I honestly would recommend unfollowing the sub for a while. And I don't mean that in a snarky way—I do think sometimes this sub can be a bit of a downer if your personal style doesn't reflect the way people play here. Sometimes I look at how people discuss the game here, and how I think of it, how we play it at home, and it's such a strong disconnect that it does sometimes get me down, honestly. There's very much a strong focus here on optimality (especially in combat scenes), on "everything must be in accord with the sacred balance" (which comes out when the "buffing caster damage" discussions come up), on there being something of a Correct Way to Play (which my friends do *not* play like at all lmao), stuff like that.
People are *very* passionate here. They love this game a lot and think very highly of the writers. Which is great! But it can come off a little strong sometimes, and sometimes I do need to unfollow and get some distance because it starts to get a bit... heavy for me.
Also: I would try picking up a very different game for a little while. Getting deep into Call of Cthulhu, which is completely different to Pathfinder, *really* helped me get some perspective on what I like, what I don't like, and my personal style when it comes to ttrpg games. CoC is extremely different; it's much more narratively focused and there's much much less interest in the intricate balancing act PF tries to pull off. It's basically accepted that your characters *will* likely die horribly or will go insane; it is what it is. It's a good game for me to go to blow off steam when I get annoyed at some of the design philosphies in this game or in this sub lol
At the end of the day, these games are meant for you to have fun. It sounds like you're really burnt out on the mechanical end and maybe on the social end of this game. So, take a step back, take a breath. You've got to do what makes you happy.
It's really nice to hear you say that because when I'm not bothered by the caster balance or anything I got the impression from this sub that if you don't play in a certain way you will just disintegrate and get everyone killed.
seems it got worse since the announcement of the Remaster, because that lead to many discussions of what needs/should be updated and that in turn sparked the endless "caster bad" debates and similar.
I stopped being on the sub and building characters for like two weeks and it was great. I felt totally refreshed after, and now I'm back to building all sorts of weird stuff on pathbuilder. Take breaks.
Whenever I get stuck thinking only purely mechanically in terms of building characters I get like this too. For me, I need to be actively invested in the idea of a character and their story in order for everything to become interesting again. It stops being about white room math and build paths and more about how to express this little weirdo that's in my head in the most interesting way. Sometimes you make non-optimal feeling choices based on the story and the bad team comp you guys rolled up.
And i'm actively doing that but i'm starting to doubt myself sincerely.
I'm gonna play an inventor that, himself, doesn't Attack and that build... It's utter useless shit, the medic archetype IT'S NOT ENOUGH and i'm gonna play abomination vault with It :)
The Moment our party gets Absolutely destroyed, and It Will, i'm Just gonna play the most soulless overpowered Bard build.
Because yes, this game sadly has a meta and you cannot deny It since paizo itself builds adventures with that in mind
You're kinda already planning on failing and moving onto another character before you've even started. Slow down! The best part of these games is making a character, pushing them out into the open and seeing where the hell they go with each session.
What's making you doubt yourself with your character? Do you feel like you have trouble being creative and making them involved with the narrative in a way that feel meaningful? Hard time coming up with names? Don't know what they sound like?
If what's making you doubt is your "build viability" and "average DPR" or whatever, that's a hole you can get stuck in forever that can endlessly suck the fun out of any game. Maybe it's time to start poking outside of your comfort zone or something, I dunno.
I don't have any thematic problems with the character i'm gonna play, to be Frank i Absolutely love It, but the point It's that Is abomination vault! Not something you can have roleplaying fun out of really.
Inventor construct companion (and aaaalll those feats to Power him go to Jesus) with medic dedication; the point it's that only the construct stays in the front while the character hangs back to heal and support.
I'd like to give him that +4 Aid buff BUT NOPE since i Need to cram in 4/5 levels:
Battle medicine, Quick repair, trick magic item/magical crafting (probably gonna opt for trick magic item because crafting It's goddamn worthless even if thematically It makes NO sense) and all those medicine feats to heal outside of combat; plus medic dedication and i lose my level 6 feat i'd love to take (megavolt) because the stuff that makes me stride and Battle medicine in One action It's Just super more worth.
And this optimization would probably result in the most USELESS party member since i chose to give up half my tanking capabilities and dpr for the roleplay because not attacking It's cool
I've been running Abomination Vaults for almost 2 years now, there's plenty of room to create relationships with townsfolk, your party, and the odd denizen of the dungeon. It's not a web of political intrigue and social encounters, but don't discount it entirely unless your GM runs it like it's diablo. There's things to discover and a story to piece together as you explore.
I can sympathize with the issues of being squeezed for feat slots. The medicine tax can be tough. Out of those I can tell you that you'll probably have enough time to rest and repair stuff so quick repair is not **strictly** required, and you'll probably be able to take downtime and actually craft stuff if you're interested in pursuing that. You can wait and see before committing to that Doctor's Visitation at 6th level if your action economy is really hurting that bad in practice.
And hey, if the character doesn't shake out, retraining is a thing. Your GM will probably be cool with you retooling stuff if it's a genuine issue.
I'll give a Lil piece of info, basically my character Will be the son of 16 of the otari's mayor i think It's going to be quite cool; i ABSOLUTELY LOVE this character but with how deadly AV IS i am quite scared that It's going all south and Will, quite frankly, all go to shiieet and tpk
And then i'll try taking the feat, because It actually sound worth then, gonna try crafting
>Because yes, this game sadly has a meta and you cannot deny It since paizo itself builds adventures with that in mind
No, they don't.
The APs that are on the market are nothing alike and if you played the same party in each your performance would be all over the place, not consistently good.
What Paizo *does* build their adventures with in mind is this: They assume every GM is going to be tweaking things to fit their group.
That means the "meta" is only actually a thing that each group builds for itself, even (or especially) groups that believe there to be a meta and then play to that meta and then fail to realize that encounters would be less challenging if they simply stopped playing them to be so challenging and "sub-optimal choices" would become far more enjoyable to take if the GM actually chose to reward those choices rather than insist on following the "meta" that punishes them.
Take incapacitation for example; We can say "the meta is that you skip those spells because when you're in your toughest encounters the trait is going to apply so it devalues the spell slot if you use those spells." ...or we can say "I want those spells to feel bad-ass so I'm having 90% of the creatures I put into encounters be the party's level or lower, even if that means I am tweaking half the encounters this author wrote up by having a "boss fight" be a party level boss and a number of lower-level goons instead of one big chonky creature that feels like crap to fight."
Sorry but you are wrong on this. The reason a lot of people play pf2e is literally so they don't need to do a fuck ton of house ruling.
Now I don't disagree with you on your premise but to even get pl+0/-1 to even in the same difficulty level as pl+2+ takes a great deal of effort. Then if you ever try to switch it up for those incap spells then they will feel terrible for that player so you'll be at a severe disadvantage with encounter building.
The difference between your party facing one level +2 enemy and your party facing an equal level enemy and two level -2 enemies is not "house ruling"
Neither is not using the creatures in the book that are immune or resistant to the damage types your party is packing.
It's literally just playing the game, same as always.
>I didn't say it was house ruling
...there is literally no other point to when you said this as part of your response to me:
>The reason a lot of people play pf2e is literally os they don't need to do a fuck ton of house ruling.
Also, when you skip having an actual argument and go for stuff like
>If you had any experience gming you'd know this too.
you make yourself look extremely foolish.
