Pathfinder 2e - How does it compare to other systems?

[Psyren]

I... don't understand why the 5e version is more fun at all. Why am I playing this encounter if a 1st level spell can just make the enemy flee off the battlemap? Why am I not baking muffins or something?

Do all your encounters involve the party facing a single monster on a 30' map? That seems like a bigger problem to me than the spells.

[Rynjin]

I... don't understand why the 5e version is more fun at all. Why am I playing this encounter if a 1st level spell can just make the enemy flee off the battlemap? Why am I not baking muffins or something?

Did this sound cooler in your head or something? Because this makes pretty much zero sense as a response.

Like...are you under the impression that making a single enemy flee for a turn ends the encounter? Do you think if they leave the battlemat they despawn like a poorly coded video game? Or do you figure they'd just choose not to come back?

Do you think combat is the only thing fun in the game? And an even further subset of that, do you think HP damage is the only fulfilling metric for what makes said combat fun? Do you think it's bad that spending resources should result in a significant gain?

I guess if your answer to the majority of these questions is "yes", and people getting to do cool stuff at the table bothers you...sure, you might as well go bake muffins. Because it's pretty clear you're not very interested in RPGs.

Like we're not talking about 3.5 Color Spray here, which is a 1st level spell which can essentially instakill like 3-4 people at low levels. This is 5e Command. Where your options are:

Approach. The target moves toward you by the shortest and most direct route, ending its turn if it moves within 5 feet of you.

Drop. The target drops whatever it is holding and then ends its turn.

Flee. The target spends its turn moving away from you by the fastest available means.

Grovel. The target falls prone and then ends its turn.

Halt. The target doesn’t move and takes no actions. A flying creature stays aloft, provided that it is able to do so. If it must move to stay aloft, it flies the minimum distance needed to remain in the air.

Exactly zero of these options end the combat. Hell, they don't even end THAT SPECIFIC ENEMY. The spell takes one guy out of the combat temporarily. You trade one of your actions and a spell slot for their action and movement. An equivalent exchange.

Command is kind of the star example of a perfectly designed spell that has an okay chance of success (Wisdom saves are pretty easy to pass) but has a decent-sized impact. Always has been. It's been the benchmark for 1st level CC for over 20 years.

Pathfinder 2e completely changes that metric, and not for the better. Instead of exchanging your turn and a spell slot for their turn (and no spell slot!), you trade your turn and a spell slot for...part of their turn. One of their attacks, essentially. Trading 2 of your actions for one of theirs is a bad trade even if you do it FOR FREE.

Why would you ever choose to do this? It makes zero tactical sense. This is like if you're playing Chess, and implement a rule where you can flip a coin and call it heads or tails; if you win, your opponent skips their turn. But they also get to flip a coin, and if you call yours wrong, or they call theirs right, you skip your next TWO turns. That would be an extremely dumb play to make, nobody would ever do that.

[Anonymouswizard]

You know P2's Command is great, except for the fact it costs two of your actions for one of theirs. If it only took one action to cast it would be a good spell to throw at enemies who include a setup action to be fully effective.

Really the issue is that most spells just weren't designed around the game's action economy.

[Psyren]

You know P2's Command is great, except for the fact it costs two of your actions for one of theirs. If it only took one action to cast it would be a good spell to throw at enemies who include a setup action to be fully effective.

Really the issue is that most spells just weren't designed around the game's action economy.

It would be better as a 1-action spell, but it would still represent a significant loss in functionality relative to its predecessor or from D&D, and thus still be disappointing to a lot of the people they are trying to attract from those games.

Arguably what they have in place may be worse than just taking some of these spells out entirely. Keeping to the Command example, in most cases you are unlikely to even see the enemy crit-fail their save, you are instead going to see the closest you get to success being to take up a single action doing what you want from a very limited list and generally undoing it with their next action. At best you waste as many actions as it takes just to cast the spell, at worst you've just spent two of your three actions and the enemy uses basically beats your face in through malicious compliance. Pathfinder had its own problems but generally if you needed CC you knew a spell was going to give you actual CC.

I love the malicious compliance line

At least as far as I'm concerned my argument isn't "this is bad and people shouldn't play it" it's "this is something I do not enjoy and I am communicating why." An argument hinging on the idea that the enemy can do it too isn't really going to change my mind because the version I prefer already has the enemy doing it too and that is something I am used to and enjoy, in the same vein I don't expect that my issues with PF2's magic are going to change your mind on what you object to with Pathfinder's. The systems are simply too different, despite sharing the brand name and a main setting I can't see porting mechanics over from either without considerable tweaking and testing doing anything but breaking what makes either system appeal to its audience.

Exactly this. I'd rather have Actual Command / Actual Sleep / Actual Color Spray Dizzying Colors in the game, with the tactical consideration that they might potentially get used on me, than being stuck with only watered-down versions for both sides.

