spellcasting entirely. It's about how spellcasting is the only thing still attrition based in the system and how that feels out of place. Especially prepared casting, which in a lot of ways is just a mechanic that the rest of the game design has left behind.
I played in a party with 2 kineticists that tried to cover striking and healing/tanking as primary roles and it was easily the weakest party I’ve ever played with.
I mean, the Kineticist in my SoT party provides ridiculous damage mitigation and pretty solid offense. He's even got some minor healing now, but you need less healing when you prevent damage from happening in the first place.
The class is not really built to be a tank, so the idea that it's not good at that means anything doesn't mean anything to this discussion. Rogues aren't good tanks either.
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To the frustration of many GMs who prefer a more continuous or tense narrative flow, many adventuring parties will simply halt everything the moment their primary resources—in the case of Pathfinder 2e, their highest-rank spell slots (or, at lower levels, all available spell slots)—are exhausted, effectively disregarding the story's momentum. Even when this carries potential consequences—such as the risk of being attacked while resting (a risk significantly mitigated by setting up watches or using spells to create shelters)—the benefits of having one's full spellcasting capacity restored often outweigh the drawbacks. Conversely, when spellcasters choose to pace themselves to avoid this, they frequently feel as though their class carries an burdensome weight—a sense that they are being penalized whenever the situation creates attrition. This is, in fact, one of the primary reasons why many players end up preferring classes like kineticists, runesmiths, or spellcasters who can rely on focus spells, rather than playing full spellcasters. The situation is such that most of my GMs prefer and recommend that players use alternative systems—like the essence-based spellcasting found in Magic+—precisely because it avoids the excessive narrative interruptions caused by resting. Even pre-written adventures are frequently ill-equipped to handle these interruptions, and when they are designed for them, they sometimes end up favoring parties that don’t rely on spellcasters with daily resource limits.
Yep. This has been my exact experience as a player in Spore War. There's an obvious narrative pressure in that to move quickly (given the war) and there's certain points with time pressure.
My Oracle is the only spellcaster in that campaign, the rest of the party is Fighter/Thaumaturge/Alchemist. The pressure of the ticking clock, the war narrative requiring haste and all of that? It's entirely on one player. (The Thaumaturge does have limited free scrolls per day but it doesn't slow them down to run out in the same way.)
The others barely have a reason to slow down. But when I run out of spells, my capacity falls off a cliff (cantrips are a waste of a turn at level 19), everything gets a lot harder, and I stop having fun.
So I have to manage attrition by myself, and I'm also the one that has to decide to say "we shouldn't press any further".
The flip side of that is that Divine casting is super good in this AP and being high level, the spells are strong. When I decide to start firing the big spells, they make a BIG impact.
In that sense I'm effectively playing a different game than everyone else is. Is that a good thing? Well, maybe? It does mean there's gameplay variety for folks to choose from. It also means that when there's a ticking clock, a party that has more attrition is worse off than a party with less attrition.
In terms of prepared/spontaneous, spontaneous definitely wins out here. I've got so many options on demand for my slots at this point that I pretty much always have what I need, and I have in whatever quantity I need it. There's been a couple of times when I wish I could swap something out the next day, but that's severely outnumbered by the times I'm glad I could fire off however many of a given spell I need in the moment without needing to have planned ahead for that. aka: I don't have to guess how many castings of Heal and Roaring Applause I'm going to need.
Season of Ghosts Spoilers
I've GMd Fist of the Ruby Phoenix twice and I noticed the same thing: one group had an easier time with the time pressured sections than the other. Some of that was simply player experience (one group was new to PF2), but one group having less attrition than the other was also a factor. Especially in book 1 where it's a pretty long adventuring day and if you blow your spells early, you're in for a bad time.
I felt that I had to just straight up warn them "you're on a hard clock with a fixed number of actions, and if you stop to rest early you do not get that time back." Because otherwise the caster player is just not going to have fun for half of that when they're out of spells.
(Meanwhile in the actual tournament where you can scout the other teams by watching their matches and thus prepare for them? One group had a Counterspell Wizard, which worked VERY well in that situation.)
Resourceless debuffing, battlefield control, AoE and even healing/buffing are just not as good and action efficient and the stuff you can get from spells and consumables, not by a long shot, and the the idea that time management always matters in a number of days something takes vs the number of 10+ minute short breaks a party can take is 100% a table/GM decision. Not an inherent game system one. At the point the GM is deciding the party can never stop to recharge daily resources or purchase new consumables to prepare for the next challenging encounter, they could easily have the party find a trove of resources or have the story advance in a way where the party can get another long rest in.