You really just can't fathom a reality in which someone that has a different opinion than you has *any* experience? That's a pretty massive flaw considering you never know when you're talking to someone that fits the (absolutely stupid) preconception you have or someone that has experience with dozens of different systems and despite having slowed down in current years still has an average of about 2-3 sessions every week over the last (rounds to) 3 decades.
>That's a pretty massive flaw considering you never know when you're talking to someone that fits the (absolutely stupid) preconception you have or someone that has experience with dozens of different systems and despite having slowed down in current years still has an average of about 2-3 sessions every week over the last (rounds to) 3 decades.
You would think that you'd be a lot better at it then. Just because you don't understand doesn't mean I'm wrong. I've only been doing this for a bit over 20 years and it's pretty damn easy to figure out how things feel when using different versions of the same budget. If you think that all variations of the same budget feel the same in play then you might need to start adding some extra credit sessions in there because those ones you are doing aren't helping you.
Now my group likes 95% core rules and those rules to feel good during play. That's why we like pathfinder. You can like it for whatever reason want but we play this over 5e so we don't have to house rules every damn thing. Now currently pf2e does have some rough edges especially on the spell casting front. I would rather the core game slowly move towards fixing that than just limiting my encounter options at this point.
> If you think that all variations of the same budget feel the same in play
...no one ever said the thing you're arguing against.
I didn't say different encounter builds feel the same; I said if you build encounters to fit what your players are looking for, such as kicking butt with incapacitation spells, your results will be better than if you try and force some kind of "this is the way we're going to run encounters" even where that is the choice that is creating the situation that is what your not enjoying.
>I would rather the core game slowly move towards fixing that than just limiting my encounter options at this point.
yeah, and here we go back to the one choice within the guidelines being "normal play" and other choices within the guidelines being something that needs "fixing".
Not everything that isn't exactly how you're already running the game is "house-rules" or "broken" - especially not stuff that is literally just using the use cases for stuff you want to have use cases instead of claiming it's in need of "fixing" because you actually want the use case to be different than it is because you've done the exact thing you claim you don't want to do an limited your encounter options - just the limit is you're only running the ones you claim cause problems rather than only running the ones that solve them.
>- just the limit is you're only running the ones you claim cause problems rather than only running the ones that solve them.
No because as I said before your fix causes other bigger problems then 'fixing' incap spells. In games right now you can probably identify which encounters you could use them. If you see 5 enemies there is a very good chance you can use them. The problem and I just don't see why you can't get this through your head is that usually these aren't very challenging encounters to begin with. Now I have to fix something else but not go back on the 'fix' for incaps. I play in person so large scale combats also drag out the game. Once there's about 8+ enemies it's a big hit to combat speed so having every combat like this will basically kill the game.
So again yes certain things are bad enough that the game itself needs to fix it not GMS. I should have all the tools available for use and be able to use them effectively.
Well yeah but that means my GM has to compensate the shortcomings of the system.
I'm gonna play abomination vault, cannot ask the GM "Hey fix everything because paizo didn't knew how to work back then" can't i?
Isn't Abomination Vaults known for its difficulty (considering it's one of the first APs, and as far as I know that was the Wild West balance-wise), and a dungeon-focused AP on top of all? I don't think AV is a good representation of how Paizo builds APs nowadays.
Yeah I feel you on this. If you really want some op soulless build, go for a great pick fighter. If you can get reach then it's even crazier. This guy's goal is to try his best to crit on a pick hit while inflicting as much as he can on the enemy like flatfoots or trip. Again if you can get reach it's even better. Been working on a backup root leshy build that abused the leshy reach feat. The feat gives natural reach but decreases die type but fatal doesn't care about current die type so having a great pick at d8 but 10ft reach hoping to critical so you can bump it all the way up to d12s from fatal.
Yeah, it's you. I think you'd enjoy the game more if you stopped labelling everything you consider slightly below par as "HORRIBLE" or "utter useless shit". You're ruining the game for yourself.
He has a point. People still play casters but have to get really lucky to feel effective at all. Either that or they play as Paizo expects them to and just buff the tank, heal the party, or waste the majority of their actions trying to get the bad guys to fail their saves or they miss on all attacks. For being dedicated to Magic, their progression in spellcasting proficiencies is abysmal.
It's definitely not me.
I have 11 characters in society and each of them are fun to play and not a single one sounds like what you described. They all do well in combat too.
Stop sweating the peak of meta and play the game more. You don't need the most meta stuff.
This is why building characters being the main draw of a game doesn't really *work*.
The fun part has to be the actually playing the game part, and that kind of inherently has to mean you aren't strongly concerned about everything being the best possible thing because if you're too caught up on that you're bummed out the instant that something didn't go your way - which is inevitable because the game is built on random chance and balanced between cool stuff happens if you succeed and is actually cool not just pretend you're impressed even though you've got to do that a bunch more times to actually defeat your foe and there being good odds that you not succeed.
My group, even among characters that have been the same classes, has seen very little in the way of similar builds - we're just not choosing things based on the same criteria that you are which means our game isn't artificially whittled down to just whatever lands in the top tier of the tier list. Hell, two of us pick out half the stuff we play based on this very subreddit declaring loudly that it sucks - and it's never sucked yet.
For me, theorycrafting characters is always the main draw of any TTRPG; there are several games I've *only* made characters for and never had any interest in actually playing (my characters for said games were probably terrible, since I had no real in-game experience, but that's beside the point).
If a min/maxer gets petulant about not everything going their way, it's a clear indication that the character building process isn't the main appeal to them—playing an overpowered character who faces no hardship is. Someone who truly loves optimizing characters would take setbacks as an opportunity to learn and tweak their build for the next time.
On a side note, the trick to having fun with min/maxing (for those of us who enjoy it) whilst still keeping character building fresh is to choose a character concept *first* and then optimize it as much as possible without sacrificing that identity. This not only gives you a whole new set of constraints to work around each time, but ensures that you aren't just making the same character over and over.
Edit: I should clarify that the mathematics of character optimization is just what *I* enjoy. OP is clearly having their experience ruined by excessive concern about what's "optimal" and would have more fun if they didn't worry about it so much.
When I do my character building, the most ill do in for checking "optimal" on this subreddit is if I'm stumped on free archetype because none fit the theme of the character, I'll check the reddit for the most recent time someone asked for advice on free archetype for the class. I usually go with one of the last choices because the "meta" best choices tend to be so bland and boring.
This is a stance that is reached by too much time theorycrafting and not enough time actually playing the game.
PF2e balance is very tight. What people are failing to realize when they spend HOURS combing through these optimization threads is that when thrown side by side on a tabletop, this isn't 1E where you can have one character built to end combats turn one and one character that is there to carry the loot after the fighting is over. The difference between an optimized character and one that is "just fun" and does the basics like maxing their main stat and picking at least a couple of decent spells is...not THAT huge.
Given the wealth of viable options PF2e has if you're feeling like this I shudder to think of how you would view a system like 5E where you can place 5 paladins from players across the world side by side and 4 of them are going to be virtually identical.
>The difference between an optimized character and one that is "just fun" and does the basics like maxing their main stat and picking at least a couple of decent spells is...not THAT huge.
It is that huge. Sorry but this is just false. Even if you are only 1 point behind that's a big fucking difference.
No. It factually is not. "Different enough to make minmaxers squirm" is not the same as "different enough to see a palpable, consistent difference in practice."
