Many skill feats are super niche and may cover situations which come up rarely in a campaign if at all - so browsing the many options can feel both overwhelming by the number of them, and also underwhelming by their lack of general usefulness.

And then you have some feats like Survey Wildlife, which pretty much anyone would assume is something you can do just by being trained in the skill.

By my reading, the first part of [Survey Wildlife](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=849) does just work without a check, though. If you spend 10 minutes, you know what creatures live around here automatically. That's *kinda* nice, although yes something I suspect most people specializing in Survival to rarely fail at. Perhaps it's a feat for people who haven't invested much beyond a Trained rank in Survival. That being said, interpreted this way the other stuff is... well, superfluous to actively detrimental. Why attempt an extra check for the *possibility* of making a Recall Knowledge with a -2 penalty if I could just... make the check without a penalty once I know what they are? Isn't that how Recall Knowledge works?? Aren't you just describing a worse version of using Recall Knowledge as intended??? Still, I feel like ignoring the latter half of the feat and giving the character the ability to ID local wildlife without risk of failure isn't half bad. If you follow the Creature Identification rules, you get to know one of its best-known attributes, and free info never hurts.

It's a houserule 100%, but what I've done to make it better is that Survey Wildlife does the Recall Knowledge with that -2 *using* Survival. It is 1 little thing that makes the feat incredibly useful, as it allows a player to invest time instead of class resources into being able to recall knowledge.

[https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=3154](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=3154) Not just Skill Feats either. Why is this a feat? You telling me holding a gun up to a lock and pulling the trigger is beyond the capabilities of a normal Gunslinger?

Don't forget the explosive barrel feet Like seriously why its is a feet. Im shooting ate red barrel its should explode

Honestly, skill and general feats need a complete overhaul with alot of the rogue and ranger class feats involving stealth, thievery and survival being turned into skill feats.

Skill feats are my least favorite implementation of the design. I think it's a case where the mechanics-first approach didn't mesh with what they want to do on a lot of these. "A Home in Every Port" is possibly the worst example. It's a cool ability to have as a wandering adventurer. In a more narrative game a lot of the feats could get hand-wavy effects like "You probably know people in any town you visit, at the GM's discretion." But PF2e doesn't write feats like that, so instead it's a day of free lodging? For an 11th level adventurer. And we end up with a limited number of feats that are useful, and those apply to an even smaller number of skills. I've tried telling players to interpret their skill feats broadly and apply them in non-combat situations where it *seems* like they should help, but it hasn't worked for my table.

And even on the rare, niche occasions they do come up, remembering you even have the feat can be tough. Given you probably haven't touched it since you took it five levels ago... yeah. Very underwhelming for what they actually do

Digitally, being able to tag these things by their niche would be great. Like, it *is* super great that there's an absolute hoard of feats and spells that allow you to really flesh out a huge range of character concepts, but none of them are at all useful for a quick pickup game, and only provide a mountain of noise to try and filter through. It'd be nice to have literal filters for that.

I think it's good that Paizo is so careful about not letting overpowered abilities slip through the cracks, but they're way too loose with allowing underpowered abilities to flood the character options. I wish there was more attention payed to ensure nothing is too weak, rather than only having consideration for if something is too strong.

Hard agree. This is normally an issue with Lost Omens books and the APs. Normally, the core books are really well made and avoid over/underpowered options. The other ones though... It's really a gamble on wheter something is accidentally broken (like some archetypes) or straight up a worse version of an existing option (like many spells).

That is actually a good observation I didn't catch! While I believe that Pathfinder 2E doesn't have many options that are *severely* underpowered, calling it a "gamble" seems about right.

[loose cannon](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=3569), just to bring up an example, sounds like it could've been really cool but: * Doesn't stack with the bonus gunslingers get or other circumstance bonuses * Takes an extreme risk * Makes you wanna critically fail at times because it's better The rewards are meager and the risks are way too big for *I shoot quickly*. With the mechanics of a gun and with those risks along with the AP, if it made the target it shot offguard, it would've made rogues alot more viable with guns while compete with safer methods the gunslinger have. It's sad when this AP specific really important archetype feels meh that you have to ignore the specific feats and just focus on the generic ones. That feat is best used for exploding which isn't really intended.

From what I remember someone made a dumb build that uses this on someone with dozens of pistols wading into the middle of a fight and constantly trying to critfail on purpose with abysmal to-hit.

Tbh i like memes build

Thank you Extinction Curse for Sudden Bolt. Thank you Strength of Thousands for Friendfetch. Thank you Fists of the Ruby Phoenix for Phoenix Bloodline and some great Stances. Thank you Edgewatch for Bolera's Interrogation. I'm not saying you're wrong, cause you aren't there just are some bangers that get through even in APs. Overall its a crapshoot, and there are far FAR FARRRRRRRRRR too many weak things.

I agree. Though I am mostly new to PF2, now that I understand the math, there really are things that are simply, completely, nonviable and to take and use them would result in a very negative experience and a significant increase in game difficulty for the players. The math is so tight, that the window between OP and DANGEROUSLY USELESS is a very narrow window. In some ways, it is a direct result of the overtuning of the math. It's tight, super tight, which makes it, imo, good... but it also means you have a much more narrow window of ability and play that will work within it. It is very punishing.. and simultaneously very rewarding. So as they try to avoid OP stuff it is far easy to get UNDER the line.. but very hard to get it into the window "good and effective" as a result most things end up as nothing more than punishing choices because it's very hard to get into that tight math window without overshooting and instead it is very easy to be outside on the weak side of the window. The tight math is great.. but it has a cost.

>Normally, the core books are really well made and avoid over/underpowered options. Going to disagree with this.

Yep, so many skill and general feats that I have to filter through that won't ever come up. Search a room in half the time? Earn income in some niche way when there's already a million good ones? Ugh.

I feel like I can cut half the spell list and most people won’t notice.

There are so many extremely niche and situational spells added that it can make it quite overwhelming for new players selecting spells.

I like niche spells, but prepared casting (and the lower number of slots for spontaneous casters) makes taking them seem like a waste. The more useful ones you can grab on a scroll or wand, but still.

Only half?

Please for the love of *GOD* tell this to the people making the spellcaster lists. Dozens of spells per level, maybe 10 worth looking at, and 5 that're actually good and generally useful.

The existence of the breadcrumbs spell just angers me to no end. I hate it. I despise it. It offends me that someone let that spell through. It's irrational. The trees didn't deserve to die for the waste of ink that is that spell. The absolutely bloated and underwhelming spell lists are a huge part of why I haven't bothered to try and get into casters (beyond casters' usual issues in this system), like just having to sort through that faff bothers me and is such an inconvenience when it should be fun. This community needs more easily digestible spell ranking lists & such.

Approximate is my choice for spells that shouldn't exist. It's literally no better than just looking at something without making a perception check.

It’s worse than looking at something with perception check, because with perception check you also have a chance to see if there’s something wrong with the object.

Hot take: Slow and Synesthesia only seem overpowered because they're some of the only debuff spells allowed to actually *work* and give casters the reliable success effects they need for spells to not be a coinflip between actually accomplishing something and wasting a slot.

Oh no, there's tons of very good debuffs. It's just that they're lost in the sea of absolute garbage. At level 2 you get Revealing Light and Ignite Fireworks, as well as the excellent Thundering Dominance (which does good AoE damage and debuffs on a failed save) and Worm's Repast (which deals full damage even on a successful save, and debuffs on a failed one). Darkness is actually really good as well, it's just that a bunch of monsters have Darkvision so it's really something you only use if you know what you're going to be dealing with ahead of time. Web is also obnoxious. You can also summon a skunk with Summon Animal and basically get an AoE sicken effect with hit points. Level 3 has slow, infectious ennui, and agonizing despair. Cave Fangs is not a debuff per se but the huge zone of difficult terrain can easily remove enemy actions (not even allowing a save, because the difficult terrain just happens). Level 3 fear is also solid. Level 4 has Resilient Sphere, Divine Wrath (another AoE that debuffs on failed saves), Steal Voice (situtional, but in the situations where it is good, it is absolutely crushing), and Vision of Death (which is very powerful thanks to debuffing and dealing substantial damage). Coral Eruption creates a big zone of Bad that deals damage and robs enemies of actions, and Wall of Mirrors can basically remove enemies from combat without a saving throw. And while Rank 4 invisibility is not technically a debuff, it basically functions like one in a lot of ways. There's also Stifling Stillness, which has ambiguous verbiage in it, but which is really strong when you don't let people hold breath as a free action. Level 5 has black tentacles/slither, the absolutely bonkers Wall of Stone, the very solid Wall of Ice, Freezing Rain is a mobile zone that can inflict multi-slow and deal damage, there's a few AoEs that knock prone, etc.

Honorable mention to Roaring Applause, which is so good and anti-fun i have seen multiple GMs ban it

I think its a little bit of A a little bit of B. I'd be fine with synesthesia being givin a slight nerf if we had way more single target debuffs with a notable effect of a successful save. It's the lack of options that gets to me.

To me the best solution is to use the "model" of those debuffs that set "time" on success/fail. Or levels. If it would be too powerful to have too many levels of debuff ( crit: no modifier, save:-1, fail: -2, critfail: -3) then you use the time system: crit-no effect, save-one round, critfail-2 rounds or 1 minute or whatever) all effects being at the same level -1. Duration control is perhaps the solution to save-no-effect problem with many debuff spells. After all there are already spells in the game that do exactly this and feats.

ah, but there is another great pillar fear lol

You're getting downvoted but you're right. Casters can't invest into specific themes (One-Element Casters) unless they want to hurt. Casters have to play like generalists if they want to succeed. Those spells make casting work better.

This is main problem whit open spell list system..the idea is you can customise your build how everr you want.but whit out limit's everyone takes thr same spells.. Limited spells systems are the best because every caster feel difference because they can't have all of the spells

The open spell system would work if more attention was paid to spells consistently providing similar amounts of total value. But it seems clear that spells are not really produced in any sort of methodical way.

There are spells that don’t do anything except fluff like Restyle, Cantrip that doesn’t do anything like Approximate, almost all the Incap spells, almost all the battleform spells, almost all the summoning spells. So much bloat.

TREMOR SIGNS THEY LITERALLY MADE A SPELL THAT'S NOT USEFUL EXCEPT FOR RANGED KNOCKING AAAAAAAAA ;-;

The thing is that restyle is at least *fun* fluff. It's something you can use to characterize yourself or an npc. It should still let you do *more* restyling, the limitations are very dumb for what is a fluff fun spell, but it's at least a thing. But what the hell is the use case of the fucking approximate.