What people are describing here as only one player having these limited resources is actually the whole party not investing their resources effectively and placing the burden for all the spike abilities on one player. No party should have only one character that can deliver close to a top rank or two heal, or a reliable “does something on a successful save” debuff for a boss creature, or ways to do different types of damage or exploit a very weak save more than one time with a skill action that might still fail on a bad roll and not be repeatable. I am not saying ever character needs to be able to do all these things, but everyone putting some gold towards scrolls that will help the cover the longer dungeons and probably having some decent quality emergency healing will greatly reduce the frequency with which one character runs out of things to do on challenging encounters AND it improves the odds of the party not getting themselves killed.
Because again, spike abilities allow parties to get in and back out of situations that are too difficult for their base abilities. Without those kind of resources, GMs are more restricted on the range of challenges that can be thrown at a party and the more every encounter feels like the same routine of 3 rounds of repeating the exact same activities over and over again.
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Resourceless debuffing, battlefield control, AoE and even healing/buffing are just not as good and action efficient and the stuff you can get from spells and consumables, not by a long shot,
That's a game design decision, which you may have noticed is what this thread is about. There's no reason why it has to be true except the game designers said so.
and the the idea that time management always matters in a number of days something takes vs the number of 10+ minute short breaks a party can take is 100% a table/GM decision. Not an inherent game system one.
It actually is a game system one if the game scales things in 10 minute increments for recover vs daily increments for recovery. Since PF2 scales most things by 10 minutes (including downtime healing, which is the single most important one), that's the inherent unit of measurement for break length that parties get.
Narratives built to be played in a given system will work with the mechanics of that system naturally, because when you don't suddenly the game itself is working against you and it makes things jarring for the players.
At the point the GM is deciding the party can never stop to recharge daily resources or purchase new consumables to prepare for the next challenging encounter, they could easily have the party find a trove of resources or have the story advance in a way where the party can get another long rest in.
Paizo is a big fan of time pressure in APs, so the people that make the system also think time pressure should be relevant in that description.
What people are describing here as only one player having these limited resources is actually the whole party not investing their resources effectively and placing the burden for all the spike abilities on one player. No party should have only one character that can deliver close to a top rank or two heal, or a reliable “does something on a successful save” debuff for a boss creature, or ways to do different types of damage or exploit a very weak save more than one time with a skill action that might still fail on a bad roll and not be repeatable. I am not saying ever character needs to be able to do all these things, but everyone putting some gold towards scrolls that will help the cover the longer dungeons and probably having some decent quality emergency healing will greatly reduce the frequency with which one character runs out of things to do on challenging encounters AND it improves the odds of the party not getting themselves killed.
Because again, spike abilities allow parties to get in and back out of situations that are too difficult for their base abilities. Without those kind of resources, GMs are more restricted on the range of challenges that can be thrown at a party and the more every encounter feels like the same routine of 3 rounds of repeating the exact same activities over and over again.
... yeah, no. People are entirely free to spend their wealth on their own character. The system in no place states anywhere that it's an expectation for all the martial characters to pool resources to prop up the caster. Nor should it be.
It might make sense to do that, but it's not an expectation, and the system shouldn't be expected to require that. It's not like there's no consumables or other items the Fighter can buy to use for their own benefit, after all.
Hell, in PFS you're specifically limited in ability to do this to "if you have an item you can let someone else use it (including consumables)" and nothing more. They can't keep it if they don't use it and they can't pay you back for it, including giving you back another of the same consumable later. Considering how much wealth you need to keep up, buying a scroll when you don't know if anyone at the next table can even use it is rather risky.
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One of the reasons I disagree with the whole "you need attrition or else your abilities can't be effective" take is that past a certain point, certain spells do become effectively resourceless: a 18th-level Sorcerer can cast sixteen 6th-rank slow spells or twelve 7th-rank haste spells, which is more than you'd need for combat, yet plentiful access to those spells at that level doesn't break them. Spells generally don't break the moment you get more spell slots to cast them than you'd need in the day, so the notion that they do doesn't strike me as rooted in evidence. The one instance where a spell does get problematic when used at-will is because, in my opinion, it is far too strong at that level range to be an at-will ability: if Timber Sentinel were a 4th-level impulse that let you cast protector tree at-will at max rank-1, the impulse in my opinion would be entirely unproblematic because it would follow the same balance as other impulses, and even casting it at max rank later on would be fine once spells become generally stronger.