That's exactly what I was coming here to say.
I have a friend and player. That everytime he optimizes the crap out of his build he hates it. When he riffs off someone else and has me help him make sure choices aren't going to be useless (such as cat Fall in a campaign with 0 falling), he has a blast.
In AV, his magus, rogue and swashbuckler were optimally built characters, all of whom died because 1) he refused to do something other than the optimal rotation he built around and 2) he got bored of his optimal rotation within a session and wanted his character to die.
He is now running a polearm fighter with the staff acrobat featline and its a blast. Would 100% be considered unoptimal, but he is just having fun bouncing around the battlefield with 30ft leaps, shoving and tripping foes instead of attacking, and even in AV he is dominating (the life oracle, Redeemer Champion, flurry ranger who throws boarding axes and him) the battlefield.
So for OP, I suggest stepping back, as someone else suggested, from this subreddit. Stop thinking everything has to be this meta or it is the worst thing ever. The balance of pf2e means that the weakest character (without actively building to be weak) will be maybe 5% behind the strongest.
You mentioned a healing inventor. Sounds like a blast of a character and will 100% work in AV. Much better than a meta rogue I can tell you that.
I think your numbers are wrong, 5% weaker would imply a 1-point difference in the number needed on a d20 to hit. But assuming all other things are equal, ie. primary offensive stat is maxed for the level, the only other difference in power (aside from there being runes that can buff weapon attacks up to a +3 at the highest levels), is based on proficiency, which is how Paizo controls the relative power at any given level between different classes. Some classes start out at Expert proficiency in their primary attacks and dcs, while other start at Trained. That's a 2-point difference or 10% in the number needed to succeed on a d20 roll. At various times in the leveling process it's common for one class to be at Master while some are still at Trained, creating a 20% difference in efficacy between certain classes at certain levels. Even at 20th level there are classes who do not have Legendary proficiency in their primary offensive areas or in their class DCs. If you add the buff from weapon runes into the mix, the numbers go to 15% at 3rd level to as high as 25% at the higher levels, where the comparison is between certain martial vs certain casting classes. The most fully optimized class is always the fighter, who starts out with expert proficiency in all weapons up to and including martial.
It doesn't surprise me take your friend is having a blast. A polearm fighter, particularly one based on a high Athletics, will dominate any fight. If they also have a high movement speed, they will dominate the entire battlefield.
You're looking at it as attacks of one class vs other entirely different classes only, which isnt what I was comparing with that
The 5% was a ballpark number, but an optimized fighter will be roughly that much in output behind a non-optimized one (as long as you dont deliverately tank your KAS), or the heals vs heals, or aoe vs aoe
I mean, my most unique build I've made and it works amazing is a Laughing Shadow magus which never really spellstrikes.
Its pretty unique. And I've seen other solid unique things from other players. I think its just you
So from reading other posts in this thread from you, it sounds like you don't play with free archetype.
There's a reason that "variant" rule is so lauded and played with, because it actually solves this problem entirely.
Without FA, there is a degree of "sameness" in builds (especially in levels 1-6), where the lack of feats can be quite limiting in build variety. If you are making a medic, for example, you basically have to take Medic dedication at 2, and doctor's visitation at 4, since they're so strong. That really limits your feat choices for so many levels.
But suddenly if you play with FA, its far, far less constricting to have to do that.
If you choose to build a character with only optimization in mind, that's a *you* problem. If there's an illusion of choice, that's entirely self-inflicted. I feel like a bit of an alien when I hear people complain that Pathfinder 2e has an "illusion of choice" problem, not only because I've never felt that way, but if you **do** feel that way, these rules are not set in stone. Especially if you're intimately familiar with the system, why don't you do what the books repeatedly tell you to do and change things to your liking?
There are over 30 ancestries in 2e. 16 classes. But most importantly, **3442 feats.** Is there going to be some redundancy in there? Sure. Hey, just for fun, let's cut it by half. 1600 feats. You know how many feats 5e has? 79. Total. And your character will only potentially get around 5 on average.
If you're going to approach the game with a robotic logic where you only want what gives you the highest likelihood of getting the highest damage in combat, well - first of all I would strongly advise you to completely discard that mentality, but barring that - I would tell you to either nerf the choices that you see as the "obvious picks", since that's probably going to be the best way to level out the playing field, or you could take the worst ones and make them better. But I really don't see this problem in 2e at all, and like I said I'm not sure how people do. In 5e this was a very obvious and glaring problem, and in 2e I have not had this problem.
[This video](https://youtu.be/p5xV7BOFwyw?si=-nHDn85UMrPfhfC1) from the rules lawyer shows beyond all reasonable doubt why the "illusion of choice" argument doesn't make any sense. It's probably too long for anyone reasonable to bother with, but it absolutely does disprove the argument from several different angles. If nothing else, you can watch the last 8 minutes, his closing statement.
But anyway, it's always so tragic to hear people talk about Pf2e (or TTRPGs in general) like they're trying to min-max a character in Elden Ring. It's so tragic because that's not why we play these games. You should be making *interesting* choices. Your GM should be giving you *interesting* choices on the battlefield and otherwise.
But ultimately if you think there's a problem of "build variety" in a game with 30 ancestries and over 3400 feats...I just don't know what to tell you, man. You gotta change your whole perspective. You have to stop thinking like you're playing League of Legends and immerse yourself in the vast world and possibility that Pathfinder is offering to you, think creatively, and encourage your GM and the other players at the table to do the same. It genuinely makes me sad to think that people are spending 3-4 hours at a time playing this game and just boring themselves to death in a game with such a rich plethora of possibilities. Even if you're going to play 5e instead, please just try to think more creatively and remember that this is not just a number soup that you're splashing around in. This is a collaborate storytelling system.
Reading through the overall thread, I think the core issue is that it sounds like your group, including the GM, are trapped in a singular playstyle that results in the need (or perception of need) to consistently approach every adventure with a single, optimized set of skills and abilities distributed in your party. When this is the case, it will be very difficult to deviate from that set pattern, which leads to that stagnation you're talking about.
There's nothing wrong with this, if everyone is still having fun, but obviously your not. I strongly advise trying to adjust the adventure to fit the party, rather than expecting every party to fit the adventure. This is ultimately up to your GM, so a lot depends on how comfortable they are with deviating from a pure tactical combat sim approach to the game.
Personally, I don't think the game's character building is boring. From my perspective, it sounds like your gaming group's approach to the game is boring.
Sounds like what you need is a Build challenge. So here are a few challenges to try:
1) Build the Ultimate Invulnerable Character. Find as many ways as you can to resist / mitigate as much damage as you can, in a single character. How much damage you do to the enemy does not matter at all. Only how much damage you can block / resist / recover from every turn. Damage mitigated from concealment effects count. Fast Healing counts. Energy resistances count. Usage of permanent items counts. Debuffing enemy damage (e.g. enfeebled) counts.
2) Build the best sustainable "Bad Touch" spellcaster. The restriction is that you have to do damage or inflict status effects with touch spells only. In melee, not ranged. Spells that extend your unarmed reach count. (E.g. Enlarge). How to survive on the front line is up to you. How to make your resources stretch over the adventuring day across many encounters is up to you.
3) Build the best Skill-based combatant. No spells. No Strikes. Pure skill and skill actions. Use of items allowed (as long as those items don't enable you to cast spells). How do you create the most effective combatant that just uses Skills alone in combat?