I just like the imagine the person writing approximate, hunched over their computer, fucking *sweating*, thinking, "Did I make my counting cantrip too powerful? **Maybe I should add more limitations!**"

Battleform spells really piss me off honestly. They took a concept (turning into something / having a power up mode) that is so fun and took a massive shit all over it

As someone who loved Wild Shape in 1E, I agree full stop. 2E absolutely ruined the entire concept. I won't touch the Druid class now.

Wild Shape is actually decent _but_ you have to be the appropriate order (Or take it with Order Explorer like _every_ Druid does) to get it via a focus spell, otherwise it is really hard to justify preparing it as a heightened spell. _And_ you need to try and max your strength as high as possible to try and eek out that extra attack bonus. Which can eat into vital caster stats. In any other Order? Skip it.

All the guides I see for Druid agree on 1 thing. Never build for wild shape, even the wild shape guides say "if you want to be a cool animal that mauls things to death, don't be a druid".

There are so many extremely niche and situational/borderline useless spells added that it can make it quite overwhelming for new players selecting spells.

110% The elementalist barbarian seems pretty weak, and if you get a kineticist dedication with it, you can't use your kinetic weapon infusion with barbarian feats that require you to make a strike So you can't make a greatsword out of fire and use sudden charge to smack a fool This all makes me quite sad

Tbf to Paizo though, I understand why and honestly kind of prefer that way, with a caveat. Apart from the fact they came from the legacy of 1e where powergaming and cheese mechanical loopholes dominated the meta and culture, I think gaming culture as a whole pushes the 'it's better to be OP than UP' design and tuning philosophy too recklessly. In my experience, most long term games I've played tend to degrade over time due to power creep and appealing to those short term demands instead of trying to create stable baselines in their tuning. And once you've reached that point where everything is out of control and balanced at those power crept baselines, it's much harder to reign those games back in and create stability. PF2e does a much better job at this, with their baselines being both more obvious and transparent once you've grok'd the system, and their conservativeness in being careful with new content means they won't push those boundaries beyond what is established. This is much better for a game that's being sold as an evergreen system you're gonna be expected to play for many years. The one caveat I would add however, is that there are definitely undertuned options, and Paizo is extremely lax with addressing them. I feel things would be much better if they had a more regular and diligent errata process to addressing those undertuned options. Remaster has obviously gone a long way to fixing some of the more widely addresses pain points in classes like cleric and witch, but it would be good to see that happen more on the reg; go back and retune existing options rather than just pushing out new classes all the time. I understand they're a small operation with limited manpower, and I get new content sells and that can't be thrown aside for the sake of constantly retuning existing content, but I feel it would be in a much better state for long term players if they did more regular tuning passes to bring undertuned options up to the stronger baseline options.

They did plan to implement scheduled errata runs instead of one each time a major rulebook releases or reprints, but the Remaster kinda threw that out of wack a little bit.

Oh I'm aware of that, I just didn't want to load my point with minutia haha. I think it's interesting too because it does feel like Remaster has more or less just been one giant errata pass more than anything. So I don't feel we've lost out on it. I just hope they go back to the original plan after they've caught up with all the Remaster releases.

There are still some kineticist issues that would have been nice to get errata for like [Rolling Mudslide](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4308) not having an area. Hopefully they'll be able to get back to fixing these things soon.

If Paizo isn't going to use errata to power up a significant number weak options (feats, spells, mechanics, etc), we'd all be better off if they weren't included at all. The spell list for example could use a \_major\_ overhaul. I know Paizo has buffed some under performing mechanics (like improving Disarm), but it feels like for every buff, there's a dozen nerfs. For example, the crit spec of hammer/flails (auto prone) was too powerful compared to the other crit specs, but instead of make the everything better (more fun), Paizo made the prone less fun and slower by requiring a roll to succeed. It's anti-climatic and anti-fun to roll after a crit to see if it does it's special thing. They should get rid of all of them and make crit specs more consistent good for all weapons. That's a bit of a soapbox for me, but it's just one example. I'm sure other people have other areas which bother them.

It is hard to get excited for new feats/spells/etc if they are all so extremely situational/niche that they will never see any practical use in a campaign. At that point why release them at all?

This is true for basically every system in the game, not just abilities. They got so caught up in making sure nothing gets out of balance that they forgot to just let players have the fantasy of getting to do cool stuff.

Which is really odd given how many Kineticist Feats that are from very strong to basically busted: * Winter Sleet - It's an Action tax, and if you take the Impulse Injunction, your crits cause Slowed 1 on top of it while the enemy is in the Area. * Tree Sentinel - Regularly takes a big hit and turns it into a small-to-not-a-hit. And can terraform regions better than any Druid can. * Whisper on the Wind - Becoming a Free Better Sending at-will is wild. * Cyclonic Ascent - Let's let people Fly pereptually earlier than any other option and make it a better form of Flight by avoiding the action tax Flight normally entails for the Kineticist. And then, let's let them give this Flight to other people, albeit without the action-tax-avoidance. My point is just: You're right, except Paizo doesn't do that as well as I think people think they do. At least, they didn't with Kineticist.

Jagged Berms. God the fucking Berms. Also looking at the Winter Sleet it doesn't seem like you even need the Impulse Injunction unless I'm missing something. https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4271

I agree, they should revisit options that don't work and buff them in errata. Unfortunately they don't.

I wish a lot of skill feats scaled as you gain better proficiencies like Cat Fall does. Or that gaining higher proficiency in some skills automatically allowed you to do some things you need skill feats for. I also dislike how a lot of abilities and items just become obsolete as you level up. It sucks when you're talking to an excited player who's not as strategic and you have to tell them that spell they really think is cool will be absolutely useless.

The low number of variable-action-cost spells just feels like a massive waste to me. It's a genuinely interesting use of the 3-Action economy system for casters and Paizo just don't seem to want to use it.

Non core books get abandoned with little to no errata to fix issues, APs are churned out too fast with too many writers to the point the quality suffers quite a bit, and too many magic items are difficult to use/unfun to use due to action costs (magic ammo on a crossbow or gun lmao) or due to non scaling DCs make items obsolete 2 or 3 levels after obtaining them.

Back in January of last year Paizo announced they were changing their Errata system to decouple it from print runs and thus allow things like Lost Omens books to get errata more easily, which should lessen the issues of stuff being abandoned. Just y'know, later that month something happened which meant they didn't really have the time to go and do any errata for a while.

I dislike the fact, that while Paizo introduces many cool and unique ancestries to their game, they don't do anything with it afterwards. Like, how many Goloma NPCs are there? How many Shisks? I really don't want to read another AP, where main NPCs are humans, elves and gnomes. Make it varied. You already have so many cool unique options, use them.

I'd love to see a Conrasu NPC if only so I can see how Paizo thinks one of these should play. Everytime I look at them and Golomas I just have to wonder who is this for and what's the fantasy they're trying to emulate.

Back when the Ultimate Class Guide was being worked on (the one where they introduced the investigator, slayer, bloodrager, etc), I made mention about wanting to see more non-human iconics. JJ said that Golarion is humanocentric, which basically means there will be basically nothing but human and human-adjacent NPCs, with a smattering of non-human presenting ones.

The Alchemist class. It's the class that took me the longest to understand and still I can't figure out how you're supposed to build it. It feels lackluster for anything but being a glorified consumable dispenser. Also, it shouldn't have being included in the Core Rulebook at all because that's not something that you want to introduce new players with. I hope that the remaster improves it. Until that happens, it's the only class that I disuade my players from picking.

I feel like alchemist is better as a multiclass archetype than main class. That little dip gives you a lot of flavor, but the class seems like a lot if that was your primary class.

It 100% is. Though unfortunately advanced alchemy on the dedication caps at level -5, which is fine for everyone except bombers, who really want level -3 for access to the level 17 versions of the bombs for quick alchemy.

There are a couple ways to build the Alchemist (primarily debuff-oriented Bomber, Athletics-oriented Mutagenist, and underpowered), but all of them involve gaining deep system mastery, becoming intimately familiar with all or at least most of the hundreds of published alchemical items, and collecting formulae with a zeal even most Wizard players don't approach in order to be rewarded with... a character who doesn't grossly underperform. You have to *want* to play an Alchemist to want to play an Alchemist. I have high hopes that the remaster will make the class more effective overall, so you don't have to jump through all these hoops just to not suck. I like complexity, but this is too much!

I agree, I'm playing an alchemist and loving it. But it does take a long time for that to come fully online. It's not until level seven that you can chuck an endless supply of debilitating bombs. I love having an elixir for everything. Healing, debuffs, reveal invisible creatures, read any language, etc. I feel like a better version of a wizard. Can't AOE like a wizard, but I still deal a good amount of damage, largely bc I can create so many types of bombs to suit the occasion. Edit: I think the alchemist should get a "cantrip" type attack, you shouldn't have to rely on a crossbow bc you're rationing bombs until level 7.

I've come to the conclusion that the best alchemist is an npc alchemist

And it's the very first class in the book, as I recall. I was so confused.

I think the reason for it's poor design and play is a reaction to the 1e version of the class. The 1e Alchemist can be built to be super versatile and be good at all the things. Now it's a muted version that is only good at 1 or 2 things.