Looking at the Kineticist's impulses, I would also argue that many of their effects are in fact exceptionally reliable: it's not just that its save-based damage is pretty much always basic saves, you get stuff like Tree of Duality dazzling with no save, Jagged Berms dealing guaranteed piercing damage when moving through their area, or Tremor creating difficult terrain. A handful of its crowd control-based saves do nothing on a success, but those are firmly in the minority.
Finally, I'll also point out something YuriP also discussed, which is that the Kineticist's at-will impulses also feature per-encounter and per-day limits via target immunities: even with an at-will spellcasting system, it is entirely possible to prevent spam by making a target immune to repeat uses of the same effect. This and built-in frequency limitations are in fact an even more effective balancing lever than spell slots themselves, which is why that had to be applied to sure strike. Building a slotless spellcasting system from this foundation would in my opinion allow us to still have the mechanics we know and love, while still being able to limit their daily usage and let classes build repertoires or prepare spells from those for slot-based spellcasting.
The game mostly expects that you have a party of two casters and two martials, not just one caster, so when party compositions stray from that (which is fine, and the system handles well), it is expected that the more martials inclined party is going to have to compensate for having less support from spells. Scrolls are the cheapest and most efficient way to do that, but not the only way. Having no healing potions or Elixirs of healing on your character and just expecting someone else to be able to cover healing is a much more problematic PFS behavior, but yes, buying scrolls when you can’t use them in PFS is not a great idea, but also an unnecessary one.
The ability to heal the most HP in 10 minutes is not more important than the ability to heal more than a standard strike’s worth of HP in an encounter, unless your encounters never threaten to drop PCs.
It is a game design choice for consumable and daily resources to exceed normal, at level, encounter target numbers. It’s the one that is really important to keep in the game because it means you can throw the occasional harder encounter at your party as a GM when you know your party builds for that. If encounter powers top out the power level, then the the ceiling of encounter difficulty become much, much more static and less adjustable.
By that logic, martials should all be expected to heal themselves, buff them selves and debuff their enemies by themselves. Casters shouldn’t have to spend any of their resources making combats easier for martials.
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By that logic, martials should all be expected to heal themselves, buff them selves and debuff their enemies by themselves. Casters shouldn’t have to spend any of their resources making combats easier for martials.
It is a literally incredible leap of logic to claim that because characters use their abilities in mutually complementary ways, they absolutely must all pool their shared fungible resource into one party member. I do think it's fine to help someone else get useful items with one's own gold, so long as this aid is reciprocated equally, as martial classes also help the party out when outfitted with items and consumables of their own.
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The game mostly expects that you have a party of two casters and two martials, not just one caster, so when party compositions stray from that (which is fine, and the system handles well), it is expected that the more martials inclined party is going to have to compensate for having less support from spells. Scrolls are the cheapest and most efficient way to do that, but not the only way. Having no healing potions or Elixirs of healing on your character and just expecting someone else to be able to cover healing is a much more problematic PFS behavior, but yes, buying scrolls when you can’t use them in PFS is not a great idea, but also an unnecessary one.
The ability to heal the most HP in 10 minutes is not more important than the ability to heal more than a standard strike’s worth of HP in an encounter, unless your encounters never threaten to drop PCs.
It is a game design choice for consumable and daily resources to exceed normal, at level, encounter target numbers. It’s the one that is really important to keep in the game because it means you can throw the occasional harder encounter at your party as a GM when you know your party builds for that. If encounter powers top out the power level, then the the ceiling of encounter difficulty become much, much more static and less adjustable.
Sorry, Unicore, but the game doesn’t demand anything of the sort. At the tables I’ve played at, most players chose whatever they wanted, regardless of the rest of the party composition—and it works just fine. I’ve always been one of the few who picks a class and ancestry based on the other party members, but the vast majority of players simply choose the classes they find most interesting at the time, for all sorts of reasons—party composition being the least of them.
And PF2e handles this just fine.
