Gripes about Pathfinder

[Magic Myrmidon]

Just started actually playing pathfinder, and I'm enjoying it so far. However, since so many people describe it as 3.75, I expected to enjoy it more than 3.5.

However, when building characters, I just felt so much more restricted, and more and more than Paizo doesn't really know what they're doing. I felt that my character's abilities were way more pigeonholed into a stereotypical member of a class. In 3.5, I felt able to build a competent, enjoyable dex/intelligence fighter type. Or a rogue who isn't actually that dextrous, but still put plenty of hurt on people. Pathfinder seems to just say "a rogue is a street urchin who can do flips", and a fighter is "the strongman who isn't going to be seeing the point to books any time soon."

Now, I thought archetypes were going to be the solution. But when looking at them, the tradeoffs are nearly always sacrificing power for flavor. Want to focus a little bit more on storms as a druid? Give up your animal companion and your ability to convert spells to summons. Shoot spells through a gun? Give up all but 2 spell schools. And thus, I feel as if I have a hard time reflavoring the abilities I do have. They tie the wrong mechanics into flavor.

And, of course, they nerfed classes like the bard by giving them barely any inspire courage rounds to work with, when that was hardly ever a problem.

That being said, there are good ideas. I like the favored class thing, and the skill changes were great. But I just had to vent, I guess.

[Anlashok]

Some of that seems a bit backwards. Int is even more viable for fighters in pathfinder when a lot of your combat maneuver feats have int prerequisites and since you can maneuver with any weapon your options for being a dex fighter are opened up, not closed.

And while those two archetypes do suck it feels like you just went out of your way to cherry pick some of the worst ones in the game as your example.

Also pathfinder bards are amazing. The only thing the 3.5 bard really has over them is sublime chord.

[Kurald Galain]

Pathfinder seems to just say "a rogue is a street urchin who can do flips", and a fighter is "the strongman who isn't going to be seeing the point to books any time soon."

Seriously? I admittedly haven't played a PF rogue yet, but they have archetypes all the way from Sanctified Rogue to Investigator to Swashbuckler to Trapsmith, and they get talents ranging from Assault Leader to Charmer to Esoteric Scholar to Riding Stunt... how exactly is all of that "a street urchin who can do flips"?

[Ssalarn]

I haven't felt pigeon-holed at all since switching to Pathfinder. If anything, I felt like they opened a lot of stuff up. One thing you commented on that I wanted to point out, restricted schools in Pathfinder aren't restricted in the way they were in 3.5. You just have to spend an extra slot to memorize them.

Similarly, you mentioned the Rogue, and that classes archetypes are all pretty good about equivalent exchange, or even flat out boosts.

The bard improved in so many ways it's a little mind-boggling for me to think of anything related to that class as a nerf, but I've never really had an issue with limited performance rounds. Versatile Performance gives him 3 to 1 return on a large number of skills, Well-Versed is a good, if niche, save boost, spells kick in sooner and you get more of them, the variety of performances are better and scale faster.... Plus the Pathfinder Bard has some kickass spell combos. I'll take the Pathfinder Bard over the 3.5 Bard any day of the week.

Fighter got probably the least relevant improvements between 3.5 and PF, but you still have options like the Lore Warden, the Tactician, the Archer, the Mobile Fighter, the Phalanx Soldier, and the Dirty Fighter which are all more versatile and provide you different but viable alternatives for how you play a Fighter. There's a couple others I didn't mention which are good, but still pretty much just strong-man-hit-things, and so not relevant to the point.

Rangers and Barbarians also got huge bumps allowing them to be far more unique and versatile than their 3.5 counterparts, and in the case of the Ranger, more powerful and effective to boot.

[Kurald Galain]

One thing you commented on that I wanted to point out, restricted schools in Pathfinder aren't restricted in the way they were in 3.5. You just have to spend an extra slot to memorize them.

Yes. Also, the spellslinger "forsakes" four schools instead of the normal two for a specialist, not four in addition to the normal two. Just don't drop conjuration or transmutation, and you'll have plenty of options left.