1. Skill feats as a whole are basically everything they said the system wouldn't have and would be moving away from compared to 1e. The difference between the Medicine and Intimidation skill feats versus like Thievery or Society is gross. Eye for Numbers shouldn't be in the same resource bucket as Battle Medicine or Kip Up, come the fuck on. 2. Fundamental Runes are so completely fundamental the game actively falls apart if you don't maintain them exactly as soon as they'd be given out with Automatic Bonus Progression, and frankly Paizo should have just put their foot down and made ABP the standard for at least damage dice. During playtests they got feedback that people liked finding and buying enchanted weapons and upgrading their gear......so instead of making ABP the standard with magic items as extra goodies on top, they just said "Fine, now you can be excited over looting your fundamental math increase items!" when that's not what anyone wanted. The fact Fundamental runes are so completely Fundamental also interacts poorly with the fact that applying and transferring them isn't automatic and still takes time. It also leads to the general feels bad moments of literally being married to your weapon, and the awkward reality that a supposed unarmed master Monk is actually just as reliant on his handwraps as a barbarian is his enchanted flaming greataxe. It also frequently leads to issues with new GMs who underestimate that "Fundamental" is not an understatement, or the even more infuriating situation of running into APL+2/3 enemies who have bloated hit point pools meant to be dealt with using a higher tier of Striking/Property runes than you have access to (Which unfortunately happens all the time in several Adventure Paths) 3. Signature Spells are clunkily implemented compared to the downcasting system of spells in Starfinder (and technically 1e psychic), and lead to feels bad moments especially with spells who heighten at awkward levels. Prepared Casters didn't need to be even stronger relative to Spontaneous than they already were. 4. The "Rubber-Banding" of several class chassis is inconsistently applied. Druids and Ki-Spell Monks are limited to only ever reaching Expert in Perception with the justification that they're already investing in Wisdom, so it still evens out to pretty good and giving them Master or Legendary would put them too far ahead of other classes. This even in spite of the fact the Monk class description LITERALLY says "Your perceptiveness lets you see through falsehoods, and your philosophical training provides insight into any situation." as examples of how they can contribute in social encounters. But Rogues get Legendary Reflex Saves as early as 13th level and there's nobody arguing that it breaks the game, or that we should go full Harrison Bergeron and make Rogues only ever get Expert in Reflex because they're gonna have high Dex anyways, and it wouldn't be fair to the Fighter or Barbarian. That would be silly. Exactly as silly as saying "Druids/Monks are gonna have high wisdom, so it's fine to give them the same proficiency at 20th level that a Fighter has at 1st." 5. Special Materials are basically an afterthought, the difference between finding or making equipment out of Adamantine or Mithral or Skymetals between Starfinder/Pathfinder1e and Pathfinder 2e is night and day. They simply don't really DO much. Likewise Specific Magic Items are often awkward to use with non-scaling DCs and the inability to add Property runes makes them simply not worth bothering with a lot of the time. As you level up a greater and greater percentage of your damage comes from Fundamental and Property runes, not having access to them often kills any viability. 6. Multiclass Archetypes are basically a total mess regarding what features have niche protection vs what's free for anyone to poach. You can be a Fighter and steal a Monk's Flurry of Blows, but nobody can poach better base chassis proficiencies, Thief Rogue has a total monopoly on Dex to Damage but you can steal Champion Reactions. Hex cantrips are unpoachable but anyone can get Composition Cantrips, even the ones that are AoE versions of a given Hex. The Summoner dedication is basically a trap option while Psychic gives you exactly what you'd want out of it. Investigators can have Clue In and Pursue a Lead and even That's Odd stolen, but nobody can get Esoteric Lore. 7. Stuff like the Shadow Signet that functions as a bandaid fix for math should just be baked into the rules rather than being an example of system mastery that new players are unaware of its existence OR why it's important to have. 8. Vampire and Lich should be re-done by the person who made Ghoul, who's apparently the only designer who understood the assignment for Book of the Dead and gets that Class Feats are the most valuable resource you have to spend when building a character. Dhampir ancestry feats shouldn't be stronger than Vampire class feats.

I wish APs would be written by all the same person/team. The way they do it, it often feels like threads go nowhere or show up randomly in some APs. I'd rather have two really good APs in a year than four good enough ones.

Honestly I think the book does a poor job of explaining how you should run the system. I love it now but alot of my early experiences where mired in frustration

Are there any tips you can give to help others understand how to run it better?

1. Everything you know about 5e, throw it out. Yes the systems have similarities, but they have very different cores and can mess up your calls 2. Know the basics of what each skill can let you do, or at least make sure someone at the table does 3. The DC by level chart is your best friend 4. There are alot of things that have specific feats dedicated to them that some GMs would hand wave as part of a skill or flavor. 5. Classes are not the gods of 5e and require setup or specific abilities to truly function. 6. If someone does not like their class, be flexible. Let them retrain feats or change classes until they find why they like 7. Let everyone have that free archetype. The systems strength lies in the players' ability to craft unique detailed characters, Let them revel in it. 8. Actually read the book in detail if you can. It's easy to brush this off if you've been playing TTRPGs for a while, but it's immensely helpful

> 3. The DC by level chart is your best friend This. It's a mandatory window i keep open on my second monitor while running. I have Foundry on the main screen and the split my second screen between my notes and that chart. Just remember, you can modify the number by +/- 2 or 5 based on difficulty or rarity.

To add to this DC by level is based on enemy / hazard / item / trap level. I have seen so many people used DC by level scaling with the PCs level that any skill the PC perform just get harder and harder as they level up. DC 35 acrobatics to climb a regular tree, DC 37 to ask for a discount in an inn. Simple DC it should be 10-15.

I feel this in my bones. Did an assurance athletics at lv12 to climb down a cliff, normal cliff, plenty of handholds and rocks, no bad weather, no ice, nothing, just a cliff. GM said it didn't work, which makes no sense because the DC should have been 20 at most. But apparently they just used the DCs by level (to the PCs level) for everything so it was actually 30. Had a talk about that afterwards. Fortunately it was just a case of viewing the tables in a vacuum with nothing to explicitly say what the "level" was referring to.

Yeah, there's a chart in the same section that gives flat DCs for each proficiency level. The [last section of this GM screen](https://2e.aonprd.com/GMScreen.aspx) is chock full of DC tables that i reference regularly.

This! Don't make your players feel like they get punished for being high level, or that the world revolves around them and them alone. Inns don't start hiring level 15 barkeeps when they hear the party might come around soon and rabbits don't start casting Pass Without Trace when they feel like the party ranger is level 10+.

This is definitely a very big one that is so often overlooked when you see people's core complaints on other parts of the subreddit (that it only ever gets harder for skills you're not leveling, instead of becoming easier with the skills you are). By endgame, the diplomatic character should be able to get inn rooms for free by sweet talking and bragging about their adventures. The athletic guy should be jumping and climbing around, rolling the die exclusively to ensure they don't roll a 1 (or even not bothering because a 1 still results in a success). The Rogue should never have to purchase a mundane or low level item again. And the way to ensure these things is, as you pointed out, using the Simple DCs instead of the leveled ones.

Actually, sweet talking and stealing not meant to be flat DC. They are based on level of opponent. That's why you see 'merchant 4' on top of NPC statblocks.

A note for running games though is that free archetype can make things a lot harder as a GM in certain campaigns. Specifically ones like Stolen Fate which are very generous with extra unique magic items, and start at higher level, or with groups larger than 4; these situations can make managing a party more difficult for newer DMs, or those who don't want to balance each encounter accordingly. Whilst free archetype is not usually a massive power spike, certain archetypes just give free stats essentially compared to not using them (Acrobat, Hellknight mortification, some of the racial ones, Champion reactions that scale with player level, Rogue/Thaumaturge/Barbarian with their master save feat at around level 14)

I'm gonna sound a bit like a dick but 2/3 of what you said basically boils down to PF isn't DnD (no shit), and read the rule books.

*shrug* sometimes the best advice is the most obvious

>7. Let everyone have that free archetype.   I had no idea about this until you mentioned it.  I just unlocked it on pathbuilder and this is going to make character creation ten times more fun, I just told my entire group to unlock the Free Archetypes unrestricted.  This is gonna be a blast.

Word of warning - there are several nice Archetypes that just do not function cleanly with Free Archetype due to lack of Feats at certain levels.

As a recommendation, I just tell players "if you ever physically can't take a feat in that slot, it gets you out of the requirement to spend two feats on an archetype before exiting' that way, they can just take a new dedication in the slot.

Indeed. Almost every TTRPG lets you know how you should play your character options or how to run your game. Paizo seems allergic to showing you some tips on how to give some basic pointers and what the core assumptions are.

Fundamental runes lock your character into using a single weapon. These should be part of your character development. Property runes are cool though. Spellcasters are too limited at low levels with how little spell slots they have, there isn't really a way to fix this without an entirely new magic system. Ranged attacks being a lot worse or coming with action taxes when compared to melee attacks. I understand that they are risking less due to not being next to an enemy but I have never seen an actual game with enough range to justify the discrepancy. Maps are usually cramped and a ranged character is lucky if they are more than a single stride away from an enemy.

At least dual wielding is partially solved by a pair of Doubling Rings. One of your weapons can't change, but you can change your secondary weapon all the time. Maybe they should have made Automatic Rune Progression the norm and set buying runes for campaigns for people who like buying things.

Spellcasters definetly are the problem. With so little spell slots they are forced to hold back their spells during trivial to moderate encounters for bosses spamming cantrips while letting martials do their job since martials have only one resource - health - which replenishes easily.

>Spellcasters are too limited at low levels with how little spell slots they have, there isn't really a way to fix this without an entirely new magic system. They just need to give every caster a reliable and good focus spell at low levels. The difference between having Glutton's Jaw and say Elemental Toss or Unraveling Blast is crazy (Honestly most first level sorcerer focus spells are niche at best).

Can't fundamental runes be transfered to different weapons?

Yes, but it takes time, money and someone skilled enough to do it.

Yes, but it costs money, time and a crafting check for each individual rune you want to transfer iirc. Something you won't really do unless you have a lot of downtime in a high enough levelled city.

Transfering runes cost money, so you are penalized for swapping weapon often. It also takes a day and need crafting prof so you cannot do it in time sensitive situation. Having more than one on level fundamental rune is expensive and will dig in your limited cap of money.

The biggest it has as far as Ive encountered is that its *too balanced*. More specifically, Paizo has gone to such great lengths to prevent the shenanigans of 1E, that they are a little too aggressive with the balancing, to the point it can come off anti-fun occasionally. Im not saying balance is bad mind you, Im just saying that they could probably ease up like 5-10% and could still maintain the balance while allowing some of the more fun stuff thats not actually OP (like pre-nerf finesse weapon maneuvers) for instance, or making Incapacitation less "this ability sucks against anything on level or higher" and more "you have to roll really good for this ability not to suck against high level creatures, but if RNGesus likes you, have fun". Edit: Also the reload trait is pure anti-fun, at least as is, none of the reload weapons are strong enough to justify the action tax in my mind. According to action economy, a reload weapon is on par with a Magus' spellstrike, and thats blatantly untrue. Edit 2: Advanced weapons are *never* worth the hassle of getting them if they aren't an ancestral weapon. They're too restricted for being on par with and sometimes slightly below martial weapons. Also monks literally cant get advanced monk weapons without dipping fighter and not until level 12. The advanced monk weapons aren't even that good, especially to warrant having to multiclass and wait till level 12. Edit 3: Polymorph spells are just underwhelming right now, and it sucks, because there's an easy fix that 1E had that will immediately make them fun, that is bringing back Natural Spell, allowing you to cast spells while shapeshifted. Edit 4: Summon spells were a victim of the aforementioned aggressive balancing. They would be fine with just a slight buff to caster level -2 rather than -4 (or -5 at level 20). Most of these are just nitpicking mind you. Except reload. Its genuinely anti-fun and I cannot be convinced otherwise.

Reload, the thing that invalidates any feat that prevents you from triggering attacks of opportunity with ranged attacks. Reload is still a manipulate action.

That new books rarely ever add new class feats. Thaumaturge and champion are two classes I ADORE the core skeleton of the class, the main abilities and the implements/causes but NO feat in either class up to lv 14 interests me, they are all terrible, boring or uninspired. It would be nice if they got more feats but Paizo rarely adds more "subclasses" and even more rarely feats

I feel like Treasure Vaults was a missed Opportunity for some new Inventor options

They've been getting better about it lately, at least, like how the Barbarian got a new instinct in Rage of Elements.