Once we finish the AP, my group is very likely to shift back to PF1, but backporting what works from PF2 like the three-action system ( which was an optional rule that showed up late in PF1's lifecycle), weapon and armor runes and a few other things.

FYI - PF1 already has the 3-action rule as a variant, because Unchained was their testing ground for multiple PF2 ideas.

[lesser_minion]

Why would you ever choose to do this? It makes zero tactical sense. This is like if you're playing Chess, and implement a rule where you can flip a coin and call it heads or tails; if you win, your opponent skips their turn. But they also get to flip a coin, and if you call yours wrong, or they call theirs right, you skip your next TWO turns. That would be an extremely dumb play to make, nobody would ever do that.

I kind of hate that I'm doing this, but a mechanic like that would be pretty strong in Chess. You could use it to stop an opponent from forcing a draw, or you could use it to escape from Zugzwang.

On slightly less of a tangent, "Surrender" used to be a valid choice for Command, so using it to end fights has at least been theoretically possible in the past.

[Anonymouswizard]

It would be better as a 1-action spell, but it would still represent a significant loss in functionality relative to its predecessor or from D&D, and thus still be disappointing to a lot of the people they are trying to attract from those games.

Because D&D is a paragon of balance and all deviations from it are terrible.

There's some disappointment in that you lose the ability for arbitrary one word commands, but otherwise it's main issue is the two for one trade.

Exactly this. I'd rather have Actual Command / Actual Sleep / Actual Color Spray Dizzying Colors in the game, with the tactical consideration that they might potentially get used on me, than being stuck with only watered-down versions for both sides.

Sleep is weird, I'd argue the base duration should be ten minutes, but it's main 'issue' in this case is that it's intentionally a noncombat spell.

As for Colour Spray I think the P2 version is actually slightly better. Blinded is possibly a bit weaker, but it has an affect unless the target(s), crit succeeds, and if they fail they're dazzled for a minute (effectively a 20% miss chance on their actions), and blinded for a whole minute if they crit fail.

[Psyren]

On slightly less of a tangent, "Surrender" used to be a valid choice for Command, so using it to end fights has at least been theoretically possible in the past.

Unless your enemy has the memory of a goldfish, I'd question the usefulness of a 1-round surrender.

Because D&D is a paragon of balance and all deviations from it are terrible.

Presumably they were interested in retaining their PF1 audience. If not, calling the game "Pathfinder 2" would be fairly illogical.

There's some disappointment in that you lose the ability for arbitrary one word commands, but otherwise it's main issue is the two for one trade.

It would still be bland even if it was 1-for-1. But it wouldn't be abjectly terrible, so I'll give you that.

Sleep is weird, I'd argue the base duration should be ten minutes, but it's main 'issue' in this case is that it's intentionally a noncombat spell.

The base duration is all but irrelevant, because even out of combat it's just normal sleep, i.e. they can perceive you to wake up; noises, smells etc.

As for Colour Spray I think the P2 version is actually slightly better. Blinded is possibly a bit weaker, but it has an affect unless the target(s), crit succeeds, and if they fail they're dazzled for a minute (effectively a 20% miss chance on their actions), and blinded for a whole minute if they crit fail.

5e's is better; it has no save, just a HP limit. The issue with the 5e version is that Sleep exists and most classes that get one get the other.

[Anonymouswizard]

The base duration is all but irrelevant, because even out of combat it's just normal sleep, i.e. they can perceive you to wake up; noises, smells etc.

Eh, ten minutes of normal sleep isn't useless, especially at levels where you care about 1st level slots. It's situational, which is a pretty big downside, but useful.

5e's is better; it has no save, just a HP limit. The issue with the 5e version is that Sleep exists and most classes that get one get the other.

Urgh, hp limits im spells.can go and die. We already have a perfectly workable method of determining if a creature resists a spell, we don't need a whole separate one for like six spells

Sleep? Use a bloody saving throw.
Colour Spray? Use a bloody saving throw.
Power Word: Whatever? Use a bloody saving throw.

Also I really feel like you're underselling 'standard effect lasts for a minute'.

[lesser_minion]

Unless your enemy has the memory of a goldfish, I'd question the usefulness of a 1-round surrender.

If they're trying to surrender to the best of their ability, then they shouldn't oppose anything you do to secure them for that round. You could disarm and manacle them, or even cast a more potent spell on them with no save or possibility of resistance.

[MonochromeTiger]

I love the malicious compliance line

I have significant experience with both DMs/GMs and players who are perfectly willing to make a very careful interpretation of effects like Command, including in my negative experiences with PF2. PF2 Command makes it much easier to have that issue than the 5e version simply because one action doing what you want while still leaving the entire rest of their turn intact as the normal result (if they even fail badly enough to set off the effect) just leaves so much room for malicious compliance responses that leave "drop prone" and "stand still" as the objective best options on its list.