The only thing the game “requires”—and even then, many people ignore it and still manage to survive—is having at least one magical healer at low levels. This is because level 1 healing potions are laughably weak and expensive for that stage of the game; the alchemist is still a disappointment; the kineticist has very few healing impulses; the "Battle Medicine" skill feat isn't easily accessible unless you started with a field medic background; HP totals are often too close to the average damage output of weapons; resistances are either low or non-existent; and archetypes generally aren't available yet. But even this becomes less of an issue as you level up: Medicine-related skills become more accessible, feats like "Robust Health" are acquired, characters pick up the Medic archetype, shields gain higher Hardness, resistances become more meaningful, and so on. Yet, even without a dedicated healer, most groups still manage to survive the majority of their encounters.
Furthermore, I’ve frequently seen parties with only one spellcaster—or none at all—playing and having a great time without any issues. In fact, at low levels, spellcasters are so weak that—aside from the aforementioned healing—my general impression is that parties below level 5 actually perform better without spellcasters than with them.
Like I said, the GM has a lot of power to tune encounters around their party. Throwing single encounter after single encounter at your party with ample 10 minute breaks between them is a choice a GM can make that enables out of combat healing options to be sufficient for most tables. PFS is inherently set up this way with a few exceptions. In APs that I have played/run there are these kind of situations often enough that some parties might get into a habit of assuming they will always be able to rest for a while whenever they want, but almost every book of every AP I have read or played has situations where encounters are expected to collapse onto each other and these situations can quickly lead to TPK for a party that eschews being prepared for them.
Even where they are not common in default adventures, it is impossible for GMs to turn up difficulty and realism dials in dungeons when a party is incapable of handling 180-360 xp if encounters without a 10 minute breaks between between them, whereas giving parties more breaks than the adventure specifies (including long breaks) is trivially easy AND strongly encouraged by AP writers and Paizo GMs.
Removing daily/consumable “spike resources” greatly reduces a party’s ability to adapt to challenging circumstances.
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The game mostly expects that you have a party of two casters and two martials, not just one caster, so when party compositions stray from that (which is fine, and the system handles well), it is expected that the more martials inclined party is going to have to compensate for having less support from spells. Scrolls are the cheapest and most efficient way to do that, but not the only way. Having no healing potions or Elixirs of healing on your character and just expecting someone else to be able to cover healing is a much more problematic PFS behavior, but yes, buying scrolls when you can’t use them in PFS is not a great idea, but also an unnecessary one.
The ability to heal the most HP in 10 minutes is not more important than the ability to heal more than a standard strike’s worth of HP in an encounter, unless your encounters never threaten to drop PCs.
It is a game design choice for consumable and daily resources to exceed normal, at level, encounter target numbers. It’s the one that is really important to keep in the game because it means you can throw the occasional harder encounter at your party as a GM when you know your party builds for that. If encounter powers top out the power level, then the the ceiling of encounter difficulty become much, much more static and less adjustable.
Sorry, Unicore, but the game doesn’t demand anything of the sort. At the tables I’ve played at, most players chose whatever they wanted, regardless of the rest of the party composition—and it works just fine. I’ve always been one of the few who picks a class and ancestry based on the other party members, but the vast majority of players simply choose the classes they find most interesting at the time, for all sorts of reasons—party composition being the least of them.
And PF2e handles this just fine.
The only thing the game “requires”—and even then, many people ignore it and still manage to survive—is having at least one magical healer at low levels. This is because level 1 healing...
On the thread about required roles, people mostly agreed the only required "role" is being able to heal the party to full when not on a clock. Whatever means are used.
Yes, PF2e doesn't assume or require casters in the party to work. Neither I or the people I usually play with are caster fans so its quite common for me to be in tables with no casters at all. The only thing PF2e requires is someone that specs into Medicine to heal people between encounters.
Everything else is optional.
Having no emergency healing would be a death sentence in every PF2 campaign I have played. Having minimal effective AoE would be pretty terrible too. The PFS scenarios I have played have been pretty easy as far as combat encounters go, but I don’t see any party making it through Age of Ashes, Extinction Agenda, Abomination Vaults, Outlaws of Alkenstar or 7 dooms of sandpoint without either one or more casters using their daily resources well or else GMs that do stuff like have enemies that can literally see a fight in progress ignore that fight, even though they are in an allied faction.
I am glad that PF2 is capable of accommodating many styles of play, but the game would not hold up 180 xp or more of encounters collapsing into 8 rounds without spell slots and consumables.