[Ssalarn]

Yes. Also, the spellslinger "forsakes" four schools instead of the normal two for a specialist, not four in addition to the normal two. Just don't drop conjuration or transmutation, and you'll have plenty of options left.

Word yo. Spellslinger is very focused, but it is still more capable than a lot of specialist wizards in 3.5.

[Metahuman1]

Course, this is the wizard who

Can get a custom free magic item instead of a familiar as a base feature.

Doesn't actually ban schools as a base class feature.

Doesn't have to spend XP to craft his gear and shatter the economy as a base class feature. (I know in 3.5 you could make it not matter, but still, come on. They even round about admit it's broken but won't fix it for real by just banning item creation feats in Pathfinder society.)

Got more HP as a baseline.

Need I go on about how much Piazo gushes over wizards?

[Kurald Galain]

Want to focus a little bit more on storms as a druid? Give up your animal companion and your ability to convert spells to summons.

As for this one: all druids can choose either an animal companion or extra domain spells as a cleric; the storm druid simply requires the latter. Furthermore, it can still spontaneously convert spells, however it converts into domain spells rather than summon spells.

[Magic Myrmidon]

Hmm... Ok. There is a huge experience difference for me between pathfinder and 3.5 for me. In fact, I just started pathfinder about two months ago, and have been playing 3.5 for... what, 6 years? So there's that.

The specialization is an important one I wasn't aware of. I kinda like that. Restrictive, but not forbidding.

For the bard, I'm frequently running out of inspire courage, sadly. But I kinda tried building an archer bard, who basically always has that up. And I took the arcane duelist archetype. Arcane duelist gave me enough to take, but I hated giving up some of the stuff I had to. Maybe that's one of my problems: if I want a single ability from an archetype, I am forced to take the others I don't want. I wanted my character to be a world wise grizzled adventurer, which meant bardic lore would have been perfect. But I had to give it up for arcane strike, which I could have used a feat for. And then the bonus feats I give up well versed and versatile performance don't really help the build. Maybe it was just my mistake to take it.

As for Paizo knowing what they're doing... I dunno. I looked at the arcanist class they're coming out with, that has spontaneous casting with wizard learning of spells. Seems absolutely insane, and they think it's fine. Meanwhile, the martial classes are still feeling like they can "hit them with their sword/arrow" again and again.

Eh. Maybe it just comes down to experience. In 3.5, I know all of the possibilities for PrCs and ACFs and such, while in Pathfinder, I haven't dented their list of feats, and don't have near enough familiarity with it to twist builds like I can in 3.5.

[Metahuman1]

Cut your teeth a bit more on Pathfinder, then start breaking out into the Pathfinder SRD's 3rd party section. Unlike 3.5, lot's of good stuff there. Dreamscarred Press in particular has a number of high quality adds including updates to Psionics, Tome of Battle and Magic of Incarnum.

That should go a long way toward making Melee/Mundanes feel less shafted. But yes, Piazo does have an insane hard on for casters, which is why we get classes like the Witch and the Arcanest and the Summoner and all the Tier 3 pathfinder classes that aren't an unintended archatype stack are partial casters like Bards and Alchemists and Maguses, but when they have a feat like crane wing that's cool for melee it get's nerfed out of useability or the combat maneuver system get's geared toward being I'll advised as a thing to focus on because monster defenses scale way, way faster then your offense, and even NPC defenses scale faster then your offense unless you super specialize, and the constant rulings on rogue that make it harder and harder and harder to set up a sneak attack until the only way to do it is to have a flanking buddy and waste time running around behind the enemy group or have snuck there before combat or win Initiative, and you can forget doing a ranged sneak attack unless you win initiative or shoot before it's rolled and happen to be in range to do so.

[Feint's End]

Well as a big supporter of Pathfinder I'd like to mention a few things I think are way better than in 3.5:

-skills are easier to access for everybody. For somebody who loves to give his characters an edge by selecting certain skills this is amazing. Between putting favoured class boni into skills to traits to pick up the extra skills you want and overall more points (due to the +3 always applying for classskills) it is much easier to customize your characters with skills. Useless skills have been ruled out or ruled together (looking at you concentration and tumble, balance and cohorts).