They move toward you? Congratulations they spend their remaining actions trying to murder you up close and since you're still a squishy caster in a game where the defensive and offensive options for casters are significantly lowered odds are pretty good you're in serious danger. Run away? "Alright, the Goblin runs a short distance away then pulls out a sling and takes a shot at the person who just showed they can mess with his head, his allies also turn to look at you as their turns start." Even "release what it's holding" has spawned a few conversations about whether or not throwing their weapon at the person who just used Command counts since it's "releasing what they're holding" at high speed and in the direction of the caster.

If they're trying to surrender to the best of their ability, then they shouldn't oppose anything you do to secure them for that round. You could disarm and manacle them, or even cast a more potent spell on them with no save or possibility of resistance.

There's limits to what even a surrendering person would accept even if they're doing their best to surrender. Generally speaking you're not going to have someone who is surrendering just sit there and accept a sword in the gut, by the same reasoning they're unlikely to just accept some spell effect they don't recognize going uncontested. As for manacles and everything else, unless the target is completely alone for whatever reason the caster and their allies aren't exactly going to have the best of times trying to tie them up or manacle them in the middle of a fight with all their friends still active. And that's if they even have the resources on hand to effectively detain the target, a surprising number of players I've seen ignore the adventuring basics like "always have rope."

[Rynjin]

I kind of hate that I'm doing this, but a mechanic like that would be pretty strong in Chess. You could use it to stop an opponent from forcing a draw, or you could use it to escape from Zugzwang.

I feel like a 25% chance to do so in exchange for a 75% chance of giving your opponent two extra turns would be pretty poor odds even in a niche circumstance like this.

Like yeah, if you're casting Command because you play in a world where it's the only CC spell, and you'll die instantly if you don't get the critical fail result, you'll still cast it, but that's not the usual tactical consideration.

It giving you a niche chance to not lose doesn't mean it is often going to be a viable tactical consideration. Particularly when it comes with the opportunity cost of learning a different spell that might have a lesser maximum impact but always works. Like if you could instead choose to allow all your pieces to move one extra square.

I'm pretty sure I'd take the latter, even if one in several games I might be like "Darn! Only Command could save me now!". I'll eat the L on those occasions.

[MoiMagnus]

Do all your encounters involve the party facing a single monster on a 30' map? That seems like a bigger problem to me than the spells.

While I'm straying away a little bit from the matter at hand (especially since I never played PF2), I have to say that I've been generally dissatisfied by boss battles in D&D.

I want "team of heroes VS the evil king in his throne room / the dragon inside his lair / etc" and no other creature in the room, and mostly a straight boss battle, to be something that works and is relatively interesting out-of-the-box.

And 5e oscillate between spells being too good because they win in one go, or frustratingly useless for the caster because of legendary resistance or worse immunity. (Though I have to admit that legendary actions are great, I'm not always convinced by the execution but it's a step in the good direction.)

From that, it follows that the most reasonable options would be for spells to have diminished effects on boss, so for every spell to have a "lesser" effect that doesn't one-turn-win the fight while still doing something.

Well, reading the comments, it seems that PF2 overcorrected by making spell also feel useless against regular non-boss enemies, which is a shame because I do think this idea has potential.

[Psyren]

Eh, ten minutes of normal sleep isn't useless, especially at levels where you care about 1st level slots. It's situational, which is a pretty big downside, but useful.

Good for you, glad you find it sufficient. I don't.

7
Urgh, hp limits im spells.can go and die. We already have a perfectly workable method of determining if a creature resists a spell, we don't need a whole separate one for like six spells

Sleep? Use a bloody saving throw.
Colour Spray? Use a bloody saving throw.
Power Word: Whatever? Use a bloody saving throw.

There's this concept called variety that you (and seemingly Paizo) might want to reacquaint yourselves with. Yes, saving throws exist, but both 5e and PF1 proved you can have spells with dramatic effects that are still reasonable for their level, and that don't need to interact with that mechanic. That's how you get a thing called depth, which PF2 spellcasting is sorely lacking.

Also I really feel like you're underselling 'standard effect lasts for a minute'.

Because in practice it won't be useful, assuming you mean sleep. In an exploration scene a single minute per casting is nearly pointless, and in combat the target will wake up at the first clang or shout, wasting your turn and slot.

[lesser_minion]

There's limits to what even a surrendering person would accept even if they're doing their best to surrender. Generally speaking you're not going to have someone who is surrendering just sit there and accept a sword in the gut, by the same reasoning they're unlikely to just accept some spell effect they don't recognize going uncontested. As for manacles and everything else, unless the target is completely alone for whatever reason the caster and their allies aren't exactly going to have the best of times trying to tie them up or manacle them in the middle of a fight with all their friends still active. And that's if they even have the resources on hand to effectively detain the target, a surprising number of players I've seen ignore the adventuring basics like "always have rope."

I don't disagree with any of this. I don't think "surrender" would always be a winning option, I just think it had the potential sometimes.