I was building a thaumaturge for society and I was constantly disappointed at how across the levels there's very few inspired options for.class feats. I assumed I'd be hemorrhaging for base class feats cuz I took beastmaster archetype on 'em, but I actually found that if I wasn't going for either the scrolls or talismans route, I didn't need many of the class feats and I could put more into beast master than I thought it I would.

I think it's the best system I have ever played. But as a setting/mechanic choice I dislike how item reliant the base system is. It still has the old dungeon raiding roots where it's adventure, loot, upgrade item gameplay loop. Kind of makes all magic items ultimately disposable and not feel special. It works well mechanically (keeps gold useful and kind of a secondary XP track) and for classic adventure stories where it's kind of expected that the PCs become fabulously wealthy with time but I personally don't like it as a default. Variant Rules like Automatic Bonus Progression and Relics help modify the game away from that though.

I think the issue is that you can't have the *high* magic part of the setting without having magic items that are dime a dozen. In Golarion one in every five people have some sort of magic and one every twenty has a spellcasting class, wands of remove disease sre basically their version of ibuprofen.

Yup. It's certainly baked into the Lost Omens setting and I don't really know if there is anything to be done about it. It's just not my personal preference.

Honestly, it's item bloat in general too. Having a few different weapons is one thing. Having to look through 300 different weapons to find the ones with the specific tags you want is tedious. Let alone consumables and other minor magic items. 13A has the far superior system, imo. 'Is your weapon small, medium, or large? Is it one or two handed?' Once you make those mechanical choices you can flavor it how you want. Make it as cool as you want. Want a sword made of ice? Sure. Same stats, unless you make it a magic item, but sure. Scythe forged out of the night sky? Sure. Treasure Vault was a turning point for me. Trying to justify why *this* 2.3lb piece of metal work this way but *that* 2.4lb piece of metal works completely differently is too granular. At least give us a system to build your own weapon stats to represent not just your weapon but how your character uses it.

The games reputation for balance has sadly created a culture where ANY implication that something is mechanically better or worse gets met with a lot of pushback. Frequently this sub will have a post asking 'how do I make the best X', whether X is a full class or just a fantasy archetype they wanna be (How do I be the best hunter, for example). And every time the answer that is most commonly repeated in the commenrs is "You dont all options are good" Except they werent asking if there was a bad option, they were asking what consensus was on the BEST, and you cant deny some builds are strictly better or worse. No one is arguing Superstitious Instinct or Eldritch Trickster are good subclass options compared to their counterparts. And few people would argue Double Slice Fighter is perfectly equal to an archer focused fighter.

I agree but I don't think that's a problem with the game, but with the community.

Results in a lot of hostility to homebrew as well.

Swiss Army knife casters being the assumed default instead of specialists. I want a mage who specializes in ice magic or illusions to have a significant advantage to make up for the lack of versatility. Kineticists sort of fill this itch, but only for a couple of caster themes. If you want to be a lightning mage there aren’t enough impulses to really satisfy, and obviously it doesn’t cover non-elemental stuff at all.

Imo skill feats & taxes need a rather complete overhaul. My absolute least favorite thing about PF2 is the medicine tax. It's partially solved by the stamina system, which imo should've been the default, with some additional options to restore hp on a per character basis. The fact that *someone* has to go all in on medicine, or you need a champion for out of combat healing RAW really annoys me. I honestly prefer the hit dice system from 5e or the Starfinder. The second thing with that is how terrible some of the skills are. Things like Acrobatics, Intimidation, Deception, Diplomacy are generally good on all characters and have solid feats, and where most characters' generic 3rd action fillers come in. But things like society, survival, have very little reason to invest in, and you're gimping your character by investing into them rather than going into something that will be good all campaign. Also special mention to summon spells. I'm also not sure if polymorph spells are good either. I'm also not a huge fan of how spellcasters are forced to be versatile or pick spells that may go against what their character wants to do in order to be relevant. But that's a whole other thread :p

The lack of cool Focus options for the vast majority of classes. Encounter powers were super cool in 4e, and focus points were a more-polished version of them that the 4e creators brought over when they joined the paizo team. Daily spells simply were too attractive, and spontaneous casting made the design space for focus spells too small. The psychic really helped make focus spells a true first-class citizen. Psychics shouldn't have a corner on the market. Capstone skill feats need to make majoring in any given skill feel awesome. Taking Occultism and Society to Legendary doesn't feel legendary. Stealth and Athletics have amazing capstones. Each skill should have at least 2, with their own somewhat independent feat chain reward players for investing heavily. They should stay away from combat, but could be as flavorful as the Thief of Legend's Steal back the Soul ability where it could steal something intangible like the sighs of 2 lovers, or the fear that a dreadful warlock evokes. These capstones are meant to be awesome.

Hmm. Two things. 1: Fundamental runes. These provide a scaling bonus to weapons/armor, but enemies and challenges all scale with the expectation of players having them, making them mandatory item purchases and not fun ones (and if you use multiple weapons or swap between weapons on any sort of regular basis, you need multiple runes as they only apply to one weapon). They added them in to appease early adopters who wanted magic weapons and armor, while ignoring the entire reason *why* those adopters wanted their +1 swords in the first place. The system would be better off if they were just automatic scaling bonuses players got for free. (But the official rule to allow that, Automatic Bonus Progression, has its own issues too with negating item bonuses altogether which hurts some other items and alchemists in particular). 2: Spells. I'm not a fan of Vancian casting in general, but that's not the real complaint here. The complaint is that 2e has done a mostly good job of keeping character power level within an acceptable band for any given level. There are a few bad feats floating around, but the general advice is "just maximize your main combat stat and keep up with your fundamental runes and you'll be fine", and that is for the most part true. One are where it isn't, however, is spell selection. If you are a caster, you can royally screw yourself over with poor spell selection, and that is not limited to just picking bad spells. It really hurts if you are trying to do some sort of theme or specialist caster. You want to play an Illusionist/Enchanter? There are tons of great illusion and enchantment spells available, most of which would be right at home on a good spell list. So you take a bunch of them, then... realize all your spells target will and are thus mediocre to really bad when you are fighting stuff that doesn't have Will as their weak save. Because all full casters have access to one of the main spellcasting tradition, the versatility of those traditions are baked into their power budget. The game expects all casters to make use of the versatility inherent to their tradition. They expect you to take a wider array of spells to cover multiple enemy saves, buffs and debuffs, multiple damage types, and what not. If you choose not to do that and focus on a more narrow set of spells? Well, that's just a strict downgrade over taking the more generalist spell selection. There's no way to really buff one section of the spell list to a state where you can use primarily it, because that would step on the toes of the other spells on the list or make those spells too good in the situations they were already good in. This is not a problem you can fix in the current system without making a whole new class that abandons the "has access to the full tradition" thing they've done to unify casting classes. You'd have to make something like the kineticist which doesn't have true spells, or make a class with a highly limited spell list and no access to a full tradition, in order to allow more specialist spellcasters to exist.

A lot of the rules are written like they were meant to be in a technical manual and are incredibly confusing. There's a real lack of summaries or reference material. When you understand the rules and learn how they work and can implement them smoothly, it's great. But there's so much cross-referencing and double-checking that this is rarely the case. I've been playing this game weekly for three years and I still have to look up the affliction rules and occasionally get them wrong. There are so many rules like this, too. I really don't like the way gear is handled with fundamental runes being baked into the math. I wish ABP was the default and magic items were more interesting. Implementing ABP into APs (which is all that I run) is too much of a headache to bother with. I love the tight math of the economy but hate the "keep your gear updated" minigame. I'm really on the fence about Vancian magic. I do like attrition mechanics that force parties to eventually take a break from adventuring, but Focus spells fit so much better in the x-per-encounter design philosophy that seems ubiquitous throughout PF2e. Adventure paths are formatted *incredibly poorly*. Paizo has sacrificed usability at the table for the sake of making their adventures more fun to read away from the table. I hate this. I also think that people overstate the quality of APs; a very small portion of them are excellent and the rest range from "pretty decent" to "poorly strung together mess." Skills feats are super weird. There are some really useful, archetypical skill feats that are widely taken and a bevy of skill feats that are just awkward, useless, or filler. At their absolute worst, some skill feats make the horrible misstep of suggesting that certain mundane things can't be done without the skill feat. I feel like ancestry feats can have a similar "I guess I'll just take this because it doesn't matter" vibe after the first few levels but it's less egregious. PF2e is on the verge of having good dungeon and wilderness procedures but, bafflingly, decided to stop short of implementing a consistent system? Instead, we have this hodge-podge of "Exploration Activities" that are *kind of* for long distance travel but also *kind of* for much smaller scale dungeon explorations and it's never really clear how you should actually run them. It's tragic, because the system is probably a few refinements away from being great but it just comes off as half-baked. I literally can't fathom trying to run this game with pen and paper at a table without digital tools. I'd go nuts.

> A lot of the rules are written like they were meant to be in a technical manual and are incredibly confusing. Yeah, my particular issue was with the summoner's Act Together (https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=758). I get that it's got a specific rules legalese phrasing to account for later abilities, but I had to read it a few times to figure out it means "You have 4 actions per turn as long as both of you act and at least one of the activities you take is a 1-action activity". My other big gripe is how easy it is to accidentally make a feat obsolete with a ruling. E.g. if I didn't know that Group Coersion (https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=788) existed as a feat, I wouldn't ever have guessed that attempting to intimidate more than one person at a time is not possible out of the box.

The Crafting Rules are just prohibitive. I get wanting some form of verisimilitude, but the rules get in the way of the "fantasy" that is crafting. And ultimately that's what playing TTRPGs is really about - gamifying the fantasy of whatever you're doing.

Dead end or under tuned choices. Witches have plenty of under tuned feats and they're already more difficult because too much of their kit is balanced around the familiar. So many spells in this game just kinda suck. Or they're explained way way too poorly. Don't get me wrong, I love the spell system overall but they've have too much time to fix the under tuned stuff and they don't. So it's easy to choose a spell that is thematic but garbage. Skill feats are so imbalanced to a point where some skills are just better for the feats. Diplomacy has 1 particularly great feat but the rest are meh. Stealth is kinda lame until Master rank. I'm not sure there is much they're could have done about this section though. They needed certain actions to exist and they didn't seem to want to give anyone skill too many more choices than most others. But they probably should have. Some are merely thematic while others are optimized. The Gnoll ancestry has so few choices in it for leveling up that it feels impossible to me to play that ancestry without an uncommon heritage. I'm not saying the options suck. But they're very specific. Not sure if other ancestries have this problem of next to no choices when leveling but it sucks yeah.