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I ran Plaguestone combined with Age of Ashes (since the adventure locations are close to each other, it’s easy to merge them), covering levels 1–20. My party occasionally swapped characters due to player fatigue—there was only one death, occurring in the final book, caused by a situation where healing couldn't help (a very poor roll against a death effect). During the first half of the campaign, the party included a bard and an elemental sorcerer. By the last two books, the sorcerer player grew tired of the class and switched to a thaumaturge (which he loved), while the bard player switched to a monk focused on grappling. Honestly, what happened is exactly what many people here describe: early on, spells like soothe and other healing magic saw some use, but that effectively stopped by the third book. In combat, the primary healing methods became Battle Medicine and the champion’s lay on hands, both chosen for their low action cost. The party’s champion, in particular, became incredibly powerful—constantly using reactions and Shield Block to protect allies while also maintaining a protector’s sphere. The damage reduction they provided was so significant that my intelligent enemies quickly realized it was better to focus their attacks on the champion—even though the champion was much harder to hit than the nearby allies, who would have had their incoming damage reduced and, on top of that, would have triggered a reaction-based counterattack. I also played in a campaign where I decided to join as a wood and water kineticist, precisely because I noticed the group lacked a dedicated healer. (I later discovered that almost everyone had the Battle Medicine skill, and some had access to low-rank healing—thanks to a mandatory free spellcaster archetype and an exemplar character who also provided some healing support.) The party had managed to survive for 8 levels this way (I joined when they were already at level 8). We are now at level 13, and we haven’t felt any need for a dedicated healer. Battle Medicine and occasional healing—mostly 1-action spells or abilities—easily cover our needs.
I’m also playing in a Revenge of the Runelords campaign. I joined mid-game as a fey sorcerer with a bard archetype; while I had broad access to soothe, I rarely used it, and when I did, it was mostly just as a precaution. Later, following the release of Impossible Magic, I switched to an pccult-tradition draconic summoner with an alchemist archetype. I have soothe, but I almost never use it; my focus is primarily on buffing allies and debuffing enemies, while my eidolon lands strikes against our foes. When we do need healing, we have plenty of characters with Battle Medicine—and, technically, I can even be the target of Battle Medicine twice.
Finally, I recently joined a Kingmaker campaign (again, mid-game) where the GM allowed the use of Starfinder classes (though without access to Starfinder equipment). I’m playing a mystic, and so far, I have [b]never[/been] used a healing spell with that character. I rely on Transfer Vitality, Battle Medicine, or infusion instead. I also played in an adaptation of Wrath of the Righteous, but the GM misjudged the difficulty—encounters were significantly tougher than what you typically see in adventure paths, and the campaign was abandoned at level 3. I also occasionally play in a game run by a friend who thinks PF2 is too easy; he frequently throws severe or even extreme encounters at us because, unless he sees someone go down, he considers the fight too trivial. In those two cases, I definitely felt the need to use healing spells during combat. It seems those GMs chose to ignore the recommended difficulty guidelines, didn't they? Generally speaking, when I’ve seen healing spells used in combat, it’s often because the players have the Battle Medicine feat but lack a dedicated medic archetype—meaning they’d have to spend an action to move before using Battle Medicine. Since that would cost two actions anyway, they opt for a magical heal instead.
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As for area-of-effect abilities, honestly, they’re nice to have but not essential. In my experience, I’ve always found it much more challenging to deal with a single, very high-level boss creature than with multiple lower-level ones—even when the party lacks AoE options. The only time I’ve truly felt the need for AoE was against high-level swarms; they deal significant damage without being affected by the multiple attack penalty, and their resistances to the types of attacks martial characters typically rely on make things very difficult for them.
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Reading more of Teridax's points did give me an idea. What if there was a hybrid attrition-slotless system based on rote experience with a spell. Based on the philosophy of doing something until it is second nature.
What if spells were ranked, but spells below a certain rank in relation to your level became unlimited casting. At this point, the spells' power levels are in line with those of a martial's normal enchanted weapons or an alchemists' bombs.
Then, at the highest level, you did have spell slots, but these slots would be the attritional spiked damage resource.
As for limitations, just set an allotment of how many spells can be unlimited-cast at a time. And those spells have to be swapped by some mechanic, whether longform or shortform. The nature of spontaneous or prepared could even have an effect, where spontaneous gets a larger list, but takes longer to swap, and prepared gets a shorter list, but can swap more easily.