The "any one-word command" thing was replaced with a fixed menu of five options in 3.5. "Command: surrender" might have been a part of it, but there must be at least a few Finnish, Estonian, or Hungarian D&D players out there who still tell stories about the first and only time someone used 3.0 Command at one of their tables.

I feel like a 25% chance to do so in exchange for a 75% chance of giving your opponent two extra turns would be pretty poor odds even in a niche circumstance like this.

I'm not a chess expert, but I suspect it would be useful in a few different endgames. Forced turn skip + check presumably equals checkmate, and if your opponent has lost their turn, it presumably also becomes legal to move your king into check.

That said, I was really just nitpicking the use of Chess, rather than having it be an M:TG card or similar.

[Rynjin]

I wanted to simplify it down to a truly turn-based game with no other factors, is why. I play enough card games to know that coin flip turn skip effects can actually get out of hand in those if you have other cards that can force a result on the turnskip.

Arcana Force XXI: The World in Yugioh is a good example. Baseline very bad card; you flip a coin and if you call it right your opponent skips their turn. Call it wrong and not only have you spent a bunch of resources to summon it, you give your opponent even more card advantage.

But there is a newly revealed deck archetype that CAN weave this into their main combo without spending a ton of resources, and force the die roll, so it's kinda degenerate in theory. Remains to be seen whether that will still be too gimmicky or not, but it's more playable than expected.

[Anonymouswizard]

There's this concept called variety that you (and seemingly Paizo) might want to reacquaint yourselves with. Yes, saving throws exist, but both 5e and PF1 proved you can have spells with dramatic effects that are still reasonable for their level, and that don't need to interact with that mechanic. That's how you get a thing called depth, which PF2 spellcasting is sorely lacking.

I hope WotC learns about this variety thing, instead of just giving every character spell slots

(Yes I know Paizo is also guilty of that.)

Variety for variety's sake isn't inherently good. We already have two methods for determining if a spell fails, why do we need a third for a literal handful of spells that you're going to ignore for most of the game as HP totals bloat?

Because in practice it won't be useful, assuming you mean sleep. In an exploration scene a single minute per casting is nearly pointless, and in combat the target will wake up at the first clang or shout, wasting your turn and slot.

Reread Colour Spray, it's effects last for a minute. It might not be complete blindness, but enemies being Dazzled for an entire combat isn't bad.

[Spamotron]

My impression of the people who don't like PF2 in this thread tried a couple sessions at most and then bounced. Their feedback might be useful to you but here's something else that's likely more nuanced. This Thread on the Official Paizo forums is people who actually enjoy the system and have played it for years discussing the pain points and dislikes they have.

[Anonymouswizard]

My impression of the people who don't like PF2 in this thread tried a couple sessions at most and then bounced. Their feedback might be useful to you but here's something else that's likely more nuanced. This Thread on the Official Paizo forums is people who actually enjoy the system and have played it for years discussing the pain points and dislikes they have.

Huh, interesting that one of the first complaints is the variable spell list casters, I actually like them. I hear Revised has Witch replacing Sorcerer in the corebook, which I completely get, but it's nice that one's still there by default.

[Psyren]

I hope WotC learns about this variety thing, instead of just giving every character spell slots

(Yes I know Paizo is also guilty of that.)

Thanks for saving me a rebuttal

Variety for variety's sake isn't inherently good. We already have two methods for determining if a spell fails, why do we need a third for a literal handful of spells that you're going to ignore for most of the game as HP totals bloat?

Because not all spells are meant to be effective for your entire career. Sleep and Color Spray being solid choices at low levels that you eventually outgrow as monsters get more HP is both intentional and good design. I'll take that over spells that are uniformly bland/niche from inception to conclusion.

Reread Colour Spray, it's effects last for a minute. It might not be complete blindness, but enemies being Dazzled for an entire combat isn't bad.

PF2 dazzled is less of a joke than PF1 dazzled, I'll give you that. But a 25% chance to lose any given attack is still going to take a couple rounds to compensate me for the two actions I gave up to impose it, never mind the spell slot.

[Serafina]

Pathfinder 2E's Command actually trades Actions 1:1 if an enemy fail's a saving throw:
- they spend 1 action running away
- they spend 1 action to get back where they started

What if they don't care about their positioning? Say, if they're an archer?
- they spend 1 action dropping everything they hold
- they spend 1 (or more!) actions picking those items back up

That leaves it somewhat ineffective against enemy spellcasters, though you can of course make them approach you to lure them into melee, or make them drop prone if they are already in melee (which makes them easier to hit and harder for them to get away), which ain't bad either.



As for Sleep - a Failure is good enough to knock a creature unconscious for 1 minute, which is plenty of time in combat. This will very much leave enemies
- unable to act
- Blinded and Off-Guard
- in need of damage, healing, or an interact-action to wake up
What it won't do until the 4th-level version is
- make enemies drop prone
- make enemies drop what they are holding
- prevent them from waking up due to loud noise.