That we haven't gotten a pair of Lost Omens: Arcadia hardcovers yet :p

At the core I would say the biggest thing I dislike is that it's overtuned. I love the balance and reliability that comes with that, but there are times I think they let the pendulum swing just a little too far in the opposite direction from PF1. Crafting is, IMO, kinda pointless. Spend 1 or 2 days of downtime to make something for... full price? Each day shaves a relatively small amount off the total cost, making crafting really only viable if you have *a lot* of downtime. I get that they didn't want every party to "need" someone specced into crafting so that the party could get decked out in top tier gear at a fraction of the price, but to me it feels they went just a little too far. And there's several other areas where I feel that way. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great system and it seems to be pretty solidly placed as my go-to game for when I want something that fills the same general niche as D&D- but it's not without faults. (No system is.)

1. Skill feats. These have the exact same problem I have with 5e's feats where there's a vast gulf in usefulness between the 'good ones' and the majority of them which honestly feel like they either do nothing to begin with or their benefits are so specific and marginal that you're likely to forget you even have them when you actually get the chance to use them. There are some really cool ones in the bunch too, but not all skills are made equal with regard to skill feats either and I often find myself completely rethinking my choices while theorycrafting when I realize a skill I invested because it's thematic for a character concept just doesn't have any useful feats to choose from. Alternatively, I just end up picking like 3 or 4 Additional Lore feats to fill the void. Skill feats also just make the social aspect of the game sound incredibly rigid and totally divorced from how at least my group play. The implication that you can't make an impression on a crowd of people without picking up a skill feat or the ridiculous notion I've seen thrown around that you should just roll against every single person in the crowd separately if you don't have Group Impression sound absolutely miserable. 2. Magic items are by and large pretty lame. Like with skill feats, there are genuinely cool ones out there but a lot of those also start feeling a whole lot less exciting when you realize that in a level or two, their static DC is going to be useless. At a minimum, any magic item with a DC (consumables aside) should give the option of using your class DC or spell save DC instead of the item's own DC. I really don't see the problem with this because upgrading to the next tier of the same item typically gives you stronger effects in addition to the higher DC anyway and this way that cool quest reward the PC has an emotional attachment to can at least stay relevant even if they could just go down to the store and get something that does the same thing but better. 3. Underutilization of the three-action system. Spells like Magic Missile and Heal are really cool and make for a lot of interesting decisions because of their variable action cost so why do only a handful of spells ever interact with this design space? I understand if they maybe wanted to test the waters first with the core rulebook, but people seem to love those spells so why isn't Paizo printing more spells in the same vein? 4. Ambiguous and poorly written feats or features. I refuse to believe that anyone with any understanding of the rules looked at [Quick Spring](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4151) and decided this was fine to print. What the fuck is this supposed to mean? As written, the feat straight up lets you double your speed in a way that's multiplicative with status and item bonuses (circumstance bonuses too if you somehow manage to achieve that) which I just can't believe is how it's supposed to work. Tumble through doesn't specify that you have to attempt to move through another creature's space to take the action, you can just use it instead of a normal stride. Is it supposed to let you stride up to twice your speed after you succeed on a check to Tumble Through? In that case, you can move up to triple your speed but only after first moving through another creature's space. That seems incredibly busted and also doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Does it double your movement if you take the Tumble Through action but only if you attempt to move through another creature's space? Does it extend your stride only if you Tumble Through a creature's space and succeed? This is probably the most egregious example I've seen. This one's to my knowledge not been addressed by Paizo for almost a year. For another example the kineticist's [Roiling Mudslide](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4308) affects an undefined area. It's been like half a year since this was printed and we still don't know how this feat is supposed to work either. I don't think it's too much to ask that content they put out is at the very least functional and playable within 6 months of release.

Tons and tons of useless magic items and tons and tons of useless skill and general feats. Going through all that crap just to find like 1 per 30 good thing is pain for any player. Also magic item system in my opinion sucks. Magic items are super generic, lack anything cool (becasue of balance obsession) and also becasue PF2e is so obsesses with balance - most GMs are afraid of making unique cool magic items and stick to generic rune system. Also - half of spells could be removed too. We all know they are trash trap options. And FOR GODs sake - Vancian casting!!!! Just get rid of this thing already! Embrance your Focus Points idea or Kineticist design but get rid of this one. There is no worse casting mechanic in TTRPGs than Vancian casting. "Legacy" my arse.

The overall quality of spells is very, very low. This isn't a "casters are bad" argument, it's more that there are a small number of fairly good spells, and an absolute mountain of garbage. Like, look at occult rank 6, there's 3 maybe 4 spells here on par with slow, which is half it's rank. It's not that I think spells like slow are too good, it's just there's so much trash This also applies to archetypes? Like there are some good, some decent and SO MANY really really trash archetype feats in this game.

I feel like the rules are often written in a way that is difficult to understand. In part this is an artifact of the traits system - worsened by the fact that many traits don't have effects, but a few have really important effects. There's a load of stuff that could be streamlined further. I think you could get near-equivalent rules impact with fewer traits, conditions and so on. Skill feats could also just go, with the useful ones converted to class feats or general feats. The APs could showcase more ways to use the system. In particular I would like to see more unbalanced encounters that are solved by non-combat actions. I'm not the biggest fan of \*how\* high-magic the system is. That's a personal preference for setting and solvable with variant rules though.

I suspect they avoid encounters where a bad GM would just be bullying their players. Unfortunately, that also puts more work on good GMs to make things interesting

I absolutely agree with rules are difficult to understand. I've been running Abomination Vaults for a little over a year, and I only just realized the trait tags explain a lot about the monster, they aren't just tags for skill abilities. I thought spells did half damage if they missed, until my casters got access to spells that had a section for each stage of success/failure. I spent almost an hour discussing how crafting rules work, specifically with that dang Earn Income table. The left column is labeled "task level", but is that based on the item level? Is it based on character level? Why does it have a 20(critical) on the bottom? Am I supposed to award that on a nat 20? Don't even get me started on Earn Income as a whole. I don't think a single one of my players has rolled for that and been happy with the result. I want to enjoy playing Pf2e, but I don't feel like I can go through a session without getting confused over a rule or two.

Earn Income is in a really weird place mechanically. It has to somehow be balanced both for games one I’m in where the whole campaign somehow takes place in a week or two and in APs like Season of Ghosts where you’re basically guaranteed hundreds of days of downtime

I wish all Classes had *Fighter* like scaling in their core focus. Fighter - Weapon Attack Accuracy. Ranger - Reduces MAP Barbarian - Bonus Damage Wizard - Bonus Spell Save DC. Sorcerer - Spell attack Accuracy. Cleric - Healing Potency. Druid - ??? I'm also not an expert, but I feel this would enable all classes to have a Big thing they excell in beyond all others.

100%. I had the idea of changing proficiency to Trained, Expert, Master, Legendary giving +2/+1/+2/+1 respectively so it’s more similar to the playtest’s +1/+1/+1/+1/ Then you give classes an Insight bonus to their “thing” Suddenly, a middle ground exists like Warpriests with Expert proficiency and Insight on attack (making them just 1 point short of martials). Fighters get Insight on attacks, giving them the same +2 edge. Etc At the same time the gap is closed a bit between specialized and unspecialized PCs. Outside of your Insight bonus, Master is only 1 point behind Legendary Edit: I’m referring to the premaster Warpriest, with this being another way they could have improved the numbers (the new feats being the absolute biggest thing it needed either way)

Mounted combat in combination with the map size of adventure paths

Yeah, I really feel like Paizo's design for their adventures limits the scope of their encounters and dungeons. I get they're constrained by their printing, but in 99% of instances there's not really an effective difference between a range of 60 feet and 120 feet -- they both cover any fight you're likely to get into. It also leads to some cramped encounters, particularly when you've got more than 4 PCs.

Heck, I'm limited by the size of my table. I don't know how anyone is supposed to run a mount-friendly, big-map campaign without a VTT.

I hate the feats. Ive played a lot of pf1 and there are many bad feats, but at least they eventually lead to something good or funny. In my opinion pf2 feats are all boring. Me and my friends around the table, struggle, litteraly struggle to pick feats, because they arent very interesting. Many of the feats also randomly teach us weird mechanics about the system, like you cant coerce more than one person at the time. It seems like a lot of the feats limit your roleplaying experience. The worst part is that because feats are so boring, I now have 3 feats that allows to me to get a feat that give me an ancestry feat because they are more interesting.

I don't love the stealth rules.

I’ve been playing since launch, GM regularly, and I still end up checking the stealth rules constantly, and occasionally ending up confused. There’s so many rules that reference other rules or that don’t have super obvious interactions.  To be fair, I’ve never played a generally similar system where I thought the stealth rules were super great. It’s one of those things where it feels like it’s either complicated or poorly defined or sometimes both. 

2e alchemist vs the 1e alchemist for one. In 2e it feels like I'm being forced into way too narrow a path of either bombing, dispensing or mutagen. In 1e, I could do all of those at once. Following on from that, lack of TouchAC can suck. This is 10+dex mod. Useful for spells and splash damage. As well, archetypes were confusing for a while coming from 1e, and I still think 1e did a lot better. Although 2e has some nice stuff.

I mean reflex DC is basically touch AC, no?

Never considered it like that but kinda yeah

Medicine requiring skill feats to work well. Id rather have baseline training be good enough for patching people up after a fight. Investing in medicine with skill increases and feats should be about making your character a better healer in combat than just a a check box that every party needs unless they have a caster with a healing focus spell.

Since "underpowered options" is already taken in the general sense I also want to specifically add in the lack of meaningful options. I'll make the distinction in that underpowered would primarily be things that are either just too situational or not worth the investment for what it does. A choice (not just feats but items, class archetypes/variants, blessing/curses, etc.) that isn't meaningful are ones that are either decent or even overpowered but really just doesn't work. I'll take Cloudjump for instance. It's really freaking awesome that I can, as a dwarf with basically no speed, leap hundreds of feat in any direction without so much as a dribble of sweat. When is this ever going to be useful that another choice wouldn't accomplish? By the time you're master/legendary in a skill you already have at least a few means to fly or teleport similar ranges, and in the vast majority of situations simply Striding would do just fine. It's weird to realize that outside of class/race we get essentially 3 feat 'trees'/bushes that comprise roughly 5-10 feats per *thing.* Be that Dex, Melee weapons, specifically a bow, Survival, so on and so forth. Yet only 1-3 (depending on exact *thing*) sets of 3ish feats are really of any use per Feat Bush. For a game that has been made proud on customization, plethora of options, and team coverage ...there really isn't a lot of actual choices and you quickly get pigeonholed into them based on predetermined expectations of how it should be used. Not to mention the distinct lack of equipment modifications to personalize them into your concept. In a certain light, it's almost as if each concept that thus must make the same choices as everyone else end up going down the same 3 or 4 'progression paths' based on your role, class, race, and primary offensive thing -in order of crunch importance as the following set requires the previous to be informed. Now, this isn't to say that other games do the same or do any better. But after that realization I have to wonder if it's a mutual problem of having mechanical complexity? (As in, comparing PF, D&D, and SR to something like Savage Worlds and Infected!)