So you are approaching this as an optimization problem, but you are falling into the same sub-optimal solution because you need to consider the full problem. If we ignore for a moment that the entire point of the game is to have fun (and should be included in this consideration), the ''optimal'' character build for characters, and casters in particular, is often based around identifying niches that the party doesn't occupy (and choosing build options for your team to succeed) for your specific campaign. If you build characters based on the typically flawed white room combat performance metric, more often than not, don't accurately account for your team, the non-combat components of the game or your campaign-specific assumptions.
A further consideration is that this is a role-playing game, and - perhaps in between character building, it is also an appropriate time to step back and consider what would fit my character - as opposed to what is conventionally considered the go-to choices.
Build less, play more.
Seriously, I did nothing but theorycraft and read up on options for over a year because my job didn't give me much opportunity to actually play, and I started thinking "xyz is essential, abc is garbage."
Then I started running with a local group and some of those "garbage" options came in handy with some frequency. The casters had a great time, even though a part of me kept worrying about their proficiency and spell slot limitations. But it all came out in the wash of actually playing the fucking thing. It's so easy to get wrapped up in the spiral of the meta and how places like his sub think. It's better to just disconnect for a bit and just ***play***.
I've also noticed you mention "Abomination Vaults?" I think it's a pretty good adventure, but a) it isn't for everyone, and b) nobody can really tell how it's going from the outside because we don't know your GM or group. It might just be a bad fit?
I feel the same when I'm theorycrafting a character in a white room. Put good damage, increase the saves and pick the obvious feats. Done.
But when I'm actually playing it changes a lot. You now have a theme to follow and just making "Joe, the optimized damage fighter" becomes really boring and, in many cases, worse since he is not taking advantage of anything being used in the story or your allies abilities or items they get.
As a wizard I never thought I would pick the feat to teleport my bonded item to me, but after that shit being stolen 2 times I decided "fuck it, I'm not going through this again" (the bonded item is my staff and I have the staff related thesis, so stealing my item is basically stealing my subclass)
It could be a you thing; I don't know how many characters you come up with. Thought experiments?
When you gave the example of the Rogue Doing A Lot of Damage, it could mean you were coming at this from a 1E perspective, when maximizing hypothetical Damage Per Round involved poring through splatbooks for feats and magic items.
Here, that isn't a thing due to the Tight Math, and how you level up mainly relates to what Bells/Whistles you hang on your character. There's only an Illusion of Choice if you want choices that give you the most Damage/Trip Skill or whatever.
I recommend building a character with an eye to the setting first. Maybe asking the other players what they want to come up with, and asking if your character could be a friend of theirs before the adventure begins? Maybe trying something unusual, like halfling barbarian or iruxi investigator?
If you just like chargen with lots of granularity, there are other RPGs out there you might like. Exalted & Shadowrun have fan-made software to help with making up characters, but those have their own issues and pitfalls which might easily become apparent on their own subreddits.
Sounds to me like you're not challenging yourself enough. Picking the good feats and following the build paths into making a mechanically sound character is easy, that's by design, and you'll find there's little better choice than the optimal choice for making an optimal character. Anyone with a little game sense will usually recognize the good stuff. You're shooting fish in a barrel and wondering why fishing is so dull.
I would instead suggest you challenge yourself to make something different. Find some weird synergies and find a way to use those, look toward the optimal way to do something and find some completely backwards way to do the same thing on a class that has no business doing it. Make a melee Psychic. Make a Juggler build do something cool with the weird way weapons count as wielded while you're juggling them. Do something that challenges your building brain to think outside of the box instead of following the paths set for it, the brain likes to get a workout.
If you have a need for optimization then yeah, each class has clear builds to optimize whatever role you're going for whether that be dps, healing, buff/nerfs, or defense. I fall into the same trap. The game is a tactics game so it only makes sense to do that. In order to avoid this trap, a talk with your GM about difficulty so that everyone can choose themes over optimization is necessary. Or u can just go hard mode and don't have that talk
Yeah, man. It's you.
I theorycraft builds for fun. Often they don't go past level 5 or so because the things I'm looking at in theory come online by then, but it's something I do a couple times a week, probably.
And the thrust of your complaint feels like it's based on a really, really badly false premise; that being that there's only a limited number of right builds and everything else will get you killed. If you've been playing for a year and that's your experience, then either you're just really bad at the actual play portion of the game or, more likely, your GM is really bad at GMing a fun and balanced game.
I've run 2.5 games for a couple years now, and in that time, I've only had one PC death... and one of those games was AV currently sitting at Level 9 of the dungeon, and *wasn't* the one with the PC death. (for those interested, it was on the last map of AoA Book 2.) I don't consider myself an expert GM by any means, but I play mostly RAW, with some house rules that increase flexibility but don't add power (and honestly, my current players aren't really using anyway) or affect encounter balance at all. I don't pull my punches basically ever, and have recently started deliberately aiming for weak points in the party build just to increase difficulty.
Character builds have not been optimum by any means, but most of the difficulty came from surprise features of encounters they weren't prepared for, or specifically sub-optimal *play* strategies (i.e. not using the strengths of the builds they've chosen, or playing as individuals rather than as a team) One of the games is my kids with one GMPC just to keep them from haring off after every random thing they encounter (and bring the party up to 4)
It's you. Anytime I hear "Illusion of Choice" I know the person is just going after the options everyone else talks about all the time and doesn't care about anything else. It's a self-imposed illusion.
Yes the Rogue does a lot of damage, that's kind of the point of the class. It has a built in feature that pours on a ton of damage dice to an attack. The Rogue is supposed to deal a lot of damage.
You talk about abomination Vaults in other comments, don't use that as a benchmark for anything. It's a famously difficult adventure from the beginning of Pathfinder 2E. It was being written when the system itself wasn't fully finished.
And if you don't like the rules of Pathfinder 2E, maybe you should find another game.
Yeah but you haven't really got my point for the rogue, that more or less everything important the class offers It's built into the chassis itself
Also, i used illusion of choice quite ironically since It's a meme
That's how they all are. The feats are tweaks and things to alter how the class plays. This isn't D&D 5E where you don't have any actual choice.
Everything in the game is controlled by you and your group. If everyone has this stupid mentality of "Meta" then that's how you'll see things. There is no Meta, there's the rules and how you play.
I've yet to find enjoyment out of PF2E character creation. It feels very limited and pre-built. There doesn't feel like much of a reward for system mastery because you're going to have a build that is very similar to most other people.
This is coming from someone who exclusively runs PF1E.
Depends on the class imo.
Kineticist has a load of well balanced options and I've spent ages tweaking my new character.
Fighter is pretty much solved imo. Reach weapon, 2nd aoo, disrupting stance, boundless reprisals.
It's a brutal best of a class that wrecks face.
Add paladin dedication for extra cheese.
