Dramatically different optimization levels across groups?

[souridealist]

So, my gaming experience up until now has been primarily in two different groups. One group was devoted to a campaign that even as a newbie, I could tell was not exactly par for the course (I wrote up the highlights on the Evil DM Stories thread, but essentially: things were weird and there was a major and malicious artifact or power-set for everyone). The other group was a little more casual, and never struck me as particularly powergamey or like anyone was overwhelmingly optimized, or anything like that. You picked what you wanted to do, set yourself up to do it as well as possible, and if the party had a task their builds weren't designed to handle then we'd figure something out. Possibly by banging our heads against it, if we had low INT or WIS scores. We weren't the best roleplayers, but it wasn't mindless hack-n-slash either (one time we nearly got toasted by an umbral dragon because the party alchemist was convinced, CONVINCED that a local sorcerer was evil.) My characters tended to do a bit less damage than the rest of the party, but hey, I was new at this, they were universally character types I'd never built before, and I could usually be useful enough. It was fun.

Now, recently, due to being five hundred miles away from the previous groups for the moment, I've joined a new collective. I sat down to build my character, applied the central principles I'd learned with my old group, and built a character who I was pretty sure would have kept up with the characters they would've created.

And everyone in the new group has looked at my character sheet and said HOLY MOTHER OF GOD.

FTR, the bit people focus on have usually been my stats. It was point-buy, we're seventh-level gestalt characters, and I'm a tiefling with stats as follows:
STR 6 DEX 18 CON 14 INT 19 WIS 14 CHA 5 before magic items. With magic items I have DEX 20, INT 23, and everything else is unchanged. I'm a rogue/wizard and it's Pathfinder.

So... old group weirdly high-optimization for people who never seemed to emphasize that aspect? New group wimps? I'm just strange? And has anybody else had moments like this?

[Silva Stormrage]

You are a multi classed rogue/wizard. You are not over optimizing for most games. I think the new group just has a much lower optimization threshold than you are used to.

[Xerlith]

Yeah, a Rogue/Wizard is good in and of itself.
Your group is most probably simply not used to diminishing stats to less than 8.
Hell, I personally enforce such a rule on my table (The counterbalance to allowing almost all the Dragon, 3rd party and homebrew material).

But then, you don't really need your casting stat higher than 10+ your spell level, unless you plan to go Save or Die on your enemies.

[Agincourt]

Gestalt is high-powered and any time you gestalt with a full-caster, you're going to get a powerful character.

That being said, I think the group may be focusing too much on the stats. Stats are helpful, but as you rise in level, their importance diminishes. More important than stats is your spell choice. A player who selects good spells for the PC but has poor stats is going to outperform the player who selects poor spells but has good stats.

[souridealist]

But then, you don't really need your casting stat higher than 10+ your spell level, unless you plan to go Save or Die on your enemies.

The bonus spells per day are nice, though. That's really what I get out of it.

(And ftr, I didn't buy quite that low - RAW you can only buy down to seven anyway. The Charisma took the extra hit because of racial adjustments; the STR dropped to six because of plot and DM fiat.)

RE: Agincourt - I also have a couple levels in the Daggerspell Mage prestige class from 3.5, which lets me deliver touch spells with a dagger to the face, so I've mostly pick touch damage? I figured that made some sense, going forward. Invisibility and Vanish, too.