Quote Originally Posted by Divine Susuryu View Post
Sort of - the top-end stuff was all around eliminated for both martials and spellcasters. No more Incantatrix, Hulking Hurler, Dweomerkeeper, or Ubercharger, after all. I think what you're referring to is more the mid-op stuff. Any caster whose gameplan was simply cast "good value spells" got nothing but gravy out of PF, and any martial character who wanted to do anything more than hit dudes got shafted by the way CMD scales so much faster than CMB can.
It goes deeper than that, IMO.

Pathfinder has tons of little niggling things that all add up to make the game appear as though the core design goal was that, "Martial characters can't have nice things."

There's no logical reason for all of the combat maneuver feats to be split up while none of the metamagic or other spellcasting feats were. Spellcasters even got a pile of new feats to play with (Dazing Spell, Bouncing Spell, Sacred Geometry, Spell Perfection, etc.) It's terrible design to allow specialist wizards to be able to cast spells of their barred schools by using two slots instead of one as well as cast them from items without penalty. There is no good reason at all not to specialize, especially if you know that the game won't progress past level 7.
Why is Tumbling now based on the CMD of the creature (which scales well out of the realm of possibility by level 10 or so) but not defensive spellcasting?

Why, in the name of Tiamat, did the design team allow someone to get away with nerfing Power Attack? And Cleave? It seems like someone at Paizo really really doesn't like spiked chain trippers, Uberchargers, and Uber-grapplers and designed the system accordingly. I don't honestly understand why, since those concepts are just differently viable alternatives to, "I run up and hit it with my stick" every round.

I understand that some of the iconic spells got nerfed too, but here's the thing with that logic: nerfing "a spell" doesn't really do anything to affect a spellcasters overall level of power as long as there is at least one other spell that also allows them to win at the same spell level. It makes spellcasters less interesting because they have fewer options they will want to use, but as a wizard I am certainly not any less powerful now that I have to cast ghoulish hunger to win the encounter because finger of death got reduced to an inconsequential damage dealing spell. There's still a multitude of spells like that on every class's list. The fine folks at Paizo even added some new ones.

I don't hate Pathfinder because of pettiness over it outlasting the system it was based on. I hate it because it was sold as a bad bill of goods. There are still people who genuinely believe that Paizo was serious about creating "3.5 D&D Done Right!" I hate it because the open play test was a blatant lie. People who actually ran apples to apples comparisons, same game tests, or repeated experiments to get controlled results or uncover regressed bugs were not only ignored, they were banned from the official forums. Paizo wasn't interested in fine tuning a system for optimal play. It was a marketing ploy that was never intended to produce any real results.

Pathfinder generally gets a thumbs-down from me. I find it to be a mechanically neutral change from 3.5, and that for everything they did right there's always at least one more thing they did wrong. If the martial/caster disparity is your main gripe with 3.5, Pathfinder will not solve your problem.