It's actually more limited compared to 5E by it's short range (30 feet) and area of effect (5 foot burst), whereas the 5E version has a long range (90 feet) and big AOE (20 foot burst).
Of course that's only an issue if you want Sleep to be an encounter-ender. The PF2E version is still quite capable of hitting several creatures and taking them out of the fight for one or more rounds.


As for Colour Spray/Dizzying Colours:
- it notably has an effect if the enemy succeeds at a saving throw, dazzled for 1 round. Assuming you catch like a few enemies with it, that's decent odds that one of them will miss a strike in that time
- on a Failure it will Stun 1 (costing the enemy 1 action outright), Blind for 1 round (which in addition to the miss chance also makes all terrain difficult terrain), and Dazzles for 1 minute aka most of a fight (imposing a 25% miss chance)
Sure, it only partially disables enemies, but it's still pretty effective at doing so? Heck, a 25% miss chance is statistically comparable to Disadvantage, which is what the 5E version imposes from imposing Blinded.

[Psyren]

Pathfinder 2E's Command actually trades Actions 1:1 if an enemy fail's a saving throw:
- they spend 1 action running away
- they spend 1 action to get back where they started

That only helps if the enemy wasn't already in melee. It also does nothing to help Command:Approach, so you might as well not have that option. In PF1 and 5e, both are useful, so it's still a nerf for no reason other than making casters less interesting.

What if they don't care about their positioning? Say, if they're an archer?
- they spend 1 action dropping everything they hold
- they spend 1 (or more!) actions picking those items back up

You've denied their second shot - but thanks to PF2's MAP that second shot was likely going to miss anyway, so there's ultimately little difference, they still get to wing you in the face. PF1/5e Command:Drop meanwhile denies all their shots.

As for Sleep - a Failure is good enough to knock a creature unconscious for 1 minute, which is plenty of time in combat.
...
Of course that's only an issue if you want Sleep to be an encounter-ender. The PF2E version is still quite capable of hitting several creatures and taking them out of the fight for one or more rounds.

You're forgetting once again that PF2 sleep does not keep them asleep - i.e. anything they perceive (like a loud noise - but those don't happen in combat, right??) can wake them up at any time. They even explicitly warn you that PF2 Sleep is intentionally ineffective in combat for this very reason. Forget one minute, you'll be lucky to get one round out of it unless your plan is to (quietly) run away.

As for Colour Spray/Dizzying Colours:
- it notably has an effect if the enemy succeeds at a saving throw, dazzled for 1 round. Assuming you catch like a few enemies with it, that's decent odds that one of them will miss a strike in that time
- on a Failure it will Stun 1 (costing the enemy 1 action outright), Blind for 1 round (which in addition to the miss chance also makes all terrain difficult terrain), and Dazzles for 1 minute aka most of a fight (imposing a 25% miss chance)
Sure, it only partially disables enemies, but it's still pretty effective at doing so? Heck, a 25% miss chance is statistically comparable to Disadvantage, which is what the 5E version imposes from imposing Blinded.

I'm not saying PF2 color spray is useless. Certainly it's much better in a fight than PF2 sleep is. But when you compare it to PF1 or especially 5e Color Spray, it still comes up short at the levels where you'd be using color spray in the first place.

[Ignimortis]

My impression of the people who don't like PF2 in this thread tried a couple sessions at most and then bounced. Their feedback might be useful to you but here's something else that's likely more nuanced. This Thread on the Official Paizo forums is people who actually enjoy the system and have played it for years discussing the pain points and dislikes they have.

I have played PF2 for two and a half years. I am willing to give it one more chance later on with a different group and running an official adventure rather than a homebrew world, and if that doesn't prove at least two degrees of success better than those 2.5 years, I will officially declare PF2 to be the worst system I've ever played.

It is, by far, the system most praised by DMs and least praised by players. It's designed in a way that a DM should never have issues running it, and players will play what they can, rather what they want. If PF1 was a hard system to DM, but an incredibly fun one to be a player in, then PF2 is the reverse - playing it is incredibly boring, but running it seems to be buttery smooth even for newcomer DMs.

It is understandable why it's that way. Paizo is a company that sells adventures. The system is secondary to those adventures, and having a system that ensures the adventures run well with 99.99% of the groups is far more important for Paizo than anything else. But the moments where I looked at the VTT and said "yeah, this was a mechanically fulfilling and fun session" were few. The only reason I've stuck it out for 2.5 years were interesting roleplay and an engaging world, neither of which had much to do with PF2.

While I'm straying away a little bit from the matter at hand (especially since I never played PF2), I have to say that I've been generally dissatisfied by boss battles in D&D.

I want "team of heroes VS the evil king in his throne room / the dragon inside his lair / etc" and no other creature in the room, and mostly a straight boss battle, to be something that works and is relatively interesting out-of-the-box.