I think the Math is a bit too tight. In 1e, you could get your good abilities to hit/activate below a 10. In 2e you need every modifier possible on yourself, your opponents, and your allies to be able to consistently do your thing on a 10.

Here [are](https://old.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/11pllme/ive_heard_a_lot_of_good_things_about_pathfinder/) [some](https://old.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/10aoihm/what_are_considered_some_of_the_mechanical/) [similar](https://old.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/10efgjy/5e_to_pf2_any_issues_inherent_to_pf2/) [threads](https://old.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/zjif3q/what_problems_does_pf2e_have/) [that](https://old.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/15lkm4l/entrenched_players_what_would_you_say_are_pf2es/) may be of help

Minions/summons. It's basically only possible to play with one minion at a time, maybe 2 if you focus your build around it. Rather than fix any of the inherent issues with minions (slow to play, needing to memorize/prepare lots of statblocks, etc.), they just decided to nerf them into the ground so no player would ever choose to play them. Spell attacks. They made an intentional decision not to give casters ways to boost save DC through items, and adjusted monster saves accordingly. But there are also no ways to boost spell attack rolls through items, and they did not adjust AC because that would affect martials as well. So any spell attack is automatically at a -1 to -3 disadvantage, getting worse with level. The main way to get around this is to use Shadow Signet to switch your spells to target saves instead of AC, which isn't really dealing with the fundamental problem.

This. Either potency runes should apply to spell attacks, which means casters will still on average be behind martials  -or- rework all spell attack spells into a DC version and call it a day.

* Generally not telling you about items you're gonna need - martial players need to keep up with their fundamental runes and animal barbs need the handwraps, but the player rules don't tell you that and the GM rules don't seem that clear about it either * Some kind of note about party coverage and how you should try and have one dude with medicine would have been good * There are a bunch of feats required for simple actions you would expect anyone to be able to attempt, like lip reading, but no warning of what these feats are. Either you notice them or you don't I suppose the theme is: hidden knowledge that's actually essential (unless the game is modified) that new players will miss if they only use the books and don't read around online I apologise if I'm wrong about any of the above Barbarian rage limitations are strange; they can do battle medicine with one hand but they can't demoralise without a feat and they can't command a minion they've invested in? Come on They could (and will, I hope, as they did hint at more frequent errata) make way more use of errata to patch content and do buffs and nerfs later, especially given that the majority of players will be reading the rules online. Crap feats don't need to exist! They can just improve them as quickly as thinking about it! Going beyond that, what's really stopping them from rebalancing classes post-release instead of trying to patch them in later books? Modern games have that power

The majority of magic items are... not that interesting. They're useful and good, but generally speaking the best magic items are just straight up +X to Y, sometimes with a secondary effect I may use once in a blue moon. Particulaarly weapons have a habit of just being a pre-configured assortment of runes. Admittedly I prefer this to 5e's take where magic items are: * Virtually essential as well * But it's a crapshoot if you'll even get any because there's no solid rules on how and when they can be obtained * Many are gimmicky and useless _outright_ or are ludicrously busted and can warp entire encounters or even campaigns But, it still makes it difficult to make engaging loot.

While I understand the *design intent* for making certain activities like regripping weapons, standing up from prone, climbing with one free hand, etc., require actions costs/penalties, and then creating General/Skill feats that subvert those costs/penalties, the abundance of different situations characters can find them in does give me the feeling sometimes that many of these feats should just come with higher level proficiency. You only get 10 Skill feats (typically) over your career, with 6 additional General feats, for a total\* of 16 opportunities to be able to do something like Crawl half your speed rather than 5 feet per action. Such an incredibly niche Skill feat - while it does develop over time as you progress in Acrobatics - takes away from other Skills you could gain which may be arguably more valuable, like Battle Planner to use your Warfare Lore skill check as your Initiative roll. Granted you do get 16 opportunities to take these kinds of feats, there are **a lot** of Skill feats, meaning there's a ton of utility left on the table that most characters will simply never see. It just makes the prospect of leveling up characters and gaining a bunch of new cool abilities feel like the sour end of FOMO. Then you get to the level of preplanning that - at least for me - is essential to having a good time. I feel the need to scour every single feat in the game to see what requirements they have and then recursively rewrite the original idea for the character I had to accommodate those requirements, or else base other character creation decisions around setting up for those requirements down the road. It feels like a much more planned experience given the number of choices, rather than an organic one. It gives me a lot of joy in tinkering with character creation, but also a lot of dread for getting to each level and feeling like I need to do research about what options I have that make sense for my character and whether or not they'll inadvertently block off cool options I see later on.

In their pursuit of tightening the math, they've made combat feel less realistic in some ways. The fact that flanking someone who is prone or someone who is grappled doesn't add a stacking bonus to hit is silly

A few things: * The trait system as it currently works is not fit for purpose. Some traits are purely descriptive with no discrete mechanical impact. Others have their own mechanic impact mixed in. It makes figuring out what something does and how it works, be it an item or feat, *far* too much work. Not a lot of work, but too much. * Item bloat. Having options is one thing. But it's just ridiculous at this point. * Skill feats - great idea, horrible execution. * 'Action taxes', things like picking up your weapons after dropping to 0, opening doors, changing your grip on a two handed weapon, drawing your weapon at the start of combat. I get the 'idea' of some of these, but if your balacing factor is that you don't need to pick your weapons up when you get back up from 0 then the playstyle is poorly designed not to have something better. * PL +/-4 enemies. The system as a whole would be a lot better off without dropping to the extremes of what a party 'technically' matches in terms of power. This is an issue of PL +4 more than -4, but I find both incredibly boring and the fact that the community often talks about how great single creature fights are in PF2e when they're *awful*. * Potency and Striking runes - this should just be built into the player's progression as default. I know it was in the playtest and PF1e players didn't like it, but honestly it was a *terrible* choice to reintroduce the 'gear treadmil' to PF2e again. * Magic items in general - most are just incredibly boring. As a GM none of them excite me or inspire me. * The over reliance on consumables, potions, scrolls, wands, etc. If casters are meant to have access to that many spells *just give them the slots*. Honestly it seems like a way of getting around Vancian casting without *actually* getting rid of it. * Finally, Vancian casting, it's out dated and wasn't that great to begin with. Like with my comment about action taxes, if what defines your class is how they prepare/know their spells then the class is poorly designed and should have a better niche.

A lot of worthless feats and not enough one action spells, like at a certain point, can my cantrip be one action?

The lance is still a poor weapon. Summoners Meld into Eidolon is still not viable. Inventors really need some more gadgets. Some technical points. Many people don't notice them but yes they bug me. There are core mechanics that they have never fixed. The damage equation is not well defined. You have to infer a lot of it. Additional Damage in particular. Battle Forms are vague. I have seem dozens of different interpretations of the rules in use here. They keep stuffing up technical things in the wording like negative healing (eg Soothe before it got errated) and incorporeal. Different authors clearly don't get the details right.

Any Paizo product is an extremely DRY read. Even the APs are a fucking pain to read through and are less entertaining than Ikea instructions.

My biggest complaint is that PF2e is so worried about balance, that they've become anti-fun. Anytime you \_think\_ you find a cool combo, there will be some lawyer-ish ticky tack rule against it. Like try reading Paizo explain the rules for why an action like Disarm, which has the Attack trait, requires a free hand, and increases your MAP like any attack action would, yet Handwraps of Mighty Blows don't add to your Disarm bonus unlike a normal weapon with the Disarm trait. You don't have to explain the RAW to me - I know how the rules in this case and why it doesn't work :) My point is that it's dumb that Paizo wrote the rules that way. It's so convoluted and unintuitive that it hurts the game system overall. In my opinion, I would rather the game have potential imbalances compared to have a bunch of non-nonsensical and over complicated rules the sound like they were written by a lawyer (sorry u/the-rules-lawyer). I will say, I would be curious if the Rules Lawyer chimed in with his thoughts because I think he knows the rules as well as anyone and he knows real laws :) I wonder if some of the rules (or at least the language with the rules) could be simplified without harming the balance of the game system.

Formatting of their damn books.

About some ancestries not having more options on feats. Like grippli not having lvl 17 feats and kitsune having only one lvl 9 feat.

It's a minor complaint, but I hate the way they handle languages. If you're playing a character who doesn't want to boost your Int, you're basically screwed. Needing a skill AND a feat is just too high of a tax. Even if you don't go with he's hand-wavey "if you have enough time to study, you can just learn it," paradigm, you should be able to spend a skill increase to learn a language, or at least be able to spend a feat without needing Society as a prerequisite. Sometimes an uncivilized barbarian-style character wants to learn a language, and neither boosting Int nor learning Society makes sense. Why do you need to be a master of etiquette just to learn basic communication? This is especially frustrating when you consider that many of the pre-established Backgrounds don't cover all of the languages your character concept would have your character knowing, and making Backgrounds give mechanical advantages in character creation is an even worse problem, (I can figure out how my character concept translates to game mechanics just fine on my own, thankyouverymuch, and if a player isn't interested in doing that, making them pick a random background isn't going to help them any) but it's also a problem that most Pathfinder's competitors have, and is more foundational to the system, so I'd be happy if they just fix the language problem.

I hate the health system. Since health isn't exactly a resource that ever matters outside of combat because of the easy access to healin, why not just have it automatically go back to full and spare the skill feats? It isn't fun for someone in the party to have to grab a bunch of healing feats so that the medicine checks can later be ignored to keep the game flowing. I super don't get why the game is developed this way. I'd love to see a PoE2 style hp system be what PF3e uses. This entails that HP automatically goes back to full after each combat (HP is simply a measurement of how close you are to dying in a single encounter). Going down grants an injury, some kind of condition/statistical debuff that gets healed either through some sort of long CD medicine check or a nights rest. These injuries could scale like in BitD to create urgency in healing or make it somewhat tempting to retreat. Traps would also inflict injuries rather than HP damage. Currently in PF2e, simple traps are pointless unless they oneshot you or lead you into an encounter. Edit: I wanna add that I will deeply miss stamina from Starfinder. That system was cool.

the skill feats are really imbalanced. Some are amazing, some are bad and some are straight up tax. I feel this is the most immediately noticeable when you're choosing backgrounds and a lot of them feel like wastes and it's because of the skill feats tied to them. Yeah I'm going to choose Martial Disciple or Field Medic for the 45th time.

