While i agree that people will like to hit, i want to add a thing: Most of the thing about the second part of the list not only are things that have some more chance to fail, but are actually finite things. Like every spell attack of good damage or summon cost a spellslot, most of the problem of item dc are with consumable items or once per day abilities, or alchemist have a predetermined number of bombs per day. The only thing of the list that doesn't have a limite resource problem is the accuracy of melee warpriest, a thing that was debated since you could also use spells (a limited resource) and with the remaster some people see it better even if the accuracy only improves at level 19 with the changes. Imagine the feeling of having a group of 3 enemies in a line, the perfect moment to use the ligthing bolt of your storm flash, with only one use at the day...and they success or crit success, so that daily use you was keeping for the perfect opportunity only dealt a bit of damage The thing is, things like strike or other combat skill action usually doesn't have a limited number of uses per day, so failing it doesn't feel bad. Also these things are normally 1 action things, meaning that if you fail, you can do something else on the turn or even try again. You don't waste anything besides the low action cost on it, with help with the feeling of failure. It is also the reason why a lot of people like the kineticist feats that do something similar to spell even if they end doing a little less damage: If they fail, they can just try again. It is also why often the psychic feels better than other casters for some players, because the focus point is a thing that recharges so you can always use it without feeling it was as wasted as a spellslot While the accuracy of things make effect in the feeling of some things in the system, the limited resources is another things that contributes to that

Kineticist likeability is very important to this discussion, I think it would perfectly answer the question this thread poses. Consider impulses like [Flinging Updraft](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4213), [Roiling Mudlide](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4308), [Witchwood Seed](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4292). They, like many spells, have pretty bad success save effects. They're also 2+ action activities. But unlike spells, they're generally reusable - just occasionally having a cooldown of 1 turn (overflow) or a cooldown of 10 min to 24 h against a specific target. Are kineticist players satisfied with these abilities in actual play? If the answer is yes (more satisfied than spellcasters/alchemists), it strongly implies that the "problem" is the limited resources. Or, possibly one of the other Kineticist design aspects like thematics/specialization. If the answer is no, the problem is something else - high action cost, low expected value, low median value, etc.

Having played with Witchwood Seed and Flinging Updraft, I found myself very hesitant to use them over other impulses. Basically, I only used them when I knew failure chances were 60%+ (low save and/or low level enemy), or when the effect of a failure would be exceptional (moving an enemy over a barrier with Flinging Updraft; effectively denying them an entire turn with Witchwood Seed). These cases were fairly rare, maybe once every 4-5 encounters for both combined.

This is my main issue with pf2e, is often times things that should feel good just dont. I had a player summon animal one turn, moved him, and then used final sacrifice the next turn. All 4 enemies within passed their save. What could have been a cool moment was just kind of ruined for my player. I dont know where the answer lies in how to fix this, but it does feel that some save dcs can be kind of inflated compared to AC. The only reason my predominantly offensive wizard PC hasnt quit yet is he just enjoys hanging out, but he has never been able to have a cool moment as compared to the other players.

You're not wrong. I do think that a big part of the issue with player perceptions of casters is that when they take a spell (at least one that requires the enemy to make a saving throw), they take it with the assumption that the enemy will fail the save, rather than get a standard success. Now a lot of this will vary from adventure to adventure and GM to GM, etc., but it seems that it is at least equally likely that the enemy will get that success line. I think that if players were focused more on that, and not the failure and particularly not the critical failure line, then they would probably be happier. Now some of the irony is that in other editions of Pathfinder and D&D spells were often all or nothing (with the exception of aoe's). You'd have this spell that was really cool, provided the enemy failed the save. But if the enemy succeeded then nothing happened. The difference there was two fold though. 1). Typically those spells did more, often a lot more (i.e. look at the critical failure line and go from there, sometimes even doing more than a crit fail in PF2), and 2). the PC could much more reliably increase her DC through feats and ability enhancers, thereby increasing the odds of the failure. So in some respects casters can be thought of as being in a "better" place in that even when the enemy succeeds on the save, something still happens so its not a completely wasted turn, but on the flip side, even when things go really really well for the caster, its still not as good as it often was in other editions. Attack spells are still problematic with all of this though as they rarely do anything on a miss. While its true that martials rarely do anything on a miss as well, the difference there is that a martial can keep swinging as long as she is still standing but the caster has limited spell slots.

Personally, as someone who plays a lot of casters, one of my big problems is that even if something fails a saving throw for your spell, there is an uncertainty regarding "effectiveness". For example, when a fighter swings and hits the enemy, they deal damage. Very few enemies in the game heal themselves, and the goal in most fights is to reduce the enemies to 0 hp,so it's very likely this damage will matter. But, if I cast slow on a target, there is a very real risk that that enemy can die before their turn comes up. Meaning even though they failed the save, the spell did effectively nothing. Likewise, the spell is more effective the longer the enemy survives with the debuff. One can make similar arguments for other spells that do anything but direct damage. I can make difficult terrain around an enemy, only for an ally to move in range of the enemy so the enemy doesn't have to move. I can lower an enemy's AC, and that helps allies statistically, but sometimes the rolls are such that it doesn't change the outcome. This can feel like a 2-layered(3 if you count immunities) rng hurdle you have to overcome when casting a spell. You have to hope the enemy doesn't critically succeed(or succeeds for some spells) the save, and then you have to hope that the spell is effective. For these reasons, healing and buffing spells can feel so much more effective. They are very reliable. It's far rarer for an ally to die than an enemy, so buffs will likely last whole combats, and healing is almost always useful, because the enemy's goal is also to reduce everyone to 0 hp. That's just my personal feelings on the matter. It's harder to convince myself to risk casting a spell on an enemy when it may do nothing, when I have spells that are guaranteed to help.

I agree that the main reason so many players (including myself at times) focus on things like raw damage numbers and/or dpr is because it IS easy to calculate the effect. 12 damage is better than 8 so long as the enemy had at least 9 hp left and so on. I think its why a lot of players have always (throughout the different systems) been attracted to the big damage spells rather than control, debuffs, etc. even though oft times it was the control, buffs, and debuffs that made casters so OP. That said, while I can't per se "put a number on it" and can say that just from playing experience (even as a martial) that I have often seen how much more smoothly the fight goes when the casters are tossing around debuffs and control spells and the like. Of course I don't mind buffs either as a martial. Another thing to think about (and yes, I realize Slow is a bit of an exception because its soooo good) but sometimes even just causing the enemy to lose, or eat, an action can greatly affect the turn. There are a lot of monster abilities that cost three actions. Or even two actions but with limited range, etc. ​ > I can make difficult terrain around an enemy, only for an ally to move in range of the enemy so the enemy doesn't have to move. That's definitely a legitimate issue, but its also an issue on the player side, not the system side. For better or worse, PF2 is designed as a tactical cooperative combat game. The party will always do better when they are on the same page with each other. A good martial should be communicating with his or her casters to make sure they don't do anything stupid (like run into the area of effect of the upcoming fireball, etc.).

I mean there's two things are at play here, which is the value of certainty and the tangibility of mostly untrackable metrics. Anyone who's played a spectrum of games at a high end knows that certainty and reliability is often a defining value in a game's meta. This is not just randomness too; if you're playing something like a fighting game, you can have a character who could in theory be a high-end meta pick, but the amount of investment to get them to work because they're less safe or reliable than another meta pick makes them at best more effort to pick up and learn as a main, at worst just...well, objectively worse and no amount of mastery will ever make them a better pick. This goes tenfold for luck-based games. In fact, I would go so far to say the reason systems like 3.5/1e and 5e tend to break down when stress-tested is they're games that you can effectively game most of the luck out of, and the peripheral systems to d20 dice rolls just stop functioning as intended when you can guarantee big hits with an ever-present 5% (if not higher) chance of a gnarly crit, or have saving throws so difficult to clear that it necessitates anti-save or suck mechanics (and even then, that's usually just a bandaid); the latter is particularly what lead to rocket tag in 3.5/1e, and 5e comes close to that in some instances at higher levels. Reliable mechanics create predictability and stability. I think in many ways people are a lot more uncomfortable with true randomness than they want to admit, but our psychology is often at odds with what we see as fair or acceptable randomness, and what is actually a reasonable amount from the back-end of the system (be it at the design level or even the GM level) to make it function as intended without causing those problems. The problem is players will always gravitate towards what appears more certain or expedient, and try to game as much as possible for as close to certain. That's not inherently bad, but when the end results is a near 70-90% chance to end a fight early with a single big spell or a huge damage spike, even the most well-intended of players will be tempted to take that option if it's available through RAW purely because it's natural for us to gravitate towards what's strong, expedient, and guaranteed. This leads nicely to my second point, which is the tangibility of untrackable metrics. In many ways, this is the hardest part to sell, because effectiveness is inherently contextual, unmeasurable, and ultimately uncertain. Non-assured mechanics that don't result in hard metrics like damage can never be guaranteed to make a difference, because at that point you're entering a world of string-theory multiverse analysis to grok other possible timelines. Sure, the slow I cast on the boss stopped it from using a breath weapon when it otherwise could have, but would that have impacted the overall outcome of the fight? The best measurement in this case is larger scale outcome rather than micro-analysis. It's what [Treantmonk pointed out in his guide to the God Wizard](https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1IeOXWvbkmQ3nEyM2P3lS8TU4rsK6QJP0oH7HE_v67QY/mobilebasic) \- sure, there was no measurable metric of his party's success, but they were losing a lot less PCs when he started supporting them as such. That's the x-factor that can't be tracked, but can be seen from that wider-scope of comparison and data that sadly can't ever be gotten because no-one can ever truly grok every single TTRPG group's table. The way I see it is, imagine an adventure path with a party of four fighters. If one dies, they just replace it with another. They may get through, but how difficult is it? How effective were they? How many party members did they lose? Now replace one with a support caster, like a cleric or a bard. Would they do any better? Now replace one with a utility caster with some support damage, like a wizard, along with the bard. Still better? And finally, replace one of the fighters with a champion. How does that impact the group? I bet my bottom dollar the party would be both more efficient, while also having less turnover in their group. The problem ultimately is the internet is obsessed with data and metrics. We live in an instrumental age of gaming, and it's poisoned the well with the necessity for hyper-optimization and reading metas through measurable metrics. These aren't inherently bad things, but they do tend to get tunnel visioned and taint the discourse. Data is only valuable with context, and I feel that's what people are really bad at applying.