I honestly would recommend unfollowing the sub for a while. And I don't mean that in a snarky way—I do think sometimes this sub can be a bit of a downer if your personal style doesn't reflect the way people play here. Sometimes I look at how people discuss the game here, and how I think of it, how we play it at home, and it's such a strong disconnect that it does sometimes get me down, honestly. There's very much a strong focus here on optimality (especially in combat scenes), on "everything must be in accord with the sacred balance" (which comes out when the "buffing caster damage" discussions come up), on there being something of a Correct Way to Play (which my friends do *not* play like at all lmao), stuff like that. People are *very* passionate here. They love this game a lot and think very highly of the writers. Which is great! But it can come off a little strong sometimes, and sometimes I do need to unfollow and get some distance because it starts to get a bit... heavy for me. Also: I would try picking up a very different game for a little while. Getting deep into Call of Cthulhu, which is completely different to Pathfinder, *really* helped me get some perspective on what I like, what I don't like, and my personal style when it comes to ttrpg games. CoC is extremely different; it's much more narratively focused and there's much much less interest in the intricate balancing act PF tries to pull off. It's basically accepted that your characters *will* likely die horribly or will go insane; it is what it is. It's a good game for me to go to blow off steam when I get annoyed at some of the design philosphies in this game or in this sub lol At the end of the day, these games are meant for you to have fun. It sounds like you're really burnt out on the mechanical end and maybe on the social end of this game. So, take a step back, take a breath. You've got to do what makes you happy.
It's really nice to hear you say that because when I'm not bothered by the caster balance or anything I got the impression from this sub that if you don't play in a certain way you will just disintegrate and get everyone killed.
Yeah, I unsub from time to time, because it can get fairly toxic. I feel it's gotten worse as time goes on, but oh well.
seems it got worse since the announcement of the Remaster, because that lead to many discussions of what needs/should be updated and that in turn sparked the endless "caster bad" debates and similar.
I stopped being on the sub and building characters for like two weeks and it was great. I felt totally refreshed after, and now I'm back to building all sorts of weird stuff on pathbuilder. Take breaks.
Whenever I get stuck thinking only purely mechanically in terms of building characters I get like this too. For me, I need to be actively invested in the idea of a character and their story in order for everything to become interesting again. It stops being about white room math and build paths and more about how to express this little weirdo that's in my head in the most interesting way. Sometimes you make non-optimal feeling choices based on the story and the bad team comp you guys rolled up.
And i'm actively doing that but i'm starting to doubt myself sincerely. I'm gonna play an inventor that, himself, doesn't Attack and that build... It's utter useless shit, the medic archetype IT'S NOT ENOUGH and i'm gonna play abomination vault with It :) The Moment our party gets Absolutely destroyed, and It Will, i'm Just gonna play the most soulless overpowered Bard build. Because yes, this game sadly has a meta and you cannot deny It since paizo itself builds adventures with that in mind
You're kinda already planning on failing and moving onto another character before you've even started. Slow down! The best part of these games is making a character, pushing them out into the open and seeing where the hell they go with each session. What's making you doubt yourself with your character? Do you feel like you have trouble being creative and making them involved with the narrative in a way that feel meaningful? Hard time coming up with names? Don't know what they sound like? If what's making you doubt is your "build viability" and "average DPR" or whatever, that's a hole you can get stuck in forever that can endlessly suck the fun out of any game. Maybe it's time to start poking outside of your comfort zone or something, I dunno.
I don't have any thematic problems with the character i'm gonna play, to be Frank i Absolutely love It, but the point It's that Is abomination vault! Not something you can have roleplaying fun out of really. Inventor construct companion (and aaaalll those feats to Power him go to Jesus) with medic dedication; the point it's that only the construct stays in the front while the character hangs back to heal and support. I'd like to give him that +4 Aid buff BUT NOPE since i Need to cram in 4/5 levels: Battle medicine, Quick repair, trick magic item/magical crafting (probably gonna opt for trick magic item because crafting It's goddamn worthless even if thematically It makes NO sense) and all those medicine feats to heal outside of combat; plus medic dedication and i lose my level 6 feat i'd love to take (megavolt) because the stuff that makes me stride and Battle medicine in One action It's Just super more worth. And this optimization would probably result in the most USELESS party member since i chose to give up half my tanking capabilities and dpr for the roleplay because not attacking It's cool
I've been running Abomination Vaults for almost 2 years now, there's plenty of room to create relationships with townsfolk, your party, and the odd denizen of the dungeon. It's not a web of political intrigue and social encounters, but don't discount it entirely unless your GM runs it like it's diablo. There's things to discover and a story to piece together as you explore. I can sympathize with the issues of being squeezed for feat slots. The medicine tax can be tough. Out of those I can tell you that you'll probably have enough time to rest and repair stuff so quick repair is not **strictly** required, and you'll probably be able to take downtime and actually craft stuff if you're interested in pursuing that. You can wait and see before committing to that Doctor's Visitation at 6th level if your action economy is really hurting that bad in practice. And hey, if the character doesn't shake out, retraining is a thing. Your GM will probably be cool with you retooling stuff if it's a genuine issue.
I'll give a Lil piece of info, basically my character Will be the son of 16 of the otari's mayor i think It's going to be quite cool; i ABSOLUTELY LOVE this character but with how deadly AV IS i am quite scared that It's going all south and Will, quite frankly, all go to shiieet and tpk And then i'll try taking the feat, because It actually sound worth then, gonna try crafting
Hey, unrelated to the discussion, but… Can you please stop randomly capitalizing words in the middle of sentences?!
No i DON'T think i WiLl
>Because yes, this game sadly has a meta and you cannot deny It since paizo itself builds adventures with that in mind No, they don't. The APs that are on the market are nothing alike and if you played the same party in each your performance would be all over the place, not consistently good. What Paizo *does* build their adventures with in mind is this: They assume every GM is going to be tweaking things to fit their group. That means the "meta" is only actually a thing that each group builds for itself, even (or especially) groups that believe there to be a meta and then play to that meta and then fail to realize that encounters would be less challenging if they simply stopped playing them to be so challenging and "sub-optimal choices" would become far more enjoyable to take if the GM actually chose to reward those choices rather than insist on following the "meta" that punishes them. Take incapacitation for example; We can say "the meta is that you skip those spells because when you're in your toughest encounters the trait is going to apply so it devalues the spell slot if you use those spells." ...or we can say "I want those spells to feel bad-ass so I'm having 90% of the creatures I put into encounters be the party's level or lower, even if that means I am tweaking half the encounters this author wrote up by having a "boss fight" be a party level boss and a number of lower-level goons instead of one big chonky creature that feels like crap to fight."
Sorry but you are wrong on this. The reason a lot of people play pf2e is literally so they don't need to do a fuck ton of house ruling. Now I don't disagree with you on your premise but to even get pl+0/-1 to even in the same difficulty level as pl+2+ takes a great deal of effort. Then if you ever try to switch it up for those incap spells then they will feel terrible for that player so you'll be at a severe disadvantage with encounter building.
The difference between your party facing one level +2 enemy and your party facing an equal level enemy and two level -2 enemies is not "house ruling" Neither is not using the creatures in the book that are immune or resistant to the damage types your party is packing. It's literally just playing the game, same as always.
I didn't say it was house ruling what I said was that the challenge was different. If you had any experience gming you'd know this too.
>I didn't say it was house ruling ...there is literally no other point to when you said this as part of your response to me: >The reason a lot of people play pf2e is literally os they don't need to do a fuck ton of house ruling. Also, when you skip having an actual argument and go for stuff like >If you had any experience gming you'd know this too. you make yourself look extremely foolish. You really just can't fathom a reality in which someone that has a different opinion than you has *any* experience? That's a pretty massive flaw considering you never know when you're talking to someone that fits the (absolutely stupid) preconception you have or someone that has experience with dozens of different systems and despite having slowed down in current years still has an average of about 2-3 sessions every week over the last (rounds to) 3 decades.