-Many, many classes have a much smoother progression than in 3.5. Now what do I mean by that? The powercurve is much smoother. If you want to play a character I can actually recommend a class to you + an archetype and say "take xy-feat and you'll be good to go". In 3.5 a lot of builds needed dips, certain feat combinations and prestige classes to work and more often than not had a breaking point where they became good .... before they were kinda meh.

-Faster Feat Progression ... I don't have to explain why this is good.

-Many classes are better and especially work much better with the ones being nerfed usually being the more powerful ones (exception is monk but monk is easily workable with using hungry ghost qinggong or zen archer qinggong without adding any other dips/prcs). I agree that bard has much less rounds BUT they also got new interesting mechanics and archetypes which actively use their rounds per day (for example soundstriker) opening a whole lot of different possibilities for playing bard. It also makes it more flexible and specified.

As for the point of classes being rolled into one maybe you are looking at the wrong classes? Of the top of my head here are some classes which have much more choices than they had in 3.5: Sorceror, Oracle (new), Summoner, Bard (yes they can do everything with the right archetype), Paladins (one of the best designed ones), Fighters (compared to the 3.5 one who had literally no classfeatures and on top PF has better featsupport for a lot of fighting styles), monk (you now can play a great ranged monk or a monk stealing life force from your enemies), Alchemist (new) ....
I could go on and explain why pretty much every class allows more options than they did in 3.5 ... if you are counting in builds than that's a whole different story but you should know that the thing with Pathfinder is that they designed classes with the thought in mind that dipping and multiclassing isn't something you want to do if you haven't a very specific build in mind.

I bet there are some points I missed but those are some of the big ones.

edit: and yeah as Metahuman1 said ... DSP rules. The Pathfinder Ultimate Psionics Book is breathtakingly good and contains a punch of wonderfully designed classes (all of them really) + archetypes to play almost everything imaginable. Then there is the new Path of War which basically is TOB with even more options and Akashic Mysteries (Incarnum based system for Pathfinder) is currently being playtested.

[Ssalarn]

Experience is a big factor. PAthfinder has a completely different set of tricks for optimization than 3.5, and using a lot of them properly is almost like relearning the game. A lot of things you took for granted in 3.5 just aren't true anymore.

Paladin Smites work at range and last until the enemy is dead now. This is a huge change. The core Paladin class can be a great chassis for one of the best and most well rounded archer builds in the game.

Bards are a whole new ballpark. I usually recommend players new to Pathfinder, even if they've played 3.5 before, try out the core Bard before jumping into archetypes. Bard got a lot of new stuff and it can be hard to tell the value of what you're trading away for other goodies if you haven't played with them yet. I've run baseline Bards that were competing for top DPR in the party while running multiple buffs and maintaining a couple performances simultaneously. Doing that latter item also teaches you the value of boring feats like Extra Performance, which gives you 6 extra rounds each time you take it. That's like an extra 1-2 encounters worth of buffs each time.

A lot of the new stuff is solid too. Inquisitor is probably the best designed class I've ever seen, capable of filling just about any role while running competent backup or even primary in a couple additional roles. Very solid Tier 3.

Oracle is a great divine addition. Their ability to hyper-specialize means they can basically pick any one thing the Cleric can do and do it twice as well, at the cost of being about a quarter less effective at everything else. Life Oracle is pretty much the best healer in the game, and one of the few classes that makes in-combat healing a smart and effective choice.

Witch is amazing. They tend to get ignored a bit by people who don't like the flavor, but this a 9 level progression full arcane caster with a suite of supernatural abilities and access to a very reasonable selection of traditionally divine spells.