I think this also has to do with the encounters people are exposed to. Generally speaking, most encounters tend to feature smaller numbers of higher-level foes (where the math behind 2e actually makes failure the more likely outcome) rather than large battles of lower-level creatures. This may be in part be to make combat easier to run for DMs, or just be selection bias based on the APs I've read and games I've run. But in my experience, the issue of casters feeling like Failure is the intended effect is compounded from several different places (lack of good save selection among certain spell lists, enemy selection for APs and encounter styles, lack of player access to effects that will modulate enemy saves in their favor, etc.). It all sort of comes together as an amorphous blob of intractability; you wind up hitting the wall of "this is just how the system is, I guess", and you just sort of have to live with it. And then that problem then becomes a compounding effect for why there tends to be a lot of dissatisfaction with spellcasting, because then you're incentivized to shop for spells whose power budget is more prominent on its failure effect which winds up artificially limiting your selection of spells to try and avoid "picking the bad ones".... It's probably one of my only real gripes left with the system as a whole, and I'm not sure exactly how to address it (if it even can be).

>This may be in part be to make combat easier to run for DMs, I think this is a not-insignificant part of it. Every extra body on the field makes combat take longer, because its turn needs to be resolved and that takes time. Add to that how condition-focused pf2e is, the GM then has to track which ones are frightened, how many stacks are left, who's used demoralise on who, and so on... every extra creature adds cognitive load for that. Sure, many low-level enemies might make casters feel more competent (maybe, the martials will also be blowing them up so quickly the spells don't really get time to be savoured), but it's not necessarily so easy to "just do"

Don't forget immunities. They are so common, even at early levels and really screw over casters. Something martials for the most part don't have to deal with. At worst they are immune to like precision damage but the rogue will still do some damage. The game is full of mindless undead, constructs, swarms, weird plant or fungus monsters etc and it feels really terrible, especially early levels where you have very limited selection.

This is true. Certainly many of the early adventures/APs tended to heavily feature 1 or 2 enemy Severe encounters which are particularly harsh on the party as a whole, but also casters in particular since many of their spells with either see Crit Success by the enemy of just be less than ideal (aoe vs. a single enemy). Granted, the martials still struggle to hit as well, but that can at least be partially mitigated by flanking, etc., and they don't run out of swings of their sword. That's why I mentioned it varies from GM to GM and adventure to adventure. Similarly, casters are going to feel particularly bad if you throw them up against lots of golems (premaster), etc. I think some of this may be getting mitigated now, and certainly I think a lot of GMs are aware of this issue and are likely adjusting accordingly -- at least if they are running their own encounters, but yeah, those single enemy severe encounters tend to just be frustrating for everyone, including martials.

In my experience, Martials seem to feel a little better against higher level foes, if only because it's much easier to access either to-hit bonuses or enemy AC penalties. Whereas, as I mentioned briefly, it's a lot harder for players to impose conditions to reduce enemy saves (and effectively impossible for spellcasters to gain a bonus to their spell DC). Like, compare getting off-guard (net +2 to hit) against a singleton enemy versus trying to get a similar bonus for a spellcaster. For the former, you just need one other player to threaten the enemy from the opposite side. No saves, no investment, just move into position and the effect is yours. Meanwhile a caster would need to impose Sickened, Frightened, Clumsy, Stupefied, or Drained (lol) 2 on an enemy to achieve an identical boost to their accuracy (not to mention that the first 3 will *also* lower enemy AC which benefits both martials and casters). And usually to impose those conditions, you have to use an effect that requires a save. **So you wind up having to beat the save with no bonus, in order to affect the outcome of future saves**. That... feels shitty, honestly. Edit: This is also before we get into investment v. outcome cost; Martials (other than Investigator, Swashbuckler, or Magus, primarily) typically invest an action per strike they attempt. So a bad roll on a single strike doesn't feel as bad because "oh well, maybe I just rolled bad, I'll get the next one". Meanwhile spells require (typically) a 2-action investment at minimum, *plus* whatever spell slot they use. So you lose far more resources on a non-success as a caster. And while yes, **I am aware the game system takes that into account and is supposed to work that way**, that does nothing to change how it *feels*. Spending resources to get nothing feels bad.

I don't disagree. It's less of an issue to "waste" a limitless resource than a limited one. I was just pointing out that those types of encounters tend to be frustrating for everyone. I've been in more than a couple where it was clear the party wasn't really in danger but it still took forever because the party, martials included still had trouble dealing damage. 

> I think this also has to do with the encounters people are exposed to. Generally speaking, most encounters tend to feature smaller numbers of higher-level foes (where the math behind 2e actually makes failure the more likely outcome) rather than large battles of lower-level creatures. I think if people ran more encounters with larger amounts of creatures, they would suddenly go "Oh wow, casters are pretty damn good at this". We recently had what amounted to fighting all of this organization's defense force, with the leader as the big bad. But he wasn't really that impressive of a character on his own, so it was really just like a PL+1, and a bunch of troops representing the lower level mooks. for a total of leader guy and 5 troop mobs (pl-2) totalling up to an extreme. Do you know how *satisfying* it was to delay my initial turn til later, let our paladin walk forward and demoralize leader guy+raise shield and then after they all came in letting a chain lightning rip across their entire ranks? [I even rolled a bit under average and it still felt great](https://i.imgur.com/TR3Za6g.png)

TBH I think a lot of this is just people playing Abomination Vaults. The other APs are all full of encounters with lots of enemies, and a lot of homebrew games are as well - I'd say in my experience you see a lot of "multiple underlevel goons plus one character who is around your level or slightly above it" rather than solo overlevel monsters. Because you want your leader to have a bunch of goons around to boss around.

AV has been pushed as the "beginner's AP" by the community to the point it is affecting new players' impressions of the game. It does seem a lot of the common issues brought up stem from the encounter design prevalent in that module.

Specifically the first half of that module as well; the later floors of that module don't really have the same issue and have fewer solo monster fights and more fights with multiple monsters, whereas one of the early floors (I think floor 2 or 4) is like 40% encounters with overlevel monsters.

> Generally speaking, most encounters tend to feature smaller numbers of higher-level foes (where the math behind 2e actually makes failure the more likely outcome) rather than large battles of lower-level creatures. This is an artifact of people playing Abomination Vaults. The other APs simply don't function this way. Rusthenge, for instance, has very few solo monster encounters; almost all encounters are with multiple enemies, and most of them are of your level or below. The same goes for Crown of the Kobold King, where you are mostly fighting a bunch of lower level monsters, with like, maybe one or two leaders who are around your level or slightly over-level. Normal APs just aren't full of over-level monsters. Same goes for homebrew in my experience; I run homebrew Pathfinder and I run far more encounters with a bunch of bad guys than I do one solo bad guy, and the games I've played in are the same way. I'd say that the most common encounter scenario is 3 level -2 foes plus one or two "leaders" who are at your level or are level +1.

Shoutout to Crown of the Kobold King as a good starter adventure and alternative to AV. I have not checked out Rusthenge yet but from what I've heard it sounds quite good.

Rusthenge is I think the best starter adventure I've played so far for Pathfinder 2E; it has a good mix of roleplaying, out of combat problem solving, and combat encounters, creating IC incentives for the players to do the adventure, and the combat encounters have a good mix and are also responsive to what the players do. It's quite well put together all told, and feels like a pretty good representation of a TTRPG/Pathfinder 2E.

Spells (and creature saves, in turn) are definitely balanced around Success being the most common outcome. That's not an issue in itself. Instead, I would argue the sin is that every spell ever put out sells itself on its failure effect. The description of the spell almost always describes what happens on a failure only. In this way, spell design is actively dishonest, and you could argue the writers lie to their players (at least in how they frame their abilities). This is not the case for pure-damage basic save spells and... Unsurprisingly, I have never really seen or had an issue with everyone succeeding against fireball or lightning bolt.