As an example, with arbitrary level numbers, what if you could cast 5th level spells. Your 4th and 5th rank spells are slotted, but what if you could cast unlimited 3rd rank spells, and then could prepare a range of 1st to 3rd rank spells, let's say, 5 of them, all of them heightened to 3rd rank, and each of these 5 spells can be cast at-will.
In fact, this already happens today—though in a somewhat less obvious way. It’s usually only players with a deep understanding of the system who concern themselves with low-rank scrolls and wands; for those new to the game, this aspect is much harder to spot.
In practice, scrolls for spells four ranks below your current level are cheap enough to purchase without significantly denting your earnings from encounters—typically costing only about 1% to 2% of the treasure you acquire.
The issue is that—with the exception of utility spells, certain specific buffs and debuffs (like *haste*, *slow*, *synesthesia*, or wall spells), and a few others—most low-rank spells aren't even worth the action cost required to cast them. The game’s structure places such a high premium on your highest spell ranks that it creates a "magic gap": older spells become obsolete as you gain access to new ones, with only the rare exceptions mentioned above remaining viable. Consequently, spamming these very low-rank spells often proves ineffective—especially at lower levels, or when you’re trying to use spells for damage, healing, summoning, counteracting, or incapacitation.
This dynamic is precisely what pressures players to stop and rest, forcing the entire party to do the same. Even if players don’t feel explicitly pressured, they may end up playing while significantly weakened—either because they’ve run out of spell slots, or because they are hoarding them to avoid falling behind the rest of the party or stalling the game’s narrative. To address this issue, the solution shouldn't be to make low-rank spells available at will. Instead, one could reduce the pressure to rely on high-rank spells, significantly boost the power of high-rank spells, or fundamentally overhaul the spellcasting system itself—shifting toward a model that is sustainable and allows for recovery between encounters, much like the "focus spell" mechanic.
Interestingly, the game already acknowledges this and attempts to implement such an approach for certain classes. A "spell-bending" wizard, for instance, sacrifices spell slots from their 3rd and 4th highest ranks to gain an additional slot at their highest and second-highest ranks. Furthermore, if they belong to a specific magic school, they can dedicate one slot per rank to a chosen spell—and, via the "Drain Bonded Item" ability, recast a spell (typically one of their maximum rank). The catch is that this comes at the cost of flexibility. Because the current magic school system restricts one slot to a very narrow selection of spells—many of which may be undesirable—and because "Drain Bonded Item" merely repeats a spell already cast, all while still requiring the player to prepare their daily spell list, many players feel penalized rather than benefited by these extra slots. Moreover, since a sorcerer’s "Sorcerer Potency" and their bloodline features amplify immediate damage output, these additional slots lose much of their appeal—at least when it comes to raw damage.
Focus spells—with the notable exception of those available to the necromancer—also fail to provide a truly effective workaround; the options are sparse and generally restricted to specific classes. Even those that aren't class-exclusive—such as domain spells—are constrained by a deity's portfolio and tend to be inferior to the already limited options found in other classes. Furthermore, regardless of all this, at low levels, every spellcaster feels weak; the number of spell slots is very limited, there are no strong options, and the cantrips are also quite weak and restricted. In practice, no one really addresses this issue properly—perhaps the psychic class does so to some extent, but because its progression is so poorly designed, no one is interested in it anymore.
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Having no emergency healing would be a death sentence in every PF2 campaign I have played. Having minimal effective AoE would be pretty terrible too. The PFS scenarios I have played have been pretty easy as far as combat encounters go, but I don’t see any party making it through Age of Ashes, Extinction Agenda, Abomination Vaults, Outlaws of Alkenstar or 7 dooms of sandpoint without either one or more casters using their daily resources well or else GMs that do stuff like have enemies that can literally see a fight in progress ignore that fight, even though they are in an allied faction.
I am glad that PF2 is capable of accommodating many styles of play, but the game would not hold up 180 xp or more of encounters collapsing into 8 rounds without spell slots and consumables.
I think people have talked about a 4-people party with only 1 caster. Not with zero of them. Nor without consumables.
Note that, for emergency healing, spells are not the only way to go. Battle Medicine and consumables/healer's gloves are there too.
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Those parts I get, but what if a given spell rank, like with alchemical bombs, was balanced around being used alongside a martial class at current level from the getgo. Of course, spells as they are in either 1E nor 2E would not fit, but if a new generation of spells was balanced around such a design goal, I think that could work out. Actively design spells so that they retain a modicum of usefulness as an at-will tool.