On the Arcanist-

I have worries as well, but having played one...
They have as many spells per day as a Wizard, though without the bonus school spell, casts spontaneously like a sorcerer but uses a spellbook and can memorize new spells each day, and has one of the best suites of class abilities of any arcane caster. They're very, very, good. That being said, for the bulk of players they are trading power for versatility as they really do have fewer spells per day, and unless they changed something since the last time I looked, they broke their class abilities up so that their class features run off CHA while their spells run off INT. That goes a long way towards balancing them to the other top tier classes who are almost exclusively SAD. They're definitely Tier 1 with a very accessible optimization threshold, but I'd hesitate to claim that they're truly more powerful than options like the Wizard, Witch, Sorcerer, and Summoner. I'd say they're a little harder to screw up than the first three, but probably end up in close to the same place, maybe even a step behind depending on what level you're looking at.

[Ssalarn]

***Then there is the new Path of War which basically is TOB with even more options and Magic of Incarna is currently being playtested.

We're going to publish the MoI conversion under the name "Akashic Mysteries". I think layout on the first class, the Vizier, is just about complete and it should be available for purchase in the very near future. The second class, the Guru, is probably in its last round or two of playtesting before I send it on for layout, and after we wrap up the third class, the Daevic, probably sometime in July/August, we'll start doing final reviews of the archetypes and PrC's. If you liked the 3.5 Magic of Incarnum, go look up the Magic of Incarna thread and check out the new materials. The links in the OP of that thread probably still need to be updated, but there are new ones on the last page for all three base classes and the first round of archetypes.

[Feint's End]

A lot of the new stuff is solid too. Inquisitor is probably the best designed class I've ever seen, capable of filling just about any role while running competent backup or even primary in a couple additional roles. Very solid Tier 3.

I agree on Inquisitors. They have a marvelous design. Great in combat through selbuffing while having a nice skilllist and the ability to use spells outside of combat too (I mean a good spelllist which is worth using outside of combat). Played one once ... never regret it.

Oracle is a great divine addition. Their ability to hyper-specialize means they can basically pick any one thing the Cleric can do and do it twice as well, at the cost of being about a quarter less effective at everything else. Life Oracle is pretty much the best healer in the game, and one of the few classes that makes in-combat healing a smart and effective choice.

Enter Vitalist. I honestly think that Vitalist beats Life Oracle when it comes to healing by effectively turning the whole group into a single health pool.

edit: Oh I just saw your second post Ssalarn. Thanks for the information. I was following the playtest thread for some time but haven't looked recently due to it's sheer size. If the vizier is already done (or close to it) I might use it in an upcoming game.

[Ssalarn]

Enter Vitalist. I honestly think that Vitalist beats Life Oracle when it comes to healing by effectively turning the whole group into a single health pool.

edit: Oh I just saw your second post Ssalarn. Thanks for the information. I was following the playtest thread for some time but haven't looked recently due to it's sheer size. If the vizier is already done (or close to it) I might use it in an upcoming game.

D'oh! yeah, the Oracle is divine. I still had the arcanist in my head :P

I think Vitalist and Life Oracle are both really good, I'd have a hard time really saying which is better. I certainly wouldn't kick either off of my team!

The final draft of the Vizier is what's currently linked in on the site, and with the exception of a few last minute revisions that haven't made it to the playtest doc (mostly for a few of the feats) what's up there is pretty much what's going to be in the first .pdf release, sans art, accreditation, and OGL required information.

[Magic Myrmidon]

Paladins in Pathfinder are definitely something I approve of. They are totally awesome, and finally feel like the determined crusaders they should be. I also looked at the psionics rules, and loved the changes their. Soulknife is actually competitive, yay! If there's a ToB book coming out there, than I'm super excited, because that was one of my favorite books out of all of 3.5.

And there are some cool new ideas from Paizo. The synthesist summoner is awesome in a can, and can be flavored so many different ways: possession, divine inspiration, or even DBZ power up type things.

Glad I'm not too off base in thinking that they didn't do much to fix the whole caster/mundane thing.

Yeah, so, sorry to offend Pathfinder faithfuls. Guess it's just difficult to relearn things.

[Feint's End]

Paladins in Pathfinder are definitely something I approve of. They are totally awesome, and finally feel like the determined crusaders they should be. I also looked at the psionics rules, and loved the changes their. Soulknife is actually competitive, yay! If there's a ToB book coming out there, than I'm super excited, because that was one of my favorite books out of all of 3.5.