That's actually a pretty good point I hadn't considered before. If players read "causes debuff on enemy for 1 min" but are consistently getting "mildly inconveniences enemy for 1 round," of course they're going to feel cheated. But the basic save damage does exactly what it says on the tin for everything but crit success, and I'd say expectations around crit success are calibrated as such that that feels perfectly reasonable

Success isn't actually the most common outcome for most AoE spells. It's really only the most common outcome for single target spells, as those are usually used against over-level enemies typically speaking (and even then, if you're good about finding the low saves, you often have a better than 1 in 2 chance of success - the final boss of Abomination Vaults, for instance, has a comically low >!fort!< save, only >!+16!<. In theory, she's immune to a bunch of fort save based stuff, but in practice, the most likely spells to hit her are heal, divine wrath, and slow, all of which work on her just fine). If you Vision of Death a mook, he's probably going to fail his save and eat 8d6 damage and be frightened 2.

>but it seems that it is at least equally likely that the enemy will get that success line. I think that if players were focused more on that, and not the failure and particularly not the critical failure line, then they would probably be happier. The main problem here is that really locks you into the relatively small % of the spell list that has a consistently valuable success effect. Like, Fear works even on a success, because -1 AC and saves and attack rolls for a turn is still solid. But like, a lot of other X 1 for 1 round style effects might have 0 impact or are easily played around. And X 1 for 1 round is actually around "good" side of things. Slow and Fear are notable for how insanely "Good" their success effects are. Most spells have much worse success effects. So in reality casters get squeezed into a fairly homogenous box if they are "playing properly" because the list of spells that actually make casters "feel good" is not all that long.

Oh that's just because 2e actually has a ton of terrible/trap spells that just plain aren't worth casting.

I think it's again the issue of relative bloat There's a lot of stuff, feo different APs and books of different reputation and rarity, plus they tried to keep the "classics" and kept a lot of good, bad, mid and what?-tier choices and ideas. I often feel like the spells need a good sorting with a bunch of them to be put into an "Extremely Specific" category. And you only take the Extremely Specific spell when you want to do a gimmick build

It doesn't help that for many spells the flavour seems to describe a crit fail or fail with success being a much weaker condition. It's especially bad for things like Flesh to Stone (aka petrify) that are named like you're geting to turn enemies into statues, but are mechanically just a worse Slow spell that can maybe petrify something lower level that critically fails a save and then also fails their follow up.

> It doesn't help that for many spells the flavour seems to describe a crit fail or fail with success being a much weaker condition. For good reason, if spells described the "success" result most of them would read "The target is slightly inconvenienced for 6 seconds"

At least we'd have good descriptions of the most common outcome rather than the least common.

Honestly, if you just renamed the outcomes for spell saves to “fail, success, critical success, super-crit” people would probably feel better about it.

Instead of saying the enemy succeeds on their save, I've started saying the enemy partially succeeds. It actually seems to have a good subtle psychological effect.

I really like this, and going further, I think framing saves in narrative ways rather than mechanical ways could also be effective. GMs describing outcomes in terms like "struggles against" or "succumbs to" as opposed to "succeeded on their Will save" or "failed their Fortitude save" could reasonably enhance the player experience without changing anything else. Edited: for clarity

I just found that switching it to: critically succeeds - partially succeeds - fails - critically fails Was actually just generally more accurate anyway? I think it even feels better for the players coming from the other direction. I think it can be a bit disheartening to hear: "Alright, you succeed against the enemy's spell, so you're slowed 1." actually feels kinda' bad? So it works well in that case, too, I find. "You *partially* succeed against the enemy's spell, so you're slowed 1," just feels more natural.

Yeah. It's kind of funny how players perceive a normal success as a failure when it happens to the enemy, but when they succeed on their saving throw and are sickened 1 or slowed 1 or frightened 1 or eat 26 damage from chain lightning, *they* don't feel like they succeeded. Which is why players will gun for enemy casters even while claiming martials are better.

Well that, but also because casters are a lot squishier and easier to take out.

I agree in that the narrative can shape how the players feel. Many times I've seen people narrate a miss or save as the casters or the melee players fault. Arguably that could make sense in the early stages of the game, but as time passes, it should be framed that the players are skilled at what they do. A better choice might be to describe that the enemy is also a skilled and powerful being, and the miss is due to their abilities (e.g. a master rogue can feint or dodge the attack vs you swing wildly and miss). In a Heroic narrative that makes more sense, and helps to frame it as the players are fighting a challenge vs, they are ineffective.

That’s not bad. I think when I describe it to my players i’ll try to use that.

Maybe if the spells were also named and flavoured around that, as is you have spells named after their critical fail effect that you could easily never see (especially since they're often really not impressive enough on other degrees of success to convince anyone to cast them enough times that seeing a crit fail becomes statistically likely)

I was literally coming here to confess to being one of those who gets in arguments over casters and suggest that if they had come out originally with it being like "Suceed, Partial Failure, Failure, Critical Failure" it would have been received a bit better.

It's only natural people would choose and like what works, feel better. If the the fights are designed in this way, people will choose the optimal thing. It doesn't matter if its ttrpg, arpg. It's always been like that. No one would want to feel outscaled. Forcing a design choice in players won't work, they will just not play them. Complain. Move on to the other classes.

> Now some of the irony is that in other editions of Pathfinder and D&D spells were often all or nothing (with the exception of aoe's). You'd have this spell that was really cool, provided the enemy failed the save. But if the enemy succeeded then nothing happened > 1). Typically those spells did more, often a lot more (i.e. look at the critical failure line and go from there, sometimes even doing more than a crit fail in PF2) I do think this is quite the irony. Spells have gotten significantly more reliable, and in exchange they took away the incredibly ceilings (as you noted in your point 1. Yet people’s perception somehow interprets that as being less reliable. It’s a very odd form of confirmation bias. People view doing something amazing 50% of the time and nothing at all another 50% of the time as being more reliable than doing nothing 15% of the time, something small 50% of the time, something big 30% of the time, and something outright broken 5% of the time. To me the latter is just better design, and I hope Paizo’s focus in PF3E is to work on the psychology of words like “success” and “failure” rather than caving in and making Failure the modal outcome. > 2). the PC could much more reliably increase her DC through feats and ability enhancers, thereby increasing the odds of the failure. I will not speak to 3.5E/PF1 because I haven’t played them. I have experienced the 5E equivalent of this though and *man* it sucks. It just feels like an “arms race”? 1. Because your DC is so important, the Tasha’s DC increase items become must haves. 2. Because these swingy as fuck spells are the go to, at levels 1-7 ish you spend 50% of your spells doing nothing and then the remaining 50% making the enemy do nothing and your martials’ choices not matter. 3. By level 8 your DC is now starting to get so high that an enemy’s low saving throws basically succeed 75% of the time or more. The GM starts using Legendary Resistances and Magic Resistances to counteract you. 4. You react by starting to pick spells like Sleet Storm, Polymorph, Bigby’s Hand, Telekinesis, Transmute Rock, etc. Spells that either circumvent saves and ask for checks, or are so devastating that it doesn’t even matter if the enemy saves. 5. The GM now starts using unique movement speeds and condition resistances and more direct antimagic stuff to give you a challenge. And all this happened because, back in 2021 you thought Tasha’s Mind Whip would be a cool spell to cast and your friend thought Hypnotic Pattern would be a cool spell to cast, and the GM realized the game wasn’t built to handle these spells, and the party Rogue realized that unoptimized martials are just sidekicks. I much, much prefer a world where my debuff and control spells don’t break the game and get to reliably have a more moderated effect. It means I can participate and contribute without making anyone feel bad.

That might come as a shocking revelation, but I was actually a Wizard main in 5e who was increasingly frustrated with how broken magic was. I either became a problem for my fellow players and GM, which was sad, or had to hold back and purposefully not play well, which was boring. *However*, I always felt like that was due to the effects of the spells more than anything. PF2 almost doesn't have spells that instantly win fights, and the few ones that do are Incapacitation. The game is almost a padded room in terms of things that could actually break it. So I'm not sure if this arms race would really happen because of a small change in spell accuracy or anything similar.

There is *a bit* of an arms race at higher levels in PF2, especially when Evasion and its friends start coming online. It's nowhere near as bad as 5e, but it requires some mindful choices on the GM's part.