And 5e oscillate between spells being too good because they win in one go, or frustratingly useless for the caster because of legendary resistance or worse immunity. (Though I have to admit that legendary actions are great, I'm not always convinced by the execution but it's a step in the good direction.)

From that, it follows that the most reasonable options would be for spells to have diminished effects on boss, so for every spell to have a "lesser" effect that doesn't one-turn-win the fight while still doing something.

Well, reading the comments, it seems that PF2 overcorrected by making spell also feel useless against regular non-boss enemies, which is a shame because I do think this idea has potential.

I have never seen a system do this particularly well out of the box. You can get there, but you'd need to do 70% of design yourself.

[MonochromeTiger]

From that, it follows that the most reasonable options would be for spells to have diminished effects on boss, so for every spell to have a "lesser" effect that doesn't one-turn-win the fight while still doing something.

Well, reading the comments, it seems that PF2 overcorrected by making spell also feel useless against regular non-boss enemies, which is a shame because I do think this idea has potential.

It's an incredibly complex and difficult balance to manage and, honestly, most games don't seem to try too hard. What you get more often is a system that follows their bias to one extreme or another with the occasional tweak or errata trying to fix the objectively broken things, if that much (PF2 for instance had entire classes or major releases that were seriously underperforming even in comparison to the other things sharing their role or niche go untouched for years despite "balance" being the main talking point of its supporters). Sadly the most likely things to actually resolve the issue are either excessively heavy house rules or basically making your own system for that specific purpose.

My impression of the people who don't like PF2 in this thread tried a couple sessions at most and then bounced. Their feedback might be useful to you but here's something else that's likely more nuanced. This Thread on the Official Paizo forums is people who actually enjoy the system and have played it for years discussing the pain points and dislikes they have.

Getting the distinct impression from how dismissive this is that bringing up how long I've sat through PF2 for, how I've finished both Homebrew campaigns and everything my friend had from the PF2 Kingmaker remake, would still just result in having my issues with the system brushed off. It's really not as simple as "oh they just don't get it, they must be biased", it's opinion and personal taste.

Even in the thread you link to you've got people who just can't seem to agree on what their issues are, or try to invalidate others' issues because they don't have them or others' favored points because they don't have them. Heck you've got one or two people in there whose main reason for loving PF2 seems to be that they just hate 3.5 and Pathfinder and that anyone from another site who has issues with it is biased. Never mind the fact that it's Paizo's own forums where of course most of the opinions on PF2 are going to be positive. You generally don't just wander into the specialized forums for a product, especially the general forums instead of customer support or technical question sections, if you don't already have an above average interest in those products. Saying this is a more nuanced view is like telling someone looking at game reviews to just ignore any negative ones and only accept the few bad things said about it in positive reviews.

Edit: to be fair, I'd be the first to say my experience with PF2 is limited. Compared to the much longer experience I have with the original it is absolutely minuscule. But I know I've had enough to form my own opinion with experience to back it and that opinion is still negative. The only positives I can think of were the people I was playing with, who I care enough about personally to suffer through those games despite how much they disappointed me, and a few points of the setting being interesting. I can acknowledge where PF2's strengths are, I can acknowledge that I am absolutely not the target audience as is proven by the fact that it has yet to appeal to me in the slightest, I can also acknowledge that for the people it does appeal to it's great. That last part is really easy to admit because, true to edition wars standards, many of those people it appeals to just come out and tell me I'm wrong for not liking it and still liking things it "improved on."

However, it's just another system that is trying to do something different from what I want. That simple, I am not who it's for nor will I be for anything short of a radical change that would almost certainly ruin it in the eyes of the people who it is for. But it really is just another system, it isn't superior or inferior on those grounds to Pathfinder, D&D 3.5, or 4e, or 5e. It's simply different, and part of that difference is accepting that some people won't like it and that their dislike isn't saying you can't like it or something you have to oppose or block out. It's just their dislike and their criticism.

[Jophiel]

I've been in a PF2e (Revised) game for a couple of months now (level four) and have been enjoying it. I'm playing a cleric and find myself with plenty to do and enough options to keep it interesting. Yes, some spells I think are "worse" such as Command but that's not a big deal for me since it wouldn't be a go-to for this character anyway. Neo-Bless took a little getting used to but it's amusing to see it blast across 80' radius of map during a protracted fight.

We played a PF1e Kingmaker game for a year and I ran a control/debuff wizard who just dominated the battlefield and was a source of semi-frustration to the GM since I'd often trivialize encounters between Color Spray, Glitterdust, Haste/Slow, Web, etc. To be clear, he was cool about it but he also had a hard time feeling like encounters were interesting when 75% of them started with me incapacitating (as a general term, not a status effect) 90% of the enemies and the rest was us mopping up. So, while my reading of those spells in PF2e definitely pings me as them being weaker and I'd probably be super frustrated to try and play the same concept in PF2e, I can understand why they did it.