You can already buy three of the classes for the new Path of War on the homepage. The Stalker, The Warlord and The Warder are all finished and ready to play.

[malonkey1]

To be honest, I consider them to be the same edition. When I run Pathfinder, I always use 3.5 material with it. The later books have classes on a roughly equal ken with PF.

[Snowbluff]

Also pathfinder bards are amazing. The only thing the 3.5 bard really has over them is sublime chord.

Yeah, because Words of Creation, Dragon Fire Inspiration, and Song of the Heart were actually Truenamer Class Features.

And there are some cool new ideas from Paizo. The synthesist summoner is awesome in a can, and can be flavored so many different ways: possession, divine inspiration, or even DBZ power up type things.

Synthesist is easily the most hilarious class available in PF. It's like they made summoner so people could have the 3.5 druid back, and then decided they wanted people to dump stats after all.

Glad I'm not too off base in thinking that they didn't do much to fix the whole caster/mundane thing.

They really didn't fix anything. PF is good for having a couple of new options, but not much else.

[Pluto!]

Maybe that's one of my problems: if I want a single ability from an archetype, I am forced to take the others I don't want.

The only thing I can say to this is welcome to class-based RPGs.

[Gemini476]

Yeah, because Words of Creation, Dragon Fire Inspiration, and Song of the Heart were actually Truenamer Class Features.

I wish. That could make for an interesting homebrew, though.
It would certainly make playing a Truenamer easier.

Synthesist is easily the most hilarious class available in PF. It's like they made summoner so people could have the 3.5 druid back, and then decided they wanted people to dump stats after all.
They really didn't fix anything. PF is good for having a couple of new options, but not much else.

They made the Paladin better and made archery actually viable as a combat style. I'll give them props for that much, at least.

However, the best Pathfinder material is the third party stuff. Paizo themselves try to stick too hard towards balancing around Core (the most unbalanced part of the game).

Not to mention the travesty that is the Rogue, as well as CMD. Paizo had some good ideas, but those weren't.

[Ssalarn]

CMD wouldn't be so bad if they didn't apply size bonuses to it universally. We run it so that you only get size bonuses to CMD vs. Bull Rush, Overrun, and Grapple and it works pretty solidly.

[Snowbluff]

I wish. That could make for an interesting homebrew, though.
It would certainly make playing a Truenamer easier.

Hm... yes.

They made the Paladin better and made archery actually viable as a combat style. I'll give them props for that much, at least.

Archery was viable. Arguments against the style are style present.

[Kudaku]

And, of course, they nerfed classes like the bard by giving them barely any inspire courage rounds to work with, when that was hardly ever a problem.

Are you sure you got this right? A typical bard will start off with ~7 rounds of Inspire Courage, and it goes up by +2 rounds with each additional level - you'll rapidly reach the double digits. I'm playing a 6th level martial bard at the moment and I have 17 rounds/day - more than enough for our typical encounters.

If you find that Perform Rounds continue to be an issue I'd consider the Lingering Performance feat. It'll basically triple your performance rounds.

Glad I'm not too off base in thinking that they didn't do much to fix the whole caster/mundane thing.

Yeah, so, sorry to offend Pathfinder faithfuls. Guess it's just difficult to relearn things.

Pathfinder definitely isn't perfect, but it has a lot of stuff going for it. Stay strong and thanks for keeping an open mind!

On the Arcanist-

I have worries as well, but having played one...
They have as many spells per day as a Wizard, though without the bonus school spell, casts spontaneously like a sorcerer but uses a spellbook and can memorize new spells each day, and has one of the best suites of class abilities of any arcane caster. They're very, very, good. That being said, for the bulk of players they are trading power for versatility as they really do have fewer spells per day, and unless they changed something since the last time I looked, they broke their class abilities up so that their class features run off CHA while their spells run off INT. That goes a long way towards balancing them to the other top tier classes who are almost exclusively SAD. They're definitely Tier 1 with a very accessible optimization threshold, but I'd hesitate to claim that they're truly more powerful than options like the Wizard, Witch, Sorcerer, and Summoner. I'd say they're a little harder to screw up than the first three, but probably end up in close to the same place, maybe even a step behind depending on what level you're looking at.