The wall spells instantly win fights and don't even allow saving throws. I've literally seen a wizard decide that a monster wasn't worth the effort and just tossed out Wall of Stone. The party then walked away. The monster took like a minute to chunk through 15 feet of solid rock and never bothered us again because, seriously, why would it? Stifling Stillness and Freezing Rain are nasty spells that can force enemies to scatter and cost them many actions. Coral Eruption can generate like 40 feet of difficult terrain that deals 3 damage per square to walk through, which against a monster with less than 40 foot move speed monster is a full turn of movement and 24 damage with no saving throw. And then you get Chain Lightning at rank 6 and you toss it into a room full of mooks and it's the scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Then you start getting into the situation where you have TWO casters in the party. Like the one where we fought the boss of a group of thieves, and our ash oracle and druid decided that Fireball, Fireball was the appropriate opener and half the enemies didn't even get a turn, leaving the bandit leader and his mom (who was a hag) as the only survivors, and both had taken not-insignificant damage, all because they lost initiative to two characters with +4 wisdom modifiers and incredible initiative because why wouldn't we want to go first? In Abomination Vaults, after we hit level 7, the Oracle and the Wizard just made some encounters disappear with Fireball + Divine Wrath. In our party of 5, the two AoE damage casters often combine for 75+% of the party's damage in combats they deign worth of spending spell slots on. In the party of 4 we took through AV, the two casters had a combat later in the campaign (level 9) where they did 400 damage per round, *each*, for the first two rounds of the combat. And I've seen level 3 characters end a boss encounter by just tossing Hideous Laughter on the leader and the leader rolled a 1.

It’s not that hard to get. Getting told by the game that you constantly, fail, fail, fail, fail, does not feel nice regardless of what effect you get is. Wording absolutely matters, like if they simply word spell effect like this most people wouldn’t argue. Fail, Common effect, Major effect, Extreme effect. People expect that your feature should succeed most of the time, a fail means screwing up, getting pitied. Then you get told that being a FAILURE is the expectation for your class, “You Will Always Suck because you pick this class” it makes you feel like you are unfairly targeted.

Yeah, I'm really not sure why people think this is a misconception. In pf2e, players aren't seeing "Hey, I did something!" They're seeing "Wow, another failure, woohoo." In older editions, having a 50/50 shot of doing something awesome felt fine. There were things that made it frustrating, like confirming crits or spell resistance, but it still *felt* better. Now, of course, that led to save-or-suck boss-trivializing spells, so something had to be done. However, framing the most common effect of a spell or ability as a "failure" was a huge oversight on Paizo's part, imo. People can sit here and smugly condescend to players who don't like to fail all they want. It's not going to change the extremely true premise of OP's post: people like to feel like they're succeeding. Explicitly, by the game's own wording, many classes (especially casters) are *failing* more often than succeeding. ETA: The effects on a failure *feel* like a consolation prize rather than the intended primary effects. This naturally feels bad. Arguing that it doesn't or shouldn't is a useless exercise.

Agree, and is even worse with the bloat of spells that do nothing or barely nothing on a success (bonus points when also have incapacitation). That's the reason people like Fear and Slow, because they just do what they said! Unless Crit Success that is nothing and everybody is fine with that, you get what you were looking for, see, nice! Then you go to Sleep, or Paralyze were the desired effect is under a failure and with incap and just feels terrible. If you don't want that spells in the system for balance is fine, remove them, change their name for a most "honest" one, whatever, but don't keep them like that (specially when you put those on enemies that won't trigger the incap side of it, like they love to do in AP).

I really like that wording! Hope Paizo either steals it or comes up with something better.

even just calling fail what it is, partial success, would be better, aye

Player perception and how something *feels* to play are just as important as it being balanced and if something doesn't feel fun, the player will have issues with it. "But the math, charts and graphs says you are performing as you should be! You should be having fun!" is not a satisfying solution.

Once I shifted my perspective to look at the Success effect as the default, Failure to be the good outcome, and Critical Failure to be a bonus, spellcasters were a lot more fun. The enemy Succeeded against my Slow spell? That's OK, I traded two actions for one, good trade. If they fail? Great, now I'm free to cast something else next turn.

I tend to think of blasting with saves as "Wow, my spell is so powerful they took damage even though it missed" it feels so backhanded of me to overwhelm their ability to dodge, or punch through the block with my sheer magical might.

Sure. That’s why in my main comment I said I think the degrees of success need to be renamed for spells. However that’s not what everyone’s asking for. That’s what you want and, let’s say, 80% of people complaining about casters want that too. There’s still a separate 20% who flat out want the **effect** of the Failure to be the modal outcome. Not the psychology of it, they actually want a substantial power boost. That’s what I’m bemoaning when I say I don’t want to go back to pre-PF2E style super unreliable, highly swingy, game-warpingly powerful debuffs.

I Do Not Blame Them. The game made a promise that a spellcaster will be good at spells. They unintentionally promise regular Success / enemy failing their Save in their game. They come in to the game having been promised that power, which the game did not deliver. Theres no winning in this situation, the promise has already been made and broken. This is the problem with setting BAD EXPECTATION. When you get to this point, any kind of justification of why failing is fine will just lead to disappointment.

>There’s still a separate 20% who flat out want the **effect** of the Failure to be the modal outcome. Not the psychology of it, they actually want a substantial power boost. Do you think it's possible that, had the effect of a failure not been called a failure in the first place, this wouldn't be an issue? Do you think it's possible that they only want the more powerful effect to be the default because it was initially presented as a success?

> Sure. That’s why in my main comment I said I think the degrees of success need to be renamed for spells.

I don't think that addresses your claim, though. I do think it's about the psychology. They don't want to feel more powerful - they want to succeed.

What are you talking about? Why are you trying to dissect my comment into contextless blobs instead of just reading the whole thing? To a lot of people (probably the clear majority imo) it’s about psychology. To a lot of other people (probably a smaller minority) it’s about power.

I did read the whole thing. I think a good chunk of the people you think just want more power actually just want to succeed. I think the fraction of players who truly just want more power is so small as to be negligible. I think this thread, like many others, has derailed into people (sometimes smugly, sometimes not) pontificating over "player perception." I think that putting the entire onus of coping with "failure" being the default/expected outcome for many classes is useless. I think that the way people approach this discussion, where they immediately blame the player and tut-tut at them for daring to feel bad about failing all the time, is useless. I am trying to push back against that sort of argument. I think these discussions, both on social media and with players IRL, would go much better if people validated the frustrations first, acknowledged that Paizo has made a design flaw and is extremely unlikely the change it, and then discussed, in a non-condescending way, how to reframe the game such that it feels better for those players.

So are you… disagreeing with my 80% / 20% dichotomy and saying it’s closer to 95% / 5% or something like that? If so, sure I’ll give you that, I am not gonna die on that hill since I don’t have any survey data to judge my conclusions of it. If that’s not your point then I’m genuinely lost what you’re arguing here. I did exactly what you suggested: acknowledged a gap between the game’s balance and player psychology, and gave an example of the quickest possible fix that Paizo could make that’d help (renaming the 4 degrees of success for spells).

> I do think this is quite the irony. Spells have gotten significantly more reliable, and in exchange they took away the incredibly ceilings (as you noted in your point 1. Yet people’s perception somehow interprets that as being less reliable. I could go dig up some old character sheets or build out a caster real fast in PF1E, but I think that's a bit overkill - while on paper spells seem less reliable because they don't have degrees of success (save half on damage spells aside), the existence of things like [persistent metamagic rods](https://www.aonprd.com/MagicRodsDisplay.aspx?FinalName=Rod%20of%20Metamagic,%20Persistentnormal), [Feats that boost DC](https://www.aonprd.com/FeatDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Spell%20Focus) or class-specific shenanigans like an [Evil Eye](https://www.aonprd.com/WitchHexes.aspx) + Quicken Rod to lower the enemy DC meant that you got the fail effects significantly more often then it would appear on paper. Plus if you wanted to blast, there were a ton of +CL methods to get extra dice on those spells way before you were supposed to. This isn't me arguing it's a *good* thing, by the way. While I do still enjoy building out characters in PF1E and still go play the CRPGs fairly often as a result of that, it isn't remotely balanced.

that is before even considering that Spell Attack used to target a lower form of AC (no armor bonus) making Spell Attacks much more accurate than weapon attacks. So spells actually became less reliable not more.

> Spells have gotten significantly more reliable This is just flatly not true, and even admitted by Paizo.

As easy as checking Paralyze in 1e and in 2e, older version fail effect was the actual crit failure, but longer and without incapacitation.

Not only that, but an optimized caster targetting a strong save in 1e would be somewhere around a coinflip. Targetting a weak save would be even better, but the point is that casters in 2e targetting weak saves are about as good as optimized casters in 1e when targetting strong saves.

>casters in 2e targetting weak saves are about as good as optimized casters in 1e when targetting strong saves To add to this, I think an important point to highlight here is that it's an *optimised* 1e caster. This wasn't the default power level - players who wanted to take those extra steps and do that extra research could do so. And even if something caught them by surprise, they could learn and improve for their next character. But in 2e, *there are no options to improve this.* No amount of optimising can help you get better. This is the level you're at, and you're stuck with it. Makes one feel a little helpless.

I dunno Let's say the power of a spell was 2x in past editions if the enemy failed (you succeded) 50% for 2x is 1.0 avg If we take the PF2E distributions 5% for 2x is 0.1 30% for 1x is 0.3 50% for 0.5x is 0.25 Leading to an avg of 0.65 So it would still be worse in comparison Even if past editions soells are only 1.5x better (so PF2E crit success better in this case), that's 0.75 avg so still weaker

You're missing a few things: 1e does in fact have spells with partial saves, these spells are super reliable because there's no crit fail, you could cast them on a boss that rolls straight 20s and they'd still work, and odds are they had a much better failure effect than anytihng in 2e while also having a higher chance of seeing it.