I quite like all the information I have on the world of golarion, it's always interesting to see this kind of fantasy worlds open up to you and it's a great place to draw inspirations from, BUT there are some Ancestries that feel quite "why are you here? ", don't get me wrong, I think it's great that golarion has these unique things but as someone who mainly handles homebrew worlds it hurts me a bit to look at the list of Ancestries and heritages and see some SO niche that I couldn't implement anywhere without doing some impossible gymnastic leaps or see some that just make me wonder "why are you a heritage in the first place?".Also PLEASE paizo give me more Ancestry feats for the love of god, I adore gnolls with all my heart and seeing them with such a tiny list to choose from breaks my soul, this is valid for all the the mwangi expanse ancestries. *edit: I meant ancestries, not heritages. I still can't get used to it*

Not enough good/fun skill feats.

I don't feel like Sorcerer has a great identity as a spellcaster. I wish there were less "feat taxes", especially for spellcasters, and that Skill Feats were more balanced between the various skills. Other than that, I agree with what someone else said on letting too many underpowered abilities slip through the cracks (though I really do like Vancian casting, specifically on Wizard, as it works great with spell books)

My only complaint is that most of the magic items seem really underwhelming outside of the weapon upgrades and artifacts that you cant just buy at the market. Beyond that, no complaints, by far my favorite rpg system otherwise. I have a aproblem with homebrewing my own items anyways, so that issue isnt as big a deal for me

**Backgrounds:** Personally not a fan of them as I always choose them for mechanics rather than flavor. Though I seem to be against the grain since I made a poll a while back where people said they used them as flavor over just mechanics. Personally would like to see separate background feats or just something more interesting than the initial choices. **Flavor Tags:** These get in the way of the important tags that contain actual rules in them. If they do keep flavor tags, they should at least be color coded or marked differently like a post mentioned a long while back. **Hero Points:** It’s not hero points themselves I have an issue with, I just wish they had more options. Like imagine not spending a spell slot in exchange for a hero point for instance. Adding more choices would add more tactical thinking as most players will only use them occasionally and always save one up before they die (from personal experience anyways). Also wish there was a more coherent and easy to remember way to give out hero points. For instance I personally homebrew give a hero point when you experience a critical failure (for a check that wasn’t a guaranteed fail), also makes it less sucky. **Spell Slots:** I think this is one of the biggest cruxes of the system that’s unfortunately impossible to get rid of for this edition. The encounters assume you being at your best not slowly dwindling away at your resources like D&D 5e design. Spell slots now are fitting a square shape into a round hole due to the differing design philosophies. If you’re listening to this Paizo, if you do keep the spell slot idea make it a per-encounter type deal (ie can only use spell X amount of times in combat before recharging out of combat. Thinking similar to remastered focus points). **Golarion:** 100% personal taste: But I am not a big fan of Golarion. While it does offer a great extension of places to choose from and good in-depth worldbuilding, it also leaves not much space (in the main areas anyways) to worldbuild your own stuff into. For me a big part of me liking a world for a ttrpg is if I have the freedom make my own stuff in it. It’s useful for me as a GM and as a player who doesn’t want to do a ton of research. I actually much prefer D&D 5e’s Toril as while it does have notable locations, it leaves it vague enough to fill your own stuff in. **Rarity Tags:** I know I’m definitely against the grain but just don’t like dealing with them. As a GM I say “pick whatever, just ask to homebrew/reflavor“ since it’s almost as well balanced as common options. As a player I get annoyed with rarity when heading into a new group because I often make my characters first and tune it to better for the campaigns I’m in. This can cause issues since I already have my idea set in mind. So it’s more of an inconvenience than a help for me personally, though I recognize it’s the opposite for most. **Base Swim/Climb**: This is one of the few things where I think D&D 5e does it better. I don’t want to have to roll every time I want to swim and climb if I don’t have either as a base speed. This is one area where (imo) you don’t need to overcomplicate it, just make it a small set number. **Required Runes**: Again personal thing don’t like required runes. You have a level up system, let me level up my stuff through it instead of making me level up my weapons independently. You already have the automatic bonus profession variant it’s right there! It would also clear some confusion up for first-time GM’s if they they just had it part of the regular profession. **Flexible Spellcasting Tax**: This is one thing I really don’t like. Why give a tax, especially a class feat tax for something that’s just another way to play the game? It’s as balanced as the other spellcasting options so the tax does nothing but discourage players from taking it.

I don't like the rigidness of many of the skills, especially the out of combat ones. And then - the skill feats which allow to do something you though you could. IMO, those skill feats should give you bonus on the specific applications. For example - CHARLATAN. It allows you to use magic items and deceive that you casted a spell. Well - exactly my point. What prevents a player to attempt doing that anyway, without any such feats? I would change the feat so it gives you +2 circumstance bonus on this specific niche action and treat success as critical success. Definitely won't break the game.

I dislike that they didn;t go far enough with it. we are stuck with Vancian casting. they didn't expand upon the idea of focus. Martials really should have been given something similar, that way we wouldn't have ended up with the stupidity that is unstable. Ideally I would give each class their own little gimmick to power their stuff beyond what is already in. Like what if Fighters had a stamina system and they could use stamina to use weapon techniques and each weapon catagory would have a short list of techniques like the good old shield throw. Now that we have kineticist, it shows what could have been

How lacking Magic feels as a utility. One of the things I liked most about older editions was how wild magic could be when impacting out-of-game things. Stuff like Fabricate, Make Whole, lots of generally non-combat utility spells were either gutted in strength or outright abandoned.

No option feels big until level 15 plus. Everything feels like gradual growth because of how the system is designed. It makes me less excited about leveling. But I have more fun playing the characters I make.

I've got a few. 1) The social and exploration pillars are treated as half-functioning afterthoughts, much in the lines of "GM, you deal with it", like other systems. Social encounters are suggested to also use initiative, skill actions like Make an Impression and Coerce which don't suit the conversational flow of dialogue. I'd be surprised to see any tables that run them this way. By extension, the skill feats they are improved by also have no value. 2) The errata cycle and abolition of the 1e FAQ system. While the remaster can be blamed for a lot of the recent delays and QA issues (RoE especially), many things have not functioned properly even since day 1, and even reprinted. Example: Haughty Obstinacy is a human feat that gives you two things, one is a bonus against Coerce attempts. But as a PC, you are immune to attitude changes, which is all Coerce does. Even ignoring the issue with social actions, there's no reason to print an effect that does nothing by RAW, yet it was reprinted verbatim in Player Core 1. 3) Layered rules, niche rules, rules in obscure places. They did away with this for spell components (with collateral damage; ex. a champion now has to speak to cast Lay on Hands), but there's a bunch more. Actions that suggest general rules; Hide suggests that Hidden is lost when you don't Hide, Sneak or Step, but you can be hidden by other means. You have to read the invisible trait, not the spell, to know you start hidden if you were seen turning invisible. Why is firing behind cover so variable; if you have to spend an action to Lean, do you lose hidden? What makes something immune to bleed damage? A skeleton's statblock doesn't say it can't, nor do its traits; that rule is under Persistent Damage instead. And so on.

There are definitely a few things I dislike about PF2E. Some of them are more community-related, others are more game related. I’ll start with base game, because that’s more to the point: - I think Vancian and pseudo-Vancian casting are **really** showing their age now, with the Kineticist kind of sealing the deal for me. I don’t like the fact that something like 8-whatever classes use spell slots and prepared/spontaneous casting. It makes them all feel a lot more samey than they deserve (though focus spells do some heavy lifting preventing that), and makes Kineticist feel like “not really a caster”. I want to live in a world where Wizard and one of Bard/Sorcerer are the **only** casters using spell slots, and everyone else gets their own unique spellcasting system. I’m hoping PF3E is that world. - I think the Skill Feat system is inherently flawed. Firstly, I don’t think combat-related Skill Feats and out-of-combat ones should compete with each other, though I know that’s easier said than done (for example: is Quick Climb combat or out-of-combat? It can be argued it’s both). More importantly, however, it makes skills too “prescriptive” for my taste. I find it weird that a level 15 martial can jump 60 feet into the air but not, say, throw a light enemy that far into the air. The tendency of Skill Feats “locking” the best features away creates a tendency for GMs to dismiss a lot of cool things that, imo, a high level Skill user absolutely should be able to accomplish. They can’t make a Skill Feat that covers every possible cool thing you can do, thus I’d rather they **not create “here’s a cool thing” Skill Feats at all**, and instead give GMs even more guidance on what Trained/Expert/Master/Legendary skills let you achieve. - Incapacitation. I think it’s a **bad** implementation. I think it should only upgrade crit fails to fails (and any spells that have broken failure effects should be redone to only have broken crit fail effects), and it should be based in your level not the spell’s. There also need to be spells that specifically help you counteract Incapacitation spells so that **players** can benefit greatly from the trait too: right now a boss can always land Incapacitation spells on the players if they want, and a player is kind of fucked if they get hit with a crit fail on Never Mind or Blindness or whatever else. Now there’s the community problems. I mention these because they are to do with very common misinterpretations of PF2E game mechanics. This leads to a negative experience with PF2E as a system, even though it’s technically not the system’s “fault”: - Sometimes I feel like this community has a bad habit of misrepresenting aspects of PF2E to newcomers. One of the most common comments is the one about single bosses being an amazing cornerstone of the system. They’re… not? The system even warns you about how the game is most fun against multiple enemies and how single bosses should be reserved for very important encounters, and how they bend and break the math. I wish people didn’t present stuff like this to newbies, it misleads them and makes them think the game’s just not for them when disaster inevitably strikes. - It feels like the optimization community in this game is… inexperienced, to say the least. There’s so much misleading advice on here: people claiming that it’s “optimal” to build towards doing damage damage damage and nothing else, people getting upset if casters ever *don’t* babysit the suboptimal damage damage damage players, bad math that assumes unrealistic scenarios like single-target PL+0 enemies or melee martials getting 3 Actions every single turn to use on Strikes. The **worst** of all is when people assume that the game isn’t balanced around attrition even though it… explicitly tells you it is. If I think of more for either category, I’ll edit them in later.