Let's use alchemist as an example. Alchemist can make a near limitless supply of at-level bombs. What if, for the sake of this comparison, they could make a small handful of bombs at a much more limited scale, that were a few levels ahead of normal.
That's the sort of balance consideration I am proposing.
I feel a Kineticist with Kinetic Activation and a few at-level scrolls fits this within their area of expertise.
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One of the reasons I disagree with the whole "you need attrition or else your abilities can't be effective" take is that past a certain point, certain spells do become effectively resourceless: a 18th-level Sorcerer can cast sixteen 6th-rank slow spells or twelve 7th-rank haste spells, which is more than you'd need for combat, yet plentiful access to those spells at that level doesn't break them. Spells generally don't break the moment you get more spell slots to cast them than you'd need in the day, so the notion that they do doesn't strike me as rooted in evidence. The one instance where a spell does get problematic when used at-will is because, in my opinion, it is far too strong at that level range to be an at-will ability: if Timber Sentinel were a 4th-level impulse that let you cast protector tree at-will at max rank-1, the impulse in my opinion would be entirely unproblematic because it would follow the same balance as other impulses, and even casting it at max rank later on would be fine once spells become generally stronger.
I do think that lower rank slots should effectively become costless/resourceless given how scrolls allow for virtually infinite usage. Implementing this into a vancian system, prepared or spontaneous, is difficult at least in terms of words and page count considerations
My issue with this framing here is that when people approach the wizard, using your example, they're going like "man I want to play dante, but I don't like ivory and ebony, I don't like that he does weapon swapping, and I don't like that he is color coded red and has longer hair. He should have shorter hair, be color coded blue and use a katana. I don't want to play Virgil though"The reason I used Dante is because, if you don't like Ebony and Ivory, instead of playing the gunslinger subclass, play Trickster or Swordmaster, and then, play any of the various other weapons. As I said, if Dante is a class, his styles and weapons are his subclass options. Either way, whether you're a Swordmaster, a Gunslinger, a Royal Guard, whether you're using Ebony and Ivory, you're using Force Edge, whether you're using Agni and Rudra, and whether you're using a motorcycle, the point is, you're still Dante.
For a more direct point, if Royal Guard is specific spell preparation, let flexible spell preparation be Swordmaster.
You're missing the forest for the trees. I'm using the examples of the mechanics and aesthetic trappings of Dante and Wizards. Essentially people ask for wizards as a class to change entirely mechanically from what they are. Using Dante as an example I listed things that compose how he works mechanically distinctly from Nero, V, and Virgil (in DMC at least). The mechanical core of Dante compared to the rest is weapon swapping. It's not quite as central as prepared casting is for d20 wizards, but in both cases these are integral parts of what the character and the class are, and how those reflect the fantasy they bring. People want to play a wizard but hate everything about wizards. That's the issue, poking at where the DMC metaphore doesn't line up 1-to-1 with a wizard is just not having a conversation with the core point
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One of the reasons I disagree with the whole "you need attrition or else your abilities can't be effective" take is that past a certain point, certain spells do become effectively resourceless: a 18th-level Sorcerer can cast sixteen 6th-rank slow spells or twelve 7th-rank haste spells, which is more than you'd need for combat, yet plentiful access to those spells at that level doesn't break them. Spells generally don't break the moment you get more spell slots to cast them than you'd need in the day, so the notion that they do doesn't strike me as rooted in evidence. The one instance where a spell does get problematic when used at-will is because, in my opinion, it is far too strong at that level range to be an at-will ability: if Timber Sentinel were a 4th-level impulse that let you cast protector tree at-will at max rank-1, the impulse in my opinion would be entirely unproblematic because it would follow the same balance as other impulses, and even casting it at max rank later on would be fine once spells become generally stronger.I do think that lower rank slots should effectively become costless/resourceless given how scrolls allow for virtually infinite usage. Implementing this into a vancian system, prepared or spontaneous, is difficult at least in terms of words and page count considerations
Scrolls require free hands and actions to get them in hand. Spells do not. It is actually a pretty big difference in play.
The true limiting/balancing factor is PF2 is the action cost.
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I just hope Paizo will not mess up like they did with the Oracle. Listening to the bigger crowd is not always the proper solution.