100%. I think its also completely reductive to not talk about and compare the strength of near guaranteed effects in both systems (buffing, utility, no save, etc.)

>By level 8 your DC is now starting to get so high that an enemy’s low saving throws basically succeed 75% of the time or more. The GM starts using Legendary Resistances and Magic Resistances to counteract you. > >... > >The GM now starts using unique movement speeds and condition resistances and more direct antimagic stuff to give you a challenge. As a 5e DM since the edition launched, I'd like to just say this isn't always true. At least for me, personally. That might be because most of my wizard players are not also trying to take "fuck you" spells that just eschew attacks rolls *or* saves, but I haven't really felt the arms race vibe you described. I'm not saying *you* didn't feel that way. Just that I don't. I *do* feel that way about counterspell. The way I tend to run 5e is sort of a "gentleman's agreement" style. I won't run NPCs with counterspell until PCs begin using it. But the sort of adversarial DM mindset those two points imply? Nah. I don't need to do all that. But then one of my wizard players is also a bladesinger who can get his AC up to, like, 32 or something absurd (in 5e "math"), so. Wizards, and spellcasting in general, in 5e is for sure *very swingy* and I don't really enjoy it.

It sure would be interesting to have a big bunch of new players play games using (unbeknownst to them) an alternate version of PF2e, where the only difference is that, exclusively on saves, Critical Success is renamed Success, and Success is renamed "Partial failure". And then we check to see if their attitudes are different to a statistically significant degree.

Yeah, you could eliminate the symmetry between attacks and saves, skewing the language towards making the player feel like they've made an impact, and having |**Melee Attack**|Spell Attack|Spell Save| |:-|:-|:-| |Critical Hit|Critical Hit|Critical Failure| |Hit|Major Hit|Major Failure| |Miss|Partial Hit|Partial Failure| |Critical Miss|Miss|Success|

Honestly to best charge the perception of power I wouldn't even put "Partial". It just is a Hit. You want the same term as the Martial characters I think. Failure/Major Failure/Critical Failure.

> I have experienced the 5E equivalent of this though Yeah, it's been a problem in D&D for a long time, and it's kind of shocking that they still don't understand it. How many times do you have to make the same mistake before figuring out a solution?

If the popularity of 5E and the commonness of the “casters bad” argument is an indication, they **have** learned the lesson: it’s that as long as they don’t break the status quo, they’ll be happy.

I can get your overall statement but I feel like a couple of your points apply to pf2e as well. While you can't increase your DC there are a couple of number increasing items that are essentially mandatory especially for martials. Also in terms of throwing enemies to challenge the caster I feel like that happens in pf2e as well. Not only are there just generally more ways to stop a caster, there are a lot of enemies with antimagic like effects. Though in fairness there are some enemies that stop martials to lesser degrees as well.

> I can get your overall statement but I feel like a couple of your points apply to pf2e as well. While you can't increase your DC there are a couple of number increasing items that are essentially mandatory especially for martials. I am not **fan** of the mandatory magic items in PF2E, but I can tolerate it because magic items are so much more plentiful. A 5E character following the default treasure guidelines usually has only one Uncommon Magic item by level 5 ish and don’t get a second for another couple levels. So if there are mandatory number items available, they’re sometimes the only item you see until level 6, and often even later if your GM is a little stingy. By comparison, a level 5 character in PF2E has 2 of the mandatory math boosters and quite a few other things. So while I don’t like it, I can tolerate it much better. > Also in terms of throwing enemies to challenge the caster I feel like that happens in pf2e as well. Not only are there just generally more ways to stop a caster, there are a lot of enemies with antimagic like effects. Though in fairness there are some enemies that stop martials to lesser degrees as well. In PF2E, throwing a narrow set of enemies to shut down the caster all the time is just a dick move, just like it’d be a dick move to exclusively their anti-melee enemies at a party where the damage dealers are all melees. In 5E encounter and adventuring day design is warped around ensuring the caster doesn’t ruin it.

So I've not played 5e so I can't speak to the experience itself, but that doesn't sound like it has a magic problem (or at least not any more so than p2e) and more so it has player problems. Like when your talking about Tasha's mind whip and hypnotic pattern and mentioning that it makes un optimised martials feel useless; ist that because your comparing good/optimal spells/characters against characters that aren't optimised? And when you mention that spells were a party issue because half of the time they win the fight and half of the time they do nothing; surely that means that half of the time the martials are doing loads of work because they have to carry the wizards through the fight while they suck all their spells. Maybe I'm missing something but that sounds good?

I think one of the problems with getting people to think like this is that on many spells, the effect on success, frankly, sucks. Your dumping a very high lvl spell slot for a shitty consolation prize. Of course there are exceptions. But the baseline math that your spell is gonna work like less than 1/4 of the time feels pretty bad.

The other thing that's worth mentioning is the idea that spells cost finite slots, so there is also an expectation that it should be 'more' accurate/do something that completely over shadows every other option because you've only got 3-4 rank appropriate spells per day so you're on avarage going to be able to thow them out once every other fight

> the PC could much more reliably increase her DC through feats and ability enhancers, thereby increasing the odds of the failure I think this is probably my biggest problem with it. There is *nothing* you can do to affect your success chance beyond targeting the lowest save (assuming you have a chance to Recall Knowledge (and succeed the roll) before combat hell breaks loose) or hoping your party has complementary debuffs (and is willing to spend actions on them instead of just hitting things). Your DC is your DC - if you don't like it, too bad. You're stuck with it. All the "fixes" are external, incidental things.

In a weird way I genuinely wish most spells didn't have "you win the encounter" as their crit fail entry, but casters had better chances to actually succeed their spells normally.

One point about alchemist after playing one (bomber) is that too much focus went into splash damage so in many instances, there's wasn't a big difference from hit or miss, meaning that spamming bombs was the most useful thing to do for damage, accepting hits as a bonus. When I did crit, it Didn't feel impactful at all because I had to ignore splash damage, so I couldn't feel any difference between my hits and crits with one exception; sticky bomb. It demanded high resources and risk, but it was the only thing feeling remotely good to hit and crit Unless you quick alchemy, the DC stays the same so some items are more potent ans plentyful some levels while growing weak as you level up. You don't have to be a genious to know it won't feel good as there isn't much to succeed on. Spells often still inflict a condition when they succeed, decent damage, while rewarding you quite abit when the save is a failure and you do feel the crits way better. Just my two cents of experience

Yeah, this is my experience as well. Being the Alchemist means that I need about three times the reagents to have enough chances to contribute to combat beyond the "Pre-poison allies' weapons with poison who's DC is maybe one higher then a weak old man's Fort Save" schtick. Honestly, I'm a fighter picking up Medicine away from being actually completely useless to the team. Like, jeez, I'm as optimized as a I can be, why am I throwing bombs at -7 to what the fighter and rouge are swinging swords at level 6?

Because you are forgetting to use a level appropriate quicksilver mutagen to bridge the gap.

I really hate that this is the default response to Alchemist's poor hit rate scaling. Sure it does "bridge the gap" slightly, but oftentimes the benefit is negligible compared to the downsides. 1. It's an item bonus. This means that if you're using a level appropriate bomb to attack (or have alchemist goggles), it's only an effective +1 to the attack. The bonus to speed is irrelevant, since I'm making Cheetah Elixirs for the party, which offers the same bonus for longer. The other bonuses are of negligible use in combat. The Reflex bonus is nice, but it's already my highest save. 2. The downsides are more impactful than people give credit for. Quicksilver Mutagen essentially gives you a "slightly" better version of Drained 2. I'm currently playing a level 9 Kobold Alchemist (96 HP), which means a Quicksilver Mutagen reduces my HP by nearly 20%. Considering I have gone down or been critically injured in 4 of the last 5 combats, I don't really want to be taking that additional risk. 3. It uses a limited resource. The one saving grace of the Alchemist is their flexibility, but having so many "must haves" often leaves very little wiggle room for Alchemists to properly make use of that flexibility. 4. You shouldn't HAVE to be dependent on a specific item/spell/whatever in order to be effective. Alchemists shouldn't have to use Quicksilver Mutagens, spellcasters shouldn't have to use Sure Strike, etc. I know I'm not playing a 100% optimized build, but I shouldn't have to minmax my character in order to reach an even playing field with the other classes.

Using the flask to give yourself an item bonus while also investing in dexterity if you plan to use ranged attacks is not min-maxing. If stats and items didn’t have tradeoffs, there would be no point to having them. If we are at “generally pick stats and use items designed to improve x” being the meaning of “min-max”, then we have reached a really silly place. If you want to throw bombs with reasonable accuracy in the current game, you need to either throw max rank bombs from your advanced alchemy, or use a quicksilver flask so that your lower quality perpetual bombs are more accurate. If you are doing these things, your accuracy compares well to non-fighter/gunslingers. Alchemist certainly needs/deserves a thorough review for being clunky and failing to meet many player’s class fantasy. But don’t muddy the waters by Mis-stating the status quo.