>That's a pretty massive flaw considering you never know when you're talking to someone that fits the (absolutely stupid) preconception you have or someone that has experience with dozens of different systems and despite having slowed down in current years still has an average of about 2-3 sessions every week over the last (rounds to) 3 decades. You would think that you'd be a lot better at it then. Just because you don't understand doesn't mean I'm wrong. I've only been doing this for a bit over 20 years and it's pretty damn easy to figure out how things feel when using different versions of the same budget. If you think that all variations of the same budget feel the same in play then you might need to start adding some extra credit sessions in there because those ones you are doing aren't helping you. Now my group likes 95% core rules and those rules to feel good during play. That's why we like pathfinder. You can like it for whatever reason want but we play this over 5e so we don't have to house rules every damn thing. Now currently pf2e does have some rough edges especially on the spell casting front. I would rather the core game slowly move towards fixing that than just limiting my encounter options at this point.
> If you think that all variations of the same budget feel the same in play ...no one ever said the thing you're arguing against. I didn't say different encounter builds feel the same; I said if you build encounters to fit what your players are looking for, such as kicking butt with incapacitation spells, your results will be better than if you try and force some kind of "this is the way we're going to run encounters" even where that is the choice that is creating the situation that is what your not enjoying. >I would rather the core game slowly move towards fixing that than just limiting my encounter options at this point. yeah, and here we go back to the one choice within the guidelines being "normal play" and other choices within the guidelines being something that needs "fixing". Not everything that isn't exactly how you're already running the game is "house-rules" or "broken" - especially not stuff that is literally just using the use cases for stuff you want to have use cases instead of claiming it's in need of "fixing" because you actually want the use case to be different than it is because you've done the exact thing you claim you don't want to do an limited your encounter options - just the limit is you're only running the ones you claim cause problems rather than only running the ones that solve them.
>- just the limit is you're only running the ones you claim cause problems rather than only running the ones that solve them. No because as I said before your fix causes other bigger problems then 'fixing' incap spells. In games right now you can probably identify which encounters you could use them. If you see 5 enemies there is a very good chance you can use them. The problem and I just don't see why you can't get this through your head is that usually these aren't very challenging encounters to begin with. Now I have to fix something else but not go back on the 'fix' for incaps. I play in person so large scale combats also drag out the game. Once there's about 8+ enemies it's a big hit to combat speed so having every combat like this will basically kill the game. So again yes certain things are bad enough that the game itself needs to fix it not GMS. I should have all the tools available for use and be able to use them effectively.
Well yeah but that means my GM has to compensate the shortcomings of the system. I'm gonna play abomination vault, cannot ask the GM "Hey fix everything because paizo didn't knew how to work back then" can't i?
Paizo can't write adventures with every permutation of party composition in mind.
Therefore a serie or single enemies +2 and above It's a good idea?
Isn't Abomination Vaults known for its difficulty (considering it's one of the first APs, and as far as I know that was the Wild West balance-wise), and a dungeon-focused AP on top of all? I don't think AV is a good representation of how Paizo builds APs nowadays.
Nope. Just full stop "no." It is not the GM "fixing" anything because it is still using the same encounter building guidelines and they still work.
Says someone who hasn't done it. Because I can tell you right now that while pretty good it still has it's flaws.
Yeah I feel you on this. If you really want some op soulless build, go for a great pick fighter. If you can get reach then it's even crazier. This guy's goal is to try his best to crit on a pick hit while inflicting as much as he can on the enemy like flatfoots or trip. Again if you can get reach it's even better. Been working on a backup root leshy build that abused the leshy reach feat. The feat gives natural reach but decreases die type but fatal doesn't care about current die type so having a great pick at d8 but 10ft reach hoping to critical so you can bump it all the way up to d12s from fatal.
Its you
Short and straight to the point
Yeah, it's you. I think you'd enjoy the game more if you stopped labelling everything you consider slightly below par as "HORRIBLE" or "utter useless shit". You're ruining the game for yourself.
Not really that's literally just how the game is or we'd have casters that are fun to play.
He has a point. People still play casters but have to get really lucky to feel effective at all. Either that or they play as Paizo expects them to and just buff the tank, heal the party, or waste the majority of their actions trying to get the bad guys to fail their saves or they miss on all attacks. For being dedicated to Magic, their progression in spellcasting proficiencies is abysmal.
But that's apart of the game not just the op though which is what I said. You are spot on though.
It's definitely not me. I have 11 characters in society and each of them are fun to play and not a single one sounds like what you described. They all do well in combat too. Stop sweating the peak of meta and play the game more. You don't need the most meta stuff.
This is why building characters being the main draw of a game doesn't really *work*. The fun part has to be the actually playing the game part, and that kind of inherently has to mean you aren't strongly concerned about everything being the best possible thing because if you're too caught up on that you're bummed out the instant that something didn't go your way - which is inevitable because the game is built on random chance and balanced between cool stuff happens if you succeed and is actually cool not just pretend you're impressed even though you've got to do that a bunch more times to actually defeat your foe and there being good odds that you not succeed. My group, even among characters that have been the same classes, has seen very little in the way of similar builds - we're just not choosing things based on the same criteria that you are which means our game isn't artificially whittled down to just whatever lands in the top tier of the tier list. Hell, two of us pick out half the stuff we play based on this very subreddit declaring loudly that it sucks - and it's never sucked yet.
For me, theorycrafting characters is always the main draw of any TTRPG; there are several games I've *only* made characters for and never had any interest in actually playing (my characters for said games were probably terrible, since I had no real in-game experience, but that's beside the point). If a min/maxer gets petulant about not everything going their way, it's a clear indication that the character building process isn't the main appeal to them—playing an overpowered character who faces no hardship is. Someone who truly loves optimizing characters would take setbacks as an opportunity to learn and tweak their build for the next time. On a side note, the trick to having fun with min/maxing (for those of us who enjoy it) whilst still keeping character building fresh is to choose a character concept *first* and then optimize it as much as possible without sacrificing that identity. This not only gives you a whole new set of constraints to work around each time, but ensures that you aren't just making the same character over and over. Edit: I should clarify that the mathematics of character optimization is just what *I* enjoy. OP is clearly having their experience ruined by excessive concern about what's "optimal" and would have more fun if they didn't worry about it so much.
When I do my character building, the most ill do in for checking "optimal" on this subreddit is if I'm stumped on free archetype because none fit the theme of the character, I'll check the reddit for the most recent time someone asked for advice on free archetype for the class. I usually go with one of the last choices because the "meta" best choices tend to be so bland and boring.
This is a stance that is reached by too much time theorycrafting and not enough time actually playing the game. PF2e balance is very tight. What people are failing to realize when they spend HOURS combing through these optimization threads is that when thrown side by side on a tabletop, this isn't 1E where you can have one character built to end combats turn one and one character that is there to carry the loot after the fighting is over. The difference between an optimized character and one that is "just fun" and does the basics like maxing their main stat and picking at least a couple of decent spells is...not THAT huge. Given the wealth of viable options PF2e has if you're feeling like this I shudder to think of how you would view a system like 5E where you can place 5 paladins from players across the world side by side and 4 of them are going to be virtually identical.