They need to listen to the Prepared players as to how to modify Prepared casters. Because those who say that 'they would play a Wizard if it was not a Prepared caster' will not actually do it if it becomes the case.
The problem with your perception is that for most people, a change from full preparation to flexible preparation is not a class change distinction. Because when people think wizard, as was said, they think an arcane caster that wears robes and pointy hats, and casts from wands and staves. It might be to you, but it's not an average thought. You're missing the forest for the trees, because you are saying that because a birch is not an oak, a birch forest does not make for a forest. In the end, both are trees, and a group of trees becomes a forest.
If you pull the next person you meet aside and ask them what they think a wizard is, I have doubts their interpretation of wizard will exactly match the Pathfinder one. Because a wizard is a wizard, and is a rather wide term. A wizard is not your specific impression of a wizard.
To say that a Pathfinder wizard, if it had flexible prepared spellcasting, is not a wizard, is to say that a D&D wizard is not a wizard. Do you mean to say that a D&D wizard is not a wizard?
Because we are asking for wizards to stay within the wheelhouse of a wizard. A person who often wears robes and incants magic that they learned from years of dutiful study often from a wand or a staff and probably wears a pointy hat. Those definitions are satisfied whether the mechanics represent specific spell preparation, flexible spell preparation, spontaneous casting, or slotless casting. If we said we wanted a wizard to worship a god, and pray to a deity to gain power, you might have a point. If we said we wanted a wizard to attune with nature and call it to heal the land, you might have a point. But we are not asking for those.
If we're going by traditionalism. A wizard from Pathfinder is not a true wizard either. If a wizard selects a single school of magic to specialize in, they must then select two schools of magic to be bad at. A wizard is not supposed to be able to cast 10th level spells. All wizards are supposed to be able to scribe scrolls. Let's go back a bit to 3.5E. Wizards are supposed to expend their experience points just to craft magic items. Back then, wizards aren't supposed to have a bonded item, because they only had familiars. In Pathfinder 2E, you can play a wizard that can specialize in a school with no penalty to other spells, can cast 10th level magic, can have a bonded item, and both doesn't have to expend experience points to craft magic items, nor even know how to craft a single magic item. This clearly is not a wizard.
If you pull a person aside and ask them what a wizard is, they'll say "idk, dude, why are you asking me stupid questions?" Truly we cannot appeal to popularity for why a thing should be a certain way. Nobody knows or cares what a wizard is unless they're in this hobby. I will absolutely say that the D&D wizard is less of a wizard, but without substantial nerfs the D&D wizard makes the sorcerer look pathetic. Which is currently the case in the game as it exists now. Flexible casting is a massive power increase in isolation, but we have to consider much of the discussion is saying "flexible doesn't go far enough" and that we ought to remove slots altogether. The conversation is not simply "make the wizard flexible." I would actually say that idea was dropped almost immediately after it was mentioned in this thread
But let's look at what actually distinguishes a wizard and a sorcerer without prepared casting. Go with the most extreme of spontaneous. And that is, just the ability score and wizards can't use magic that isn't arcane. Blood magic truly doesn't really add a whole hell of lot, and many of the wizard feats do nothing without preparation. Spell substitution does nothing etc. Spontaneous casting and prepared casting have thematic weight within the system and convey different things in juxtaposition. Without a distinction here what the magic someone uses means less. I'm all for deleting the sorcerer class from the game entirely, I think it rubs against eugenics coded ideas, but I know this won't happen
I also am not arguing for or from traditionalism, but from a design, thematics and aesthetic perspective. I already think casters in 2e are way too homogeneous with very little that distinguishes them. All spell traditions can do everything. They can all buff, blast, debuff, have utility, crowd control etc. the only except is arcane can't heal. The differences are in minor degrees, not in kind. The next edition needs to sharpen the differences to justify multiple spellcasting classes existing, not smooth them all over into a gray blob. My argument is that we ought to keep the wizard feeling the way it does with mechanics that emphasize it's thematics and help distinguish it from other classes. On other threads I have argued a PF3E wizard ought to be designed around spell customization to emphasize it's learned nature, and that sorcerers ought to emphasize spell intensity with higher damage and the like to really sell it's thing. The more distinction between these two the system is capable of expressing, the better
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You can choose whatever flavor you want for your character, without the need for a distinct class. Two classes mean different enough mechanics, or they are just a waste of pages.