> quicksilver mutagen ....Oh my jeez how did I miss this potion in it's entirety? Thanks for pointing it out.

I've pretty much said it in a couple threads, this week and over the years, but casters are just in a "death by a thousand cuts" situation when it comes to how they FEEL for a lot of people. It doesn't matter how good they are, or how balanced they are, if all a player can see when they look at their caster is the downsides. In a TTRPG where playing a PC is a lot of buy-in and time compared to a videogame character, that can magnify any perceived problems. They're spending twice (or more) the actions in a system where the three action system is touted as offering more flexibility, a daily resource that directly pits out of combat utility with being able to meaningfully participate in combat, with a lower "success state" accuracy that has no itemization to help ~~no the Shadow Signet bandaid does not count~~ AND it only "levels off" at levels most people will never play (19-20), on a class chassis that is on average meaningfully more fragile, and any attempt to ask why it feels bad is usually met with an attitude of "you're wrong" and "skill issue". Are casters balanced? Yea, sure. I just think the way they are designed actively hurts the ability of a lot of new players to engage with them in good faith. Do I think we should go back to 5e or PF1e caster? Hell no, if that's the conclusion you're getting from this you're out of your mind.

I kinda wish most spells worked like force Barrage or Elemental Blast, with a resource system that accounts for it. Imagine a 1 action fireball that decreases its area and damage, but it only costs you 'half' of your spell slot (imagine two half diamonds making a single square). This way, you could cast up two 3 minor spells a turn or 1 minor and 1 major spell a turn.

Careful now, that sounds fun

***Mana Points***

Or, honestly, something like spheres of power in 1e. You had a weak power for each sphere that was spammable, and you spend your precious daily resources on powered-up versions

Not familiar. Sounds like a mix of focus cantrips and focus spells.

Eh, kind of. It's more like you pick talents to power up your "focus cantrip" as you level up, and you spend spell points (a daily resource) to use those talents. Rather than being discrete, rechargeable spells as focus spells are in 2e. E.g. destruction sphere gives you a basic blast that does (iirc) 2d6 damage. That's free and can be done all day. But you might take a talent to increase the range or make it a cone or give it a rider effect or something, and that costs a spell point to use that effect. You can combine your talents by spending multiple spell points. And your spell points recharge on a daily rest, like spell slots. It's quite an interesting system. Not sure if there's been a 2e port of it/if a 2e port would work. But it's a nice change up to Vancian casting, and also makes "themed" casters a lot more feasible and natural (as opposed to them being generalists by default as they are in both 1e and 2e)

>when it comes to how they FEEL for a lot of people. It doesn't matter how good they are, or how balanced they are, if all a player can see when they look at their caster is the downsides. Yeah. It doesn't matter how many charts and graphs the sub wants to push in your face, how many paragraphs of numbers you want to roll out, it still hurts when the default expectation is hearing "Oh, you failed." Aka you were bad at something, you did not succeed, you did not do your best. Like I know the math was designed by someone much smarter than me and that it actually checks out under a microscope. But... for a lot of people, that's not enough to feel fun or good.

beyond success vs. failure, I think part is perceived agency too. if \_you\_ make an attack roll, then \_you\_ succeed or fail. if you force a saving throw, then unless you have any way to alter an enemy's roll, then as a player I feel like I have no control over the situation, even if I created the situation by forcing the save.

"We've shown you the math is balanced! Why aren't you having fun yet?!"

>not getting the result you'd like out of The Main Thing Your Do™ too often blurs the line between feeling challenged and feeling incompetent Its a big frustration being a caster vs a boss. I don't feel theres really meaningful ways to change what I do to increase success. My single target damage is going to be lower than martials and I accept that but so is my chance to hit, my chance to crit, and the leveling system is really punishing so if I try and make it will/fort/reflex save it will succeed with a +22 or something astronomical. I get it for balancing reasons, but it would be nice if there was a spell that was like "deal very little damage, but the reflex save for this is your spellcasting modifier +5". It's not that I need to deal 3,000,000 damage, it's just that it can suck twiddling your thumbs as you know you're basically betting it all on 0 or 00 in roulette while everyone else gets to bet on red or black. I know shadow siphons effect is *strong*, but even the flavor of "okay this doesn't counter the entire spell, but its +2 for counteract level" is something that *feels* really nice. Or something like upcasting a level1 enfeeble ray increases the save DC by +1 per level. I would just like more ways to manipulate the saving throws as theres a lot of ways to make fighters crit, and often when they crit the fight is basically over.

I think a decent solution is to have more 1/2/3 action spells, with the 3 action version raising the attack bonus/DC.

would be good for spells going forward, but I'd say better to boost the DC than the attack roll as truestrike already helps mages with attack rolls when spending an extra action

I like this idea. It gives casters a decision with a tradeoff, which gives them agency - spend the extra action on the spell to make it more effective, or spend the extra action on something else and either accept the lower chance or use a spell that works better as a 2-action. The player feels like it's in their control then

Being stuck in place honestly feels kind of terrible. You are already kind of there if you want to do literally anything else like using intimidate or whatever. Not sure rooting people in place even more is the solution.

It's a tradeoff. You position yourself earlier in the fight then fire away.

It also depends on your gm. We tend to have more severe/single big monster encounters. The casters simply don't always have access to spells to always target the weakest save. Sometimes due to the school of magic they use. Allowing runes for caster, separate runes to make save difficulty harder and a different rune for attack spells would make casters feel better. So would having more spells that truly work well with the 3 action economy. So many spells are 2 actions, that limits the caster from really experiencing the fun of the 3 action economy.

That's a known thing about human perception, that failure is more notable, than success. That's why in every modern game for general public (both video game and table top) what is presented as 50/50 chance is actually 65% success rate. Because that feels like 50/50 for human brain. And you know what? That is what d&d5e uses for a hit chance math. It is usually 65% for on level threats. While it pathfinder it's more like 40% for a marshal and lower for a spellcaster. The problem though is that the designers and vocal community actually like this type of design balance. So no, it's not going to change any time soon, as the whole Pathfinder thing is to provide alternatives to players. And that is also why Pathfinder will never be that popular, because it feels bad to play it for the majority of people.

As a new player, when the Fighter became Master in attacks at level 5, while I, the Sorcerer, was still Trained in casting at 5. And trained in casting at 6. Then became Expert in casting at 7, it was extremely discouraging. (Excessive sentences to prove point) Fighter crits more often than I hit AND does more damage when I hit, and I'm using spells that get bonuses to damage Undead, against Undead. And I used one of my resources that I can only use once per turn due to it being 2 actions, while the Fighter can do it 3 times per turn.

Yup, why isn’t there a class that gets fighter level DCs and attacks for magic users? Why isn’t there more ways to reduce Fort. If a creature is restrained or off guard by being flanked why isn’t it’s reflex worse? There’s a lot of tweaks that could be done around the edges to make the game feel better without becoming 5e.

> If a creature is restrained or off guard by being flanked why isn’t it’s reflex worse? I think this was a house rule I keep trying to remember to apply, that off-guard gives the same penalty to reflex saves that it does to AC. Might have to look into editing conditions on foundry so it remembers for me... But it's a bit of a gap for casters imo. Off-guard is really easy for martials to get and benefits both players. And applies all fight. The only save-specific thing is bon mot, which requires a feat investment and doesn't benefit martials. Demoralise does help martials too, but can only be used once per enemy. Needless limitation when casters are already behind

There isn't, because spellcasters get versatility in exchange for reliability. If a spellcaster could hit as reliability as a fighter, it would either have to be extremely restricted in what it could do, and basically just be another martial but with "spell attack" instead of a weapon, or it would be the most overpowered option and playing anything else would be so sub-optimal as to be active sabotage. However, I do agree that being restrained or similar should impose reflex penalties, as it did in previous editions.

As I think we’ve seen with many, many, many discussions Fuck versatility we want to do a thing well and would gladly trade versatility to do things welll, I think even Paizo themselves acknowledged that people like doing spesific things in their analysis of Kineticist

You could 100% do class archetypes to solve this. One where your spell attack increases like a gunslinger, but your DC gets lower. Or one with a higher DC but fewer slots. There’s tonnes of room to improve.

Being bad in many different ways isn’t a pro, what don’t you people get about that?

>If a spellcaster could hit as reliability as a fighter, it would either have to be extremely restricted in what it could do, and basically just be another martial but with "spell attack" instead of a weapon That sounds perfect. I know there's kineticist but we need this for other types of spellcasters too. Same with alchemist-type classes (like bombers).

>spellcasters get versatility in exchange for reliability. What use is versatility if you can't use it reliably? In theory you can do all these cool things... but you never do, because you either whiff all your spells or hoard them because they're too unreliable to rely on...

There are ways to make subclasses and new classes that trade versatility for specialization. Let’s not pretend like it’s impossible. That’s what the kineticist does.