This lines up very well with my experience with the Arcanist. I adore their spell selection system and I'll heartily encourage anyone curious about full spellcasters to try out an Arcanist, but I don't find them to be dramatically better than wizards. If Paizo put a bit more emphasis on the Intelligence/Charisma divide and tone back the bloodline/wizard school options I think the class could be a real diamond.

The spontaneous casting means there's much less bookkeeping than with traditional prepared casters, which is frequently the main thing holding back people from trying out wizards.
The flexible spell list means you don't have the same problem as with sorcerers, where you frequently realize that your spell choices didn't really work out as well as you wanted it to... And now you can trade out one spell every two levels so you can salvage it in another six levels or so. It's ironic that so many people consider the sorcerer more newbie-friendly than the wizard.

The number of elemental theme sorcerers I've seen new players roll up, and then desperately try to salvage when they realize that Burning Hands + Scorching Ray + Fireball maybe wasn't the best spell selection for blasting...

[Psyren]

For the bard, I'm frequently running out of inspire courage, sadly. But I kinda tried building an archer bard, who basically always has that up. And I took the arcane duelist archetype. Arcane duelist gave me enough to take, but I hated giving up some of the stuff I had to. Maybe that's one of my problems: if I want a single ability from an archetype, I am forced to take the others I don't want. I wanted my character to be a world wise grizzled adventurer, which meant bardic lore would have been perfect. But I had to give it up for arcane strike, which I could have used a feat for. And then the bonus feats I give up well versed and versatile performance don't really help the build. Maybe it was just my mistake to take it.

What you have to remember is that while archetypes are aimed at the player, the baseline stuff they give up are aimed at the DM. In other words, they force you onto a set track to give the DM a little more agency in saying "Yeah, it lets them do X, but now they can't do Y."

If your character concept truly does call for you to have both X and Y, make the case to your DM and get it added back in. The Paizo Fun Police are not going to show up at your door with assault rifles if you modify an archetype to not replace X, or to replace Y with B instead of A.

[Kurald Galain]

Not to mention the travesty that is the Rogue, as well as CMD. Paizo had some good ideas, but those weren't.

I haven't seen the Rogue (and its cousin the Ninja) in play yet, but they strike me as odd. On the one hand, they have this long list of "tricks" that sound pretty cool. On the other hand, they sound pretty cool for level 1-5 and not so much for higher levels, and they only get two or three tricks in that range.

This lines up very well with my experience with the Arcanist. I adore their spell selection system and I'll heartily encourage anyone curious about full spellcasters to try out an Arcanist, but I don't find them to be dramatically better than wizards. If Paizo put a bit more emphasis on the Intelligence/Charisma divide and tone back the bloodline/wizard school options I think the class could be a real diamond.

I agree that the Arcanist isn't better than the Wizard, but it just might be better than the Sorcerer... Perhaps it would be nice if the Arcanist distinguished itself more. By its fluff it's supposed to be a "magical hacker" type, but too many of its exploits are evocation-style energy bolts of various flavors.

[malonkey1]

CMD was a lifesaver! Now instead of having umpteen rules many repeated on each maneuver, we have a single unified roll and a few short rules for each maneuver. If I were programming I'd never want to rewrite the same procedure umpteen times when I could just call a function, and that's what the CMD does, functionally.

[Kudaku]

I haven't seen the Rogue (and its cousin the Ninja) in play yet, but they strike me as odd. On the one hand, they have this long list of "tricks" that sound pretty cool. On the other hand, they sound pretty cool for level 1-5 and not so much for higher levels, and they only get two or three tricks in that range.

The rogue didn't really age well from 3.5. They got some much-needed improvements (sneak attack works on just about anything except elementals and ooze), but their scaling pretty much stopped at Core and the tumble changes hurt them badly. If you can look past the Asian flavor the ninja is arguably a better take on the rogue. It also kind of feels like the ACG takes on the rogue classes (Investigator and Slayer) are attempts to re-imagine and upgrade the rogue. Hopefully there'll be some nice talents and/or feats in that book for rogues too.