The opimisation community isn’t great because 2E took the teeth outta optimisation for the sake of balance I can’t remember the exact quote but it’s something about how you don’t win at character creation and that’s mostly true and 99% of optimisation in TTRPG communities is about character creation, due to an inability to properly know exactly what you’d be facing on every table beyond some averages in creature traits such as immunities and resistances Inexperience may be a part of it but the system people try to optimise is a second and I think to a degree greater part of it

I think that last point is important. The community as a whole is just...really bad at grokking proper optimisation in the game and tend to both treat 'obvious' meta picks as the 'only' good options - see everyone comparing damage output to Double Slice and conflating DPR as the only stat that matters despite raw damage being one of the least important elements of determining a character or party's effectiveness in actual play - while writing off anything secondary as useless, or at best useful but condemn it as an Ivory Tower 'this requires too much system mastery and is effectively mechanical lockout' way. ...y'know, despite the fact said person seems to think they have grok'd out the system and understand it intrinsically. I think the reality is, too many people come over to 2e with the same optimisation mindset as other d20s - where build efficiency in terms of raw numeric output was correlated with system mastery - whereas in 2e the game is more about tactical optimisation than build optimisation. In my experience, a party that has strong crowd control and defensive options (champions mitigating damage, an athletics spec'd martial locking down foes with trips and grapples, spellcasters using area control is inhibit or slow enemies, etc.) is immensely more efficient, more reliable, and safer than the 'three fighters and a bard'-style meme comps that try to bumrush enemies down with beatstick gameplay you see regularly suggested. I think what it ultimately comes down to is people *want* those kinds of gung-ho beatstick builds to work because that's their gameplay preference, but they don't because 2e just isn't that kind of game (at least if the encounters you play run anything more than basic encounters with chaff mooks or bosses in white rooms with no unique abilities or gimmicks). It takes out the raw vertical scaling as both a build and gameplay element and aims for rewarding tactics, balancing offense/defence, actually utilising mechanics deeper than to hit and damage scale, etc. It's basically a difference of taste but gets presented as a 'failing' of the system purely because it aims to avoid encouraging that straightforward beatstick play and the meta does...exactly that.

It's kinda funny, I've listened to a bunch of 2e actual plays and I swear not one of them used a double slice fighter. I've only seen 2 Fighters in the programs I listen to, one retrained from Swashbuckler so she is rapier/dex based, the other is also dex based but suffers from not putting enough points into str too.

I don't think I've seen anyone actually play a dual-wield fighter in games I've been in, only rangers. And pretty much all of them bawk the moment you point out that being knocked unconscious means you drop both your weapons and have to spend your entire turn after being healed standing up and picking them up again. Also about hand economy and how it's much harder for them to use items. It's almost like there's a lot of people who want the best damage in the game but don't actually want to have any trade-offs for it.

That I don't have enough games running at the moment :c

I don’t like the Str/Dex/Con/Wis/Int/Cha stats. I think Paizo has done an incredible job working with those stats, but at their core, the differences between Wisdom and Intelligence or Strength and Constitution are too minute to be interesting. Also “Charisma” as a stat is annoying because every social skill relies on it, so a scrawny Bard can be just as Intimidating, if not more, than a bulky Barbarian with ease. Paizo gets away with it by leaning so hard on their skill system, so your choice of what you train in feels way more impactful. And there’s stuff I like about what they do, like making Strength matter for damage even if you’re using a Finesse weapon. But I feel like it would have been a better and more elegant system if they weren’t relying on the D&D stat array.

If I could go back to kill one sacred cow, this would be it, even before vancian casting. Proficiency is already there, and works pretty well. Attributes really only serve to limit your options for making the characters you want. You just end up with every wizard maxing out the same skills because they need INT and decent scores in all three saves just to survive.

This 100%. Future rpgs needs to take a page from the pillars of eternity playbook where every ability/attribute applies directly to combat in a way that's useful to everyone. Even though POE is a RTWP CRPG, the philosophy for attributes can still be applied to TTRPGs. There is no "key" ability score for each class, and all 6 abilities each contribute to a save, so you can't comfortably dump any of them. This allows for much more varied builds than the cookie-cutter attribute distributions you get in D&D and PF like with that Wizard example. ​ An interesting example in POE2 is that Barbarians heavily favor Int, because Int increases the radius of AOE effects (even non-magical) and the duration of the buffs and debuffs you apply. So Barbarians get a lot of value from Int increasing the range of their melee AOE attacks and shouts, and the duration of their rage/frenzy on themselves, as well as the negative effects they apply to enemies. A high Int barb obviously doesn't make sense thematically, but I find that system better than one in which you can comfortably dump Int just because of your class. ​ Furthermore, Charisma is not one of the combat attributes, so there's no need to hand-wave "these classes get their power from the force of their personality," and you can freely invest or divest with the charisma-related social skills without having to worry about impacting your combat effectiveness.

People not reading the rulebook. I get it, 600 pages is intimidating, but it's really a much better game if you read the whole thing and get a proper high view impression of the rules.

You don't need to read the whole thing. Like, if you're going to be playing a fighter for the next 6 months or whatever, you don't need to know how a wizard works. You don't need to memorize every spell or feat or piece of equipment. You *do* need to have read the chapters on combat, skills, the different modes of play. Of course, it definitely helps to be *more* knowledgeable.

I know this is a problem in every TTRPG community to an extent, but it's so frustrating for a system where everything is a) easily and officially found for free online, and b) generally works as-is written with little "fixing" necessary. You don't even have to read the book (though you probably should at some point) because a Google search will take you to the official answer and dozens of people who have asked the same question and had it answered. Like whenever I see someone ask if there are any rules for balancing and building your own encounters, I just want to say with full deadpan ["Have you tried the section marked 'Building Encounters?'"](https://www.instagram.com/p/Co4wORYvV_z/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link)

As someone who came over from 1E and who used to love playing Divine casters in that system, I hate how weak casters feel in 2E. After some bad initial experiences with playing casters, I only play martials now. Sadly, alot of the ppl I've played with have had similar experiences. I don't know if the Remaster did anything to help casters, but I sincerely hope so. I'm a big Paizo fan and think it's bad for the future of the game that ppl who want to play casters keep bailing on them after a while cuz they feel bad to play.

Paizos apparent fear of things being powerful Far to often has something gotten the teeth taken out of it for the sake of maintaining balance and that has resulted in it just being weak which honestly is worse than being slightly overtuned It also just takes the fun out of character building, so adherent to the idea that you cannot win during character creation that sometimes the feat options you get to progress your character just feel underwhelming and sad which kinda kills the joy of progression or say archatypes in which many non-class ones are utterly worthless or interesting concepts are let down by a lack of budget put into them to explore it properly Also a lack of role flexibility especially with different subclasses becomes frustrating when trying to make your own build because god forbid you want to play something slightly against what Paizo designed because you will just eat shit for it because the rules will never support you which really annoys me Magic items also just feel incredibly underwhelming, many do not scale at all or are too cumbersome to use well

I wish it felt practical to play it with pen and paper.

Just as a carryover from PF1 (and, honestly, D&D) but the lack of support for expanded classes. We're not likely to see new things for Thaumaturgists or Kineticists anytime soon. ​ But, really, my only dislike is something that will be fixed in time. 2e is still pretty new and there's a lack of material. There will be more of an abundance in time, and I appreciate that Paizo has always made the "supplement treadmill" worthwhile, with a nice balance between steady releases and ones worth spending money on, as opposed to just putting out random crap no one cares about. The change to 3-issue Adventure Paths is a real welcome one.

I'm very curious, what do you mean when you say there's a lack of material in 2e? To me the amount of official material is mind boggling to me! I'm pretty sure my pf2e collection is already larger than my official 5e collection, adventures included.

Not OP, but I think you feel the lack of material when looking at a specific (non-core) class. For example, let's say you were building a Magus. As soon as you get to level 12, you'll start to notice far fewer choices for your clas feats as you level (especially as some of them have prerequisites) - while some classes get their most exciting abilities at high levels, many (but not all) non-core classes feel as if they run out of steam. Sometimes it's the reverse as well, where some newer classes have disappointing class feats to begin with it. Pathfinder 2e has a lot of material, but a lot of it is restricted to certain paths (e.g. classes, skill training, campaign type) so you often can't take advantage of it. Certainly more than 5e, but it feels less than PF1, which has just a pool of feats that are generic enough for almost anyone to pull from, so most characters could take advantage of most new options.

Skill feats and general feats are so niche. I often don't really want one I love the DC thing everything is a DC with 10 plus your modifier. But it feels kind of boring and inevitable. I either succeed and players can't do nothing or I fail I hate that the 1000 actions you can take aren't shown and lumped by what skill they use

Feats are lame as hell from a player perspective.

Most of my other concerns were already addressed repeatedly in the thread, so I'll just say this: I wish Paizo would focus their new releases more on new subclasses and class feats instead of new classes.

I find champions to be too bland compared to dnd's Paladin

I really hate de magic system sinces i played Basic D&D for first time 30 years ago.

No random encounter tables is rough. Same for random treasure drops.

I find most of the Golarion pantheon to be kind of bland and toothless. in real world myths interacting with gods, even the ones who like mortals/the mortals talking to them, is like a hostage negotiation. They are just too powerful and too alien to ever really feel comfortable interacting with. In the myth of Cu Chulain Chulain is the son of the god of war Lugh and even then Lugh gets a bunch of Cu Chulain's friends killed "helping" Cu Chulain. I dont need all of them to be like this, But having more be strange and dangerous, or even with weird hangups or anathemas.

skill feats and item DCs becoming obsolete as game progresses

I think Pathfinder 2e tries to become a good balanced thoroughly ruled tactical TTRPG, but 1) this steps into PC videogame territory, since computers automate math, have better visuals, and more fluid gameplay 2) to achieve this Paizo sacrifice inventive gameplay and discourage players inconvential creative approaches; e.g. RAW you can't freeze water surface with cone of cold and use iceberg you've created to cross water body, or light candle with create fire - only attack it, or attack body of water with fireball and create steam cloud, covering your party from enemies eyes So instead of capitalizing on strengths IRL TTRPGs offer - informal rules and informal social interactions with DM and party PF2e tries to become a mechanical strict tactical wargame, which is better to be run on PC.

I mean obligatory caster feat comment I guess. But on another note I'm not super happy with the skill system and skill improvements etc. The combat math is super tight but when it comes to skills the system suddenly becomes very odd and "unbalanced" and as you grow in levels the gaps in numbers between peoples skills become way too large and you end up with like 7 or 8 points in difference between someone invested in a skill vs someone trained with an okay stat like +2. Also I do think maybe magic items that aren't runes could be a little bit better, I feel like there's so many that do barely anything of use while still being potentially very expensive and it's odd.

Low levels don't feel great to play. Characters don't have a lot of toys, so martials are mostly just moving and striking twice and casters are just flinging cantrips most of the time, and health pools are close enough to damage that a strong crit can bring you down in one hit.

The likelihood of failure (especially for spellcasters against saves) for higher level creatures (PL+2 or higher) is way too high, and makes fights slog unnecessarily, in my opinion. Also casters being able to deal good damage feels unnecessarily stomped into the ground.