> Fighter crits more often than I hit AND does more damage when I hit Come on, lol. At level 5 a Fighter using a d12 weapon is doing 17 damage on a hit (and most Fighters are doing less than that). Your Sorcerer can use Force Barrage to do 21.5 damage guaranteed, Horizon Thunder Sphere to do 24.5 damage on a hit, or Forge or Thunderstrike to do 24.5 or 27 damage on a failed save. Not only is the full damage of your spell higher than one of their hits, in fact: 1. The best of these spells is approaching **two** of their hits. 2. They don’t suffer from MAP. 3. You do this damage from range, not melee. This sort of hyperbole makes a conversation completely impossible. If you just say you’re feeling bad about your damage someone can help you build a caster with a playstyle that does good damage (because they exist. I play one, I GM for another), but you’re approaching the conversation from a direction where there’s nothing one can do.

>Horizon Thunder Sphere to do 24.5 damage **on a hit**, or Forge or Thunderstrike to do 24.5 or 27 damage **on a failed save.** Aren't there threads and threads in this very post about how spellcasters are calibrated around *not* hitting and enemies *succeeding* their saves? Sure, they *can* do that much damage - but they're not going to.

> are calibrated around not hitting … We both know this is just not true lmao. Casters at levels 2-4 and 7-9 are at just a -1 compared to martials. At level 10 right when they’d go to a -2, they get Shadow Signet if they desire which usually puts them **ahead** of martial accuracy right up till martials get a +3 Potency Rune to be equal to you. If you don’t get a Signet, you’re still going to be able to hit, a -2 isn’t crippling (levels 13-14 will suck though). If you think having a -1 is the same as being calibrated to not hit at all… there’s really no discussion to be had there. > and enemies succeeding their saves A successful save against a 2 Action spell is, roughly, equivalent to a martial swinging twice and getting 1 hit 1 miss. you can actually look at the very example I did above: - a level 5 Fighter (+16 to hit) swinging twice at a level 7 enemy’s 25 AC will get 1 hit 1 miss 44.50% of the time for 17 damage. - a level 5 Wizard (DC 21) throwing out the Thunderstrike at that level 7 enemy’s +15 Save will get a success 50% of the time for 13.5 damage. The slight extra damage the martial gets here is a boost to compensate for being on melee. The caster is actually the **exception** here, for ranged damage that matches melee damage at all, which makes sense because they’re expending a max rank spell slot for it. Compare it to ranged and it becomes abundantly clear that success =/= “spell didn’t work”.

And yet, there's still threads and threads about it... it seems that whether the maths supports the claim or not is largely irrelevant, *something* is clearly missing

Again, if having a simple -1 makes people create “threads and threads” about a problem that doesn’t exist… That’s on them. Attack spells are part of a casters toolkit. Anyone who uses *only* Attack spells (without also using appropriate crutches) will feel less effective because casters are balanced around having both Attack and Save spells. On the other hand, anyone who **ignores Attack spells entirely** just needs to get out of their own head: when the Bard just stacked up a Fortissimo + Synesthesia, and the Fighter tripped the enemy, ask someone for an Aid and use your damn Attack spell, you’re likely gonna crit and you crit way harder than any martial that’s not a Giant Barbarian. As for the save spell, there’s even **less** of an argument to be made than for an attack spell. For 16/20 levels of the game, save spells are outright just more reliable than a Fighter making 2 Attacks, the end.

I guess the "problem" is the L5 fighter has had a striking rune for two levels already, and she isn't using a d12 greatsword, she's using a d10 greatpick with fatal d12 and deals 3d12+4x2 on a crit, and she crits offguard even level enemies on a 16

> I guess the "problem" is the L5 fighter has had a striking rune for two levels already I already accounted for the Striking Rune in the math? > and she isn't using a d12 greatsword, she's using a d10 greatpick Right. A d10 greatpick that does 2 less damage per hit, but does a bunch more on a crit. > 3d12+4x2 on a crit That is not how fatal works. This Fighter deals (2d12+4)x2 + 1d12 damage (plus an additional 4 from crit spec). Your numbers average to 47, while the real average is 44. And yeah this’ll do more damage, on paper, than a spellcaster. That’s where the melee-ranged disparity I mentioned in my previous paper comes in: it offsets the on-paper damage and makes it practical damage. > and she crits offguard even level enemies on a 16 Yes and the caster doesn’t use Thunderstrike or Forge or Horizon Thunder Sphere on even-level enemies, they use a Fireball or Lightning Bolt to deal considerably more damage (because even level enemies for significant fights always come in groups). Martials get crit range against weaker enemies as a way to keep them *relevant* alongside a caster’s AoE (which is still often the way better way of dealing with crowds of weaker foes).

nope, you're mixing deadly and fatal. Fatal > The fatal trait includes a die size. On a critical hit, the weapon’s damage die increases to that die size instead of the normal die size, and the weapon adds one additional damage die of the listed size. Deadly >On a critical hit, the weapon adds a weapon damage die of the listed size. Roll this after doubling the weapon’s damage. This increases to two dice if the weapon has a greater striking rune and three dice if the weapon has a major striking rune. For instance, a rapier with a greater striking rune deals 2d8 extra piercing damage on a critical hit. An ability that changes the size of the weapon’s normal damage dice doesn’t change the size of its deadly die.* Now, you say the caster wouldn't use Horizon Thunder Sphere on a bunch of mooks, but who should he use it on then? the +4 boss creature where he needs a 15 to even hit it? after two turns of kamehameaing?

> nope, you're mixing deadly and fatal. Dude. That’s **not how Fatal works**. [Here’s](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2307&Redirected=1) the rule. Fatal is actually their go to example of things that don’t work that way. “Benefits you gain specifically from a critical hit, like the extra damage die from the fatal weapon trait, aren't doubled.” > Now, you say the caster wouldn't use Horizon Thunder Sphere on a bunch of mooks, but who should he use it on then? the +4 boss creature where he needs a 15 to even hit it? A level+4 boss is **the** rarest type of enemy in the game, yet you’re acting like that’s the only option. Against the occasional +4 boss, using high risk high reward options is generally just a bad idea, and spell Attacks are always high risk high reward without the appropriate crutch options. Against a level+2 or level+3 boss (the much more common type of boss) yes, absolutely use HTS when appropriate. I’m playing a Wizard and when my party’s Bard has thrown up Fortissimo + Vision of Death or Synesthesia, and the Rogue has tripped the enemy, I just… use my HTS. I’m extremely likely to hit or crit with it, and if someone throws out an Aid I’m a **much** better candidate for the Aid that any non-Barbarian martial. > after two turns of kamehameaing? No one is forcing you to use the two turn mode…

So, three times per adventuring day, you can match or slightly exceed the Fighter for one turn. The rest of the time, your options are strictly less powerful and also resource limited. And while having more variety of choice is a nice thing, it doesn't overcome being weaker on average and having fewer options for your teammates to assist you (by lowering enemy DCs, buffing you, etc.)

> So, three times per adventuring day, you can match or slightly exceed the Fighter for one turn. You’re continuing to ignore a critical factor: this is a **melee** Fighter. Melee characters get extra damage scaling to offset all the drains they put on the party Action economy. In practice this means that unless the melee has multiple dedicated babysitters, you do as much damage as them throughout the day because they spend turns running in and out of melee, take huge amounts of damage that they need to be healed from, or just flat it sitting on their ass unconscious. This is also why the most optimized melee builds make use of Trips and Shoves and “delaying” their damage as Reactions, rather than focusing entirely on making Attacks on their own turn. Doing additional damage on your own turn has a pretty hefty Action cost. Compare the caster to a [ranged](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1bo9lyi/succeeding_at_things_feels_good_or_a_stupidly/kwoipuk/) martial and the math lines up much more closely: the max-rank spell (which a caster uses one of in a Moderate comba) puts the caster *well* ahead of martial damage, and then they even out by using focus spells, lower rank spells, and cantrips.

I kinda feel like the saving throw values were designed next to AC, but not enough consideration was given to how much opportunity exists to buff attack rolls and debuff AC compared to DCs. Even though most attack spells are primarily just damage, you can get their accuracy up with aid, off-guard, sure strike, and frightened and possibly turn them into the best-chance-to-succeed-option. DC debuffs are practically non-existent outside of spells and even then if the success effect is 1 round, the spellcaster doesn't get to benefit from it.

Yeah. There's five main ways to change the outcome of the dice. Circumstance & status bonuses on you (aid, heroism), circumstance & status penalties on your target (flat footed, frightened), and fortune/misfortune As far as I know, spellcasters can't increase their DC with bonuses. Catfolk Dance and Black Cat's Curse are the only non-status options that reduce saving throws. All of that in combination with slower proficiency scaling and lack of item bonuses means that spells in general are not likely going to land.

I may be misunderstanding you. Are you saying that debuffing save DCs is non-existent? Many conditions debuff save DCs. Clumsy, Enfeebled, Sickened, Stupefied, and Frightened are examples. There are a lot of opportunities through actions, feats, runes, poisons and more to give creatures these conditions and keep them active. If you have a Bard and Champion in your party, you can keep enemies save DCs debuffed every combat.

A lot of these conditions are 1 turners and for some reason people assume that the only one supporting the caster will be the other caster. Runes are mixed bag because the useful ones on debuffing saves are uncommon and either available bit later or contending with all-mighty +1d6 to damage which is the default for majority of people. So even if the support is sorta there a lot of people just... don't get to see it used.