I agree that the Arcanist isn't better than the Wizard, but it just might be better than the Sorcerer... Perhaps it would be nice if the Arcanist distinguished itself more. By its fluff it's supposed to be a "magical hacker" type, but too many of its exploits are evocation-style energy bolts of various flavors.

I find the energy bolts the least interesting options for the Arcanist, really. Dimensional Slide, Counterspelling, Spell Tinkerer and Spell Disruption are all incredibly cool exploits.

Random question, but: How would you feel about a feat that let the sorcerer reshuffle parts (or all) of their spell list once a week or so? Still significantly less flexible than the Wizard's approach but infinitely more flexible than the current class.

[Kurald Galain]

CMD was a lifesaver! Now instead of having umpteen rules many repeated on each maneuver, we have a single unified roll and a few short rules for each maneuver. If I were programming I'd never want to rewrite the same procedure umpteen times when I could just call a function, and that's what the CMD does, functionally.

I really like the concept of CMD; it is much simpler and faster to resolve than what 3.5 had. On the other hand, I don't necessarily like all modifiers to CMB checks, but that's a simple matter of tweaking the math.

The rogue didn't really age well from 3.5. They got some much-needed improvements (sneak attack works on just about anything except elementals and ooze), but their scaling pretty much stopped at Core and the tumble changes hurt them badly. If you can look past the Asian flavor the ninja is arguably a better take on the rogue. It also kind of feels like the ACG takes on the rogue classes (Investigator and Slayer) are attempts to re-imagine and upgrade the rogue. Hopefully there'll be some nice talents and/or feats in that book for rogues too.

I'm fine with the Asian flavor, but the Ninja also gives me the impression that most of their tricks are rather low-level. Plus if any class needs more points (ki points, in this case) it's them.
Perhaps the rogue needs more "skill monkey" abilities, because PF's skill rules make 8 points per level less impressive than it was.

I find the energy bolts the least interesting options for the Arcanist, really. Dimensional Slide, Counterspelling, Spell Tinkerer and Spell Disruption are all incredibly cool exploits.

I agree, I just find it odd that so many of the arcanist's exploits are about energy bolts instead of about cool stuff.

Random question, but: How would you feel about a feat that let the sorcerer reshuffle parts (or all) of their spell list once a week or so? Still significantly less flexible than the Wizard's approach but infinitely more flexible than the current class.

Good idea. I find the sorc's retraining rules much too stern - one spell every two levels? I know it may hurt consistency if a character retrains all their abilities too often, but surely a blooded spellcaster can learn different spells. I'd consider houseruling it to swapping half-cha-mod spells whenever you level up?

[StreamOfTheSky]

I'm well aware of how broadly and badly paizo nerfed melee, but it continues to frustrate me when I try to build a melee character in PF that I'm not allowed to make something fun *and* competent. Combat maneuvers suck so bad now, all the cool feats are gone or got put at much higher level so I can't enjoy them. All I can do is dish out a lot of damage. PF martials can do that pretty decently. Sadly, DPR has always been the most boring form of optimization for me...

They made the Paladin better and made archery actually viable as a combat style. I'll give them props for that much, at least.

Agreed. Paladin is the only PF class change I 100% prefer to 3E. And archery is much more viable now, albeit all it can do is tons of damage (see above).

CMD wouldn't be so bad if they didn't apply size bonuses to it universally. We run it so that you only get size bonuses to CMD vs. Bull Rush, Overrun, and Grapple and it works pretty solidly.

Size isn't nearly the worst part of it, especially w/ PF's nerfs to size bonuses, they're practically nonexistent till you get to gargantuan. The (biggest, hardly the only) problem is adding BAB to the CMB/CMD thing. It's like people have amnesia. Who seriously thought 3E grappling was balanced? *Why* was it imbalanced (aside from all the spells that auto-neuter it)? Because big monsters with tons of HD got to add their stupidly big pile of BAB to it! Pathfinder took the "grapple problem" and applied it to all combat maneuvers. And tumble, for good measure!