Most of what I'm iffy about in PF2e is really just based on expectations from PF1e and D&D across multiple editions instead of really being a mechanical flaw. If I let those preconceptions go, I'm enjoying the system and game.

[Ignimortis]

I feel weird about the complaint that spells only "do their thing" on a crit fail because the only examples I can think of are spells that would be blatantly broken if they could pull it off consistently.

Most spells do what they're intended to do on a failed save, and critfail ranges from "this enemy is already dead, they just don't know it yet" to "fail, but for more rounds, which are likely unnecessary anyways". Slow critfail dumpsters a target. Web critfail does basically nothing unless a target specifically plays into the Web by being dumb.

That all cuts both ways.
An enemy spell caster with Command can tell a melee PC to Flee and they lose two turns for one low-level spell, no concentration required. One turn running away and one turn running back. It is very possible to resolve combats in three rounds.
I’m not going to lament the diminishing, or even the elimination, of the "do I just skip my turn" die roll.

Except enemies still have critsave-or-suck abilities. My party has fought a default PF2 enemy that imposed confusion for 1 round on a fail...and on a success, you were free...except you made the save on the end of the turn (so you can't do anything yet!), and had to roll the save again at the start of your next turn if you were in a 30-ft range of the enemy. Basically, until a melee player made a critical save, they were at best useless, at worst killing themselves.

Going to throw my comment in on the "they overcorrected" side of things as far as magic goes, but with the further point they also overcorrected on self reliance vs team play.

Frankly, if magic managed to swing things in a fight then you were already so close that a minor buff/debuff would've pushed things to a decisive win in another game. Magic in Pathfinder 2 caps out somewhere around where a decent crowd control spell would have in Pathfinder, meanwhile AoE damage is pretty much the only real damage role that magic classes are really allowed by the system. The problem isn't that magic can't do damage at all or that its spells can't have any effect it's that the damage it can do and the effect it has is fit into very specific bands of intended effect with the "full" effect being stuck behind your opponent crit-failing their save just to meet what would have been the normal effect an edition before.

Meanwhile Fighter is the standard around which damage in the game is based, and it still merely performs "adequate." That's part of the issue, they've combated over-optimization in 2e by lowering the ceiling for performance on an individual level to barely adequate and group play to "decent", the floor meanwhile is still much lower. Magic classes doing "well" are playing buff/debuff cheerleader and occasionally throwing out an AoE in a way that closely mirrors 4e's "alright we need to stack up all our +1s and all their -1s" where filling the checklist each fight is worked into the expected difficulty of each encounter as the standard of play. You aren't going to break the game or really swing things in a way that it didn't already fully account for because they have taken all the flashy toys' legs off at the knees and narrowed the range of abilities to the point that your party is either playing as the game expects you to or playing badly with highly predictable results for both.

Depending on what you want out of the game all of this may be a good thing for you. Perhaps you're tired of magic users having a spell that just shuts something down and happening to have it prepped during the encounter it's most useful for, PF2's solution to that is that magic users are much more limited in what they can actually do unless your GM is either fudging rolls or improbably unlucky with saves and intentionally setting enemies up where AoE is always the answer. Perhaps you're tired of one of your players just not realizing it's a team game and toning down their optimizing to be in line with the rest of the party, PF2's solution is a design philosophy where everyone is largely incapable of accomplishing anything of actual value alone to keep anyone from "carrying the fight" but also punishing trying to perform too far out of their class's designated roles. Perhaps you're a GM who is frustrated about how inaccurate CR can be with some monsters punching way above their weight, PF2's solution is that just about every monster is set up to run fairly predictably without nearly as much in the way of abilities that can quickly turn the fight one way or another unless the players are doing things very foolishly.

PF2's solution to just about every problem is to keep cutting off the edges until everything fits within a tightly controlled maximum for performance somewhere far below what Pathfinder had. Essentially "we knew how this level of play worked so lets just take that and stretch it over the entire gameplay experience" but even with the focus on math it still has places where things fray and you end up with the average player straining to still maintain that standard of "meets expectations." To accomplish this everyone ends up less capable on their own, everything has been squished into such a narrow box that anyone standing out and having a moment to shine is either a result of someone or something else being played badly or amounts to what Pathfinder would consider just a normal move working as intended; very few things are objectively terrible but the "worse" options are still present and can add up especially if you try to push anything out of its invisible role. In Pathfinder you could take a "bad" build and still accomplish something interesting with it, in PF2 a bad build is just objectively bad. In Pathfinder you could take a good build and pull off things that get remembered for years, in PF2 the idea of anyone really being a standard fantasy hero is treated like something to be ashamed of and your grand accomplishments amount to being 4-6 random people who only get anything done because you all happen to be working together while struggling through the problem.