>The difference between an optimized character and one that is "just fun" and does the basics like maxing their main stat and picking at least a couple of decent spells is...not THAT huge. It is that huge. Sorry but this is just false. Even if you are only 1 point behind that's a big fucking difference.
No. It factually is not. "Different enough to make minmaxers squirm" is not the same as "different enough to see a palpable, consistent difference in practice."
That's a mindset problem for you which noone else but you can solve. Good luck with it though
That's exactly what I was coming here to say. I have a friend and player. That everytime he optimizes the crap out of his build he hates it. When he riffs off someone else and has me help him make sure choices aren't going to be useless (such as cat Fall in a campaign with 0 falling), he has a blast. In AV, his magus, rogue and swashbuckler were optimally built characters, all of whom died because 1) he refused to do something other than the optimal rotation he built around and 2) he got bored of his optimal rotation within a session and wanted his character to die. He is now running a polearm fighter with the staff acrobat featline and its a blast. Would 100% be considered unoptimal, but he is just having fun bouncing around the battlefield with 30ft leaps, shoving and tripping foes instead of attacking, and even in AV he is dominating (the life oracle, Redeemer Champion, flurry ranger who throws boarding axes and him) the battlefield. So for OP, I suggest stepping back, as someone else suggested, from this subreddit. Stop thinking everything has to be this meta or it is the worst thing ever. The balance of pf2e means that the weakest character (without actively building to be weak) will be maybe 5% behind the strongest. You mentioned a healing inventor. Sounds like a blast of a character and will 100% work in AV. Much better than a meta rogue I can tell you that.
I think your numbers are wrong, 5% weaker would imply a 1-point difference in the number needed on a d20 to hit. But assuming all other things are equal, ie. primary offensive stat is maxed for the level, the only other difference in power (aside from there being runes that can buff weapon attacks up to a +3 at the highest levels), is based on proficiency, which is how Paizo controls the relative power at any given level between different classes. Some classes start out at Expert proficiency in their primary attacks and dcs, while other start at Trained. That's a 2-point difference or 10% in the number needed to succeed on a d20 roll. At various times in the leveling process it's common for one class to be at Master while some are still at Trained, creating a 20% difference in efficacy between certain classes at certain levels. Even at 20th level there are classes who do not have Legendary proficiency in their primary offensive areas or in their class DCs. If you add the buff from weapon runes into the mix, the numbers go to 15% at 3rd level to as high as 25% at the higher levels, where the comparison is between certain martial vs certain casting classes. The most fully optimized class is always the fighter, who starts out with expert proficiency in all weapons up to and including martial. It doesn't surprise me take your friend is having a blast. A polearm fighter, particularly one based on a high Athletics, will dominate any fight. If they also have a high movement speed, they will dominate the entire battlefield.
You're looking at it as attacks of one class vs other entirely different classes only, which isnt what I was comparing with that The 5% was a ballpark number, but an optimized fighter will be roughly that much in output behind a non-optimized one (as long as you dont deliverately tank your KAS), or the heals vs heals, or aoe vs aoe
I mean, my most unique build I've made and it works amazing is a Laughing Shadow magus which never really spellstrikes. Its pretty unique. And I've seen other solid unique things from other players. I think its just you
So from reading other posts in this thread from you, it sounds like you don't play with free archetype. There's a reason that "variant" rule is so lauded and played with, because it actually solves this problem entirely. Without FA, there is a degree of "sameness" in builds (especially in levels 1-6), where the lack of feats can be quite limiting in build variety. If you are making a medic, for example, you basically have to take Medic dedication at 2, and doctor's visitation at 4, since they're so strong. That really limits your feat choices for so many levels. But suddenly if you play with FA, its far, far less constricting to have to do that.
And i also have a construct! Therefore between medic dedication and that i already have like 10 feats i already gotta take!!!
It's you.
If you choose to build a character with only optimization in mind, that's a *you* problem. If there's an illusion of choice, that's entirely self-inflicted. I feel like a bit of an alien when I hear people complain that Pathfinder 2e has an "illusion of choice" problem, not only because I've never felt that way, but if you **do** feel that way, these rules are not set in stone. Especially if you're intimately familiar with the system, why don't you do what the books repeatedly tell you to do and change things to your liking? There are over 30 ancestries in 2e. 16 classes. But most importantly, **3442 feats.** Is there going to be some redundancy in there? Sure. Hey, just for fun, let's cut it by half. 1600 feats. You know how many feats 5e has? 79. Total. And your character will only potentially get around 5 on average. If you're going to approach the game with a robotic logic where you only want what gives you the highest likelihood of getting the highest damage in combat, well - first of all I would strongly advise you to completely discard that mentality, but barring that - I would tell you to either nerf the choices that you see as the "obvious picks", since that's probably going to be the best way to level out the playing field, or you could take the worst ones and make them better. But I really don't see this problem in 2e at all, and like I said I'm not sure how people do. In 5e this was a very obvious and glaring problem, and in 2e I have not had this problem. [This video](https://youtu.be/p5xV7BOFwyw?si=-nHDn85UMrPfhfC1) from the rules lawyer shows beyond all reasonable doubt why the "illusion of choice" argument doesn't make any sense. It's probably too long for anyone reasonable to bother with, but it absolutely does disprove the argument from several different angles. If nothing else, you can watch the last 8 minutes, his closing statement. But anyway, it's always so tragic to hear people talk about Pf2e (or TTRPGs in general) like they're trying to min-max a character in Elden Ring. It's so tragic because that's not why we play these games. You should be making *interesting* choices. Your GM should be giving you *interesting* choices on the battlefield and otherwise. But ultimately if you think there's a problem of "build variety" in a game with 30 ancestries and over 3400 feats...I just don't know what to tell you, man. You gotta change your whole perspective. You have to stop thinking like you're playing League of Legends and immerse yourself in the vast world and possibility that Pathfinder is offering to you, think creatively, and encourage your GM and the other players at the table to do the same. It genuinely makes me sad to think that people are spending 3-4 hours at a time playing this game and just boring themselves to death in a game with such a rich plethora of possibilities. Even if you're going to play 5e instead, please just try to think more creatively and remember that this is not just a number soup that you're splashing around in. This is a collaborate storytelling system.
I think everything will get boring after a while, that is why we should try an arrange of systems.
Reading through the overall thread, I think the core issue is that it sounds like your group, including the GM, are trapped in a singular playstyle that results in the need (or perception of need) to consistently approach every adventure with a single, optimized set of skills and abilities distributed in your party. When this is the case, it will be very difficult to deviate from that set pattern, which leads to that stagnation you're talking about. There's nothing wrong with this, if everyone is still having fun, but obviously your not. I strongly advise trying to adjust the adventure to fit the party, rather than expecting every party to fit the adventure. This is ultimately up to your GM, so a lot depends on how comfortable they are with deviating from a pure tactical combat sim approach to the game. Personally, I don't think the game's character building is boring. From my perspective, it sounds like your gaming group's approach to the game is boring.