Thing is quite a bit of this is clear on how it got there. It's similar to the jarring move from D&D 3.5 to 4e complete with the designers swearing up and down it's a natural evolution of the mechanics. Partially because some of the same people behind 4e are or were involved in PF2 and most of the differences between the two systems are either down to them realizing most people hated something and changing it slightly or the more recent remaster trying to distance the system as much as possible from anything WotC might sue over if they manage to scrap the OGL. As Psyren puts it they were chasing the unicorn of parity, and that's not necessarily a bad goal but the way they did it was stripping most of the individual worth from things and turning most of the "options" into the same thing worded differently then putting whatever people thought the biggest offenders were in the corner and pinning them in.

An excellent post, by the way. Outlines every single frustration I have with PF2 in a more eloquent way than I can usually do.

Edit: My PF1 GM said this is an advertisement, not a critique. *shudders*

[Anonymouswizard]

Most of what I'm iffy about in PF2e is really just based on expectations from PF1e and D&D across multiple editions instead of really being a mechanical flaw. If I let those preconceptions go, I'm enjoying the system and game.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. People don't dislike P2 because it's mechanically bad, it's because it differs from their expectations. This forum has biases towards D&D 3.X and 5e, and therefore how it differs from them is what is mainly being argued about in this thread.

Another comment I've seen floating around is that stats don't matter as you'll quickly find your Proficiency Bonus being the single biggest factor in your rolls. Which generally comes from people not realizing that as it's primarily designed for adventure paths play most* DCs will be keeping level with Proficiency Bonus.

* But admittedly not all so players can feel a sense of progress.

[Greenflame133]

Hi, I'm about to try PF 2e myself, as I wonder about it and my play group seemed attracted simpler rules. From just reading the rules it seemed great, a full system builds on flexibility of some SoP/SoM

Reading the post I'm having secound thoughts. Probably going to give it a try regardless, but might be more verful.

As somebody who bounded of 5e with all the characters feeling sami, it sounds like 2e has simular issues but even worst. Witch is a shame since the modual feat system seems to promise the exact opposite

[Tanarii]

Pathfinder 2e is basically Pathfinder 1e revised to be D&D 4e.

It's very heavy on feats as your build options.

It's got balanced martials and casters. Due to that, folks used to some D&D systems that aren't 4e often regard martial as OP and casters as weak.

It's got tight math, so enemies need to be in narrow level band (+/-2 for the most part).

It's heavily tactical. The difference is in D&D4e it's more about position yourself and your enemies, with rider buffs/rebuffs being secondary. In PF2e it's more about buffs/rebuffs with position being secondary. Both are important in both systems, it's just that one is slightly more focused that the other on different aspects.

It has an okay skill system with a game structure (roughly equivalent to skill challenges).

It's got a gear treadmill, unless you use optional rules.

That means it's designed primarily for linear adventures with ever increasing power for both characters and enemies in step, focused around a series of encounters, mostly combat encounters on a grid. In other words, it's very Combat as Sport.

It's not designed for heavily narrative play, combat as war, OSR-style non-linear dungeon/hex crawls, mystery, intrigue, or the like.

So yeah, basically 4e. But with plenty of improvements. And retaining spell slots for casters.

Edit: To be clear, I very much liked D&D 4e and I very much like PF 2e. Both are very good at what they do. It's just important to be clear on what they do so you can know if it's what you're looking for.

[Kurald Galain]

I think you've hit the nail on the head. People don't dislike P2 because it's mechanically bad, it's because it differs from their expectations.

Nah. People dislike PF2 because it spends a lot of word count on mechanically fiddly things that in practice don't make a difference, AND because it contains a lot of options that (compared to other options in the same system) really aren't worth using. For instance:

As for Colour Spray I think the P2 version is actually slightly better.

Bear in mind that P2's color spray has that keyword that gives level-appropriate enemies +10 to saves. Even aside from that, given how long combat lasts, stun for 1d4+1 rounds (PF1) is much more powerful than dazzled for 10 rounds (P2).

Eh, ten minutes of normal sleep isn't useless, especially at levels where you care about 1st level slots.

P2 sleep also has that +10 to saves keyword. That goes a long way to making the spell useless even outside of combat (inside combat, as Psyren mentions, enemies will just wake up from the noise).

My impression of the people who don't like PF2 in this thread tried a couple sessions at most and then bounced.

LOL, I remember from the 4E days that a common statement was that if people would just play it they would agree with the fans. And look how that worked out
Although to be fair, 4E is way ahead of P2 in terms of versatility, tactics, class balance, and overall "heroic feel".

[Xervous]

Pathfinder 2 offers solutions to issues I simply do not experience as a GM, and is vastly inferior to other games in its derived player facing options. (Derived as opposed to stated, as there is a lot of tedium masking the lack of choices which end up meeting par).

4e and Lancer are far more entertaining skirmish games with greater diversity of distinct archetype behavior. Many games offer more interesting and rewarding progression options beyond the meager scope of what PF2 has stretched over its 1-20 span.

PF2 seems to be designed to function for bottom of the barrel setups with low competence GMs who need to be guarded against power hungry players. Fun? That’s a secondary concern.