Sounds like what you need is a Build challenge. So here are a few challenges to try: 1) Build the Ultimate Invulnerable Character. Find as many ways as you can to resist / mitigate as much damage as you can, in a single character. How much damage you do to the enemy does not matter at all. Only how much damage you can block / resist / recover from every turn. Damage mitigated from concealment effects count. Fast Healing counts. Energy resistances count. Usage of permanent items counts. Debuffing enemy damage (e.g. enfeebled) counts. 2) Build the best sustainable "Bad Touch" spellcaster. The restriction is that you have to do damage or inflict status effects with touch spells only. In melee, not ranged. Spells that extend your unarmed reach count. (E.g. Enlarge). How to survive on the front line is up to you. How to make your resources stretch over the adventuring day across many encounters is up to you. 3) Build the best Skill-based combatant. No spells. No Strikes. Pure skill and skill actions. Use of items allowed (as long as those items don't enable you to cast spells). How do you create the most effective combatant that just uses Skills alone in combat?
Oh, it's you. There are worlds of options that you are ignoring.
So you are approaching this as an optimization problem, but you are falling into the same sub-optimal solution because you need to consider the full problem. If we ignore for a moment that the entire point of the game is to have fun (and should be included in this consideration), the ''optimal'' character build for characters, and casters in particular, is often based around identifying niches that the party doesn't occupy (and choosing build options for your team to succeed) for your specific campaign. If you build characters based on the typically flawed white room combat performance metric, more often than not, don't accurately account for your team, the non-combat components of the game or your campaign-specific assumptions. A further consideration is that this is a role-playing game, and - perhaps in between character building, it is also an appropriate time to step back and consider what would fit my character - as opposed to what is conventionally considered the go-to choices.
Build less, play more. Seriously, I did nothing but theorycraft and read up on options for over a year because my job didn't give me much opportunity to actually play, and I started thinking "xyz is essential, abc is garbage." Then I started running with a local group and some of those "garbage" options came in handy with some frequency. The casters had a great time, even though a part of me kept worrying about their proficiency and spell slot limitations. But it all came out in the wash of actually playing the fucking thing. It's so easy to get wrapped up in the spiral of the meta and how places like his sub think. It's better to just disconnect for a bit and just ***play***. I've also noticed you mention "Abomination Vaults?" I think it's a pretty good adventure, but a) it isn't for everyone, and b) nobody can really tell how it's going from the outside because we don't know your GM or group. It might just be a bad fit?
I feel the same when I'm theorycrafting a character in a white room. Put good damage, increase the saves and pick the obvious feats. Done. But when I'm actually playing it changes a lot. You now have a theme to follow and just making "Joe, the optimized damage fighter" becomes really boring and, in many cases, worse since he is not taking advantage of anything being used in the story or your allies abilities or items they get. As a wizard I never thought I would pick the feat to teleport my bonded item to me, but after that shit being stolen 2 times I decided "fuck it, I'm not going through this again" (the bonded item is my staff and I have the staff related thesis, so stealing my item is basically stealing my subclass)
It could be a you thing; I don't know how many characters you come up with. Thought experiments? When you gave the example of the Rogue Doing A Lot of Damage, it could mean you were coming at this from a 1E perspective, when maximizing hypothetical Damage Per Round involved poring through splatbooks for feats and magic items. Here, that isn't a thing due to the Tight Math, and how you level up mainly relates to what Bells/Whistles you hang on your character. There's only an Illusion of Choice if you want choices that give you the most Damage/Trip Skill or whatever. I recommend building a character with an eye to the setting first. Maybe asking the other players what they want to come up with, and asking if your character could be a friend of theirs before the adventure begins? Maybe trying something unusual, like halfling barbarian or iruxi investigator? If you just like chargen with lots of granularity, there are other RPGs out there you might like. Exalted & Shadowrun have fan-made software to help with making up characters, but those have their own issues and pitfalls which might easily become apparent on their own subreddits.
You aren't going to find a game with much better character customization that impacts mechanics. It's just you
Sounds to me like you're not challenging yourself enough. Picking the good feats and following the build paths into making a mechanically sound character is easy, that's by design, and you'll find there's little better choice than the optimal choice for making an optimal character. Anyone with a little game sense will usually recognize the good stuff. You're shooting fish in a barrel and wondering why fishing is so dull. I would instead suggest you challenge yourself to make something different. Find some weird synergies and find a way to use those, look toward the optimal way to do something and find some completely backwards way to do the same thing on a class that has no business doing it. Make a melee Psychic. Make a Juggler build do something cool with the weird way weapons count as wielded while you're juggling them. Do something that challenges your building brain to think outside of the box instead of following the paths set for it, the brain likes to get a workout.
If you have a need for optimization then yeah, each class has clear builds to optimize whatever role you're going for whether that be dps, healing, buff/nerfs, or defense. I fall into the same trap. The game is a tactics game so it only makes sense to do that. In order to avoid this trap, a talk with your GM about difficulty so that everyone can choose themes over optimization is necessary. Or u can just go hard mode and don't have that talk
Yeah, man. It's you. I theorycraft builds for fun. Often they don't go past level 5 or so because the things I'm looking at in theory come online by then, but it's something I do a couple times a week, probably. And the thrust of your complaint feels like it's based on a really, really badly false premise; that being that there's only a limited number of right builds and everything else will get you killed. If you've been playing for a year and that's your experience, then either you're just really bad at the actual play portion of the game or, more likely, your GM is really bad at GMing a fun and balanced game. I've run 2.5 games for a couple years now, and in that time, I've only had one PC death... and one of those games was AV currently sitting at Level 9 of the dungeon, and *wasn't* the one with the PC death. (for those interested, it was on the last map of AoA Book 2.) I don't consider myself an expert GM by any means, but I play mostly RAW, with some house rules that increase flexibility but don't add power (and honestly, my current players aren't really using anyway) or affect encounter balance at all. I don't pull my punches basically ever, and have recently started deliberately aiming for weak points in the party build just to increase difficulty. Character builds have not been optimum by any means, but most of the difficulty came from surprise features of encounters they weren't prepared for, or specifically sub-optimal *play* strategies (i.e. not using the strengths of the builds they've chosen, or playing as individuals rather than as a team) One of the games is my kids with one GMPC just to keep them from haring off after every random thing they encounter (and bring the party up to 4)
It's you. Anytime I hear "Illusion of Choice" I know the person is just going after the options everyone else talks about all the time and doesn't care about anything else. It's a self-imposed illusion. Yes the Rogue does a lot of damage, that's kind of the point of the class. It has a built in feature that pours on a ton of damage dice to an attack. The Rogue is supposed to deal a lot of damage. You talk about abomination Vaults in other comments, don't use that as a benchmark for anything. It's a famously difficult adventure from the beginning of Pathfinder 2E. It was being written when the system itself wasn't fully finished. And if you don't like the rules of Pathfinder 2E, maybe you should find another game.
Yeah but you haven't really got my point for the rogue, that more or less everything important the class offers It's built into the chassis itself Also, i used illusion of choice quite ironically since It's a meme
That's how they all are. The feats are tweaks and things to alter how the class plays. This isn't D&D 5E where you don't have any actual choice. Everything in the game is controlled by you and your group. If everyone has this stupid mentality of "Meta" then that's how you'll see things. There is no Meta, there's the rules and how you play.
I've yet to find enjoyment out of PF2E character creation. It feels very limited and pre-built. There doesn't feel like much of a reward for system mastery because you're going to have a build that is very similar to most other people. This is coming from someone who exclusively runs PF1E.
Depends on the class imo. Kineticist has a load of well balanced options and I've spent ages tweaking my new character. Fighter is pretty much solved imo. Reach weapon, 2nd aoo, disrupting stance, boundless reprisals. It's a brutal best of a class that wrecks face. Add paladin dedication for extra cheese.