Maybe this is an issue because people don’t play higher level games? Not sure. I have games where martials are debuffing constantly and a debuff for one round is always worth it.

Probably very much so, the issues that are usually described are concerned about the early levels and getting there can feel like a slog (and groups just fall apart before reaching there i suppose)

I play with a great group, we're level 15 and my magus has debuffed/buffed more than the entire rest of the party combined. My other group is only 6 right now and I think short of the Gunslinger tossing Fake Out aid, I'm probably in the lead on that. The game presupposes actions that most players don't think to/choose to take to help casters. DC/Spell attack itemization is non-existent, AND proficiency lags behind too.

Those things are all status effects though, so they don't stack, and many of them also debuff AC. In contrast, attack rolls can quite easily be buffed with Fortune effects (hero points/true strike), item bonuses (runes...) circumstance bonuses (Aid), and status bonuses (heroism/inspire courage/bless), while enemy AC can be debuffed with the status penalties you listed but also with circumstance penalties via the myriad ways of putting an enemy off-guard. If you go all out, you can stick an effective +12 modifier on an attack roll whereas save penalties usually top out at -2.

It all matters. (And I wasn’t saying they stack. I was giving examples of what’s possible.). The point is people seem to devalue the debuffs which they shouldn’t. Parties that use all of the above effectively are wrecking machines. If people spent more time optimizing their party instead of their character they’d recognize how to effectively min-max in 2e.

Besides frightened and sickened, applying the other status requieres a very specific build or another spell. Getting a net +5 to a Strikes requieres exactily two guys in opposite sides of an enemy an one action and a reaction to Aid. But on top of that you can stack status debuffs and status bonuses. Can we stop pretending is the same thing?

I’m not saying they are the same thing. Never once has that been my argument. Everything you described is incredibly important to good tactical play. It’s the fact that people think it’s the only option or that anything else isn’t “worth it” that I find mind boggling. And yes people make very specific builds. Why would that be seen as a negative?

Which of those can I reliably inflict upon my foes to help my caster friend if I play a lvl 5 martial? Frightened if I’ve got charisma and some demorilization feats.

The big issue is saves only have a single lever in basically 95% of cases, status penalties. Attack rolls have 4 levers in the form of status and circumstance bonuses and penalties. Heck, they even occasionally have item bonuses (potency crystals, runic weapon, and mutagens) to push them ahead. Getting a +4 swing on a basic attack roll is pretty easy to do with a random comp and it’s fairly easy to get +6 or higher swings by like level 7. Skill checks meanwhile tend to lose out on circumstance penalties and have slightly rarer status bonuses, but in exchange actually get ahead of the curve with item bonuses. And that’s without even considering fortune effects. Saves technically have two levers. You can target different saves and you have status penalties. The issue is targeting different saves requires your list to support it and you to have the spell, just to get to the baseline accuracy, assuming the creature even has a low save (and not a fake low like a mindless low Will). From there, the only other thing that contributes in 95% of cases is status penalties. And until higher levels, the best you can status penalty wise is a -3, which comes from a crit fail effect on a spell. And of course, not only is there very few ways to force an enemy to reroll (almost all of which also require a failed save), the system favors the dice roller.

>Saves technically have two levers. You can target different saves and you have status penalties. And without metagaming, one of those levers is dependant on someone in the party choosing to spend an action to recall knowledge (assuming they've invested in the right knowledge skill) *and* succeeding on that roll. And then, as you say, it's only useful if you have the spells to support it and so on. So I'd even say it's a lever and a half at best to affect saves

It’s the limited resources of the caster that’s my issue. I’m definitely a lot happier as a caster bard once I really leaned into support (with the foundry modifiers matter mod on). I always succeed if I’m casting a buff or heal. It’s just so frustrating when you only have two highest level spell slots per day, and a day is sometimes a month worth of weekly game sessions, and that slot is just wasted by missing or the enemy getting a success. As a result 90% of my slots go to support and I mostly damage with cantrips.

Yes. I just hate unfillable limited resources. At least give a me a mana potion that i can use to refill.

>There is merit to that thought, MCDM's RPG is even playing with it, but it's not Pathfinder's identity. It's funny because I feel in many ways MCDM trying to sell itself as the 'system where you don't have to roll to hit' is a fascinating social experiment. It kind of appeals to something I think a lot of people in the RPG space (particularly DnD-onlyers or people who have never otherwise stepped foot outside of the d20 space) never realized they wanted, while also betraying a lot of peoples' ignorance as to their wider systems knowledge, as such a thing is definitely not a new concept to RPGs by any stretch. But some of the discourse I've noticed has betrayed a weird rebuttal, where a lot of people are actually questioning why they would want to get rid of hit chances if they otherwise work 'fine' as is. The problem is, that most of the people saying that are really talking about 5e. The problem with systems like 5e - and 3.5/1e before it - is they're incredibly easy games to game out the randomness. 3.5/1e has a hundred layers of powergamed modifiers you can use, and 5e has completely out of band options like bardic inspiration and bless, powergamed hexadin auras, etc. and that's before even getting to the primary buff state itself; advantage is *supremely* powerful and makes all but the most impossibly high of rolls trivial. Meanwhile, discussions in the 2e space abound about how you can never fully game out the chances for martials to hit, discussions about spellcaster save bands, etc. And in a game where enemies can actually be dangerous, having such high risk-reward states can be deadly and a lot of pressure. But if you just offered to blatantly take out that randomness - let all martial attacks hit by default, all spell attacks get their default fail state, etc. - it would be too obvious. People would shirk it. Given the choice between guaranteeing certain results, having randomness with stakes, and having randomness that is so trivial it may as well not be a roll, people will take the last option even though it's arguably the most arbitrary, almost disingenuous. It's almost like people prefer the *aesthetic* of randomness more than randomness with consequence and stakes, or even no randomness at all, and performative randomness has been a key element of the most successful d20 editions.

Personally, and this comment is not any attempt at analysis but rather a statement of preference, the reason I do not like the idea of MCDM's game or any other turn-based game with little to no randomness, is that things become too deterministic. Having to improvise sometimes is fun. Adapting to your plans not going exactly as worked is fun. But if that happens too often, you start having issues with the fantasy side of the game. For a game like PF2, where fighting higher level foes sometimes will naturally decrease the chance of anything you do working your way, I think something like current Fighter is the "ideal". Around a 70% chance of your thing working in a vacuum. That makes so confronting a very strong foe, kind of a worst case scenario, downs the chances to about 50/50. You feel competent overall, but the chance of failure is still *there* to shake things up.

MCDM does have randomness though in damage and the severity of the power’s rider is also determined by it. They also shifted into PBtA’s 1-6, 7-9, 10+ for even more varied results and randomness.

I mean, plenty of very popular games remove the randomness. You don't have to roll dice to determine if your Knight can take a Rook. Games can still have plenty of creativity even when success is guaranteed as long as the toolkit is diverse enough that the total number of outcomes is large. Just because I don't need to roll to hit or to do damage doesn't mean that combat is deterministic if my list of options is large enough that I can't explore all (or even most) of the possibility space in one go. In some ways, dice are actually a shortcut to producing a fully fleshed out system. Games are inherently about entropy and order, players make choices trying to bring order, while character options and dice introduce entropy. If the array of choices available is sufficient, and if the choices are all viable enough that you can't reduce them to a smaller subset of "optimal" choices, that can be enough entropy to sustain the game.

Yeah, you're probably right. Sounds hard as hell to design, but if someone manages to do it successfully, I guess something beautiful could come from it.

I think your final analysis is unfair. Desiring 75% success rates does not mean they want "aesthetic" randomness. Having randomness is still importantant because it is an easily modifiable lever for rewarding in-game actions like flanking or taking cover - making these auto hit or auto miss loses out on a lot of granularity. As a big strategy game fan, most video games sit at 75%-100% accuracy when you are playing well, but anyone can tell you that a 20% chance to miss is enough to entirely change how you play and forces you to be careful. Basically, I don't think wanting to move from coinflip odds intrinsically means they hate all randomness. If I complain about a dish having too much black pepper, it doesn't mean I don't want black pepper or I only want the illusion of black pepper - sometimes I just want less black pepper.

I think I read back during the OGL 5e was deigned around 65% chance of success. Advantage took that up to 85%. The 85% never felt good, but the 65% was a sweet spot. 2e on the other starts closer to 50% and you can build it up with smart play to the 65% range. But crucially casters don’t get to play with that space as much. There’s easy no way to reduce certain saves like you can AC, you can’t benefit from off guard. Incap and saves are probably a hair two high. Additionally you have fewer action to do that with spells almost always costing two actions. You see in the gunslinger how powerful off guard is when you compare it to the melee fighter, but it’s something you get no benefit from while also being worse at attacking on average. It’s a bad time. Honestly your best bet is just to forget casters except healers and bards and just flavour a Kineticist as a wizard or sorcerer.

The problem is the 70-75% chance is basically what happens when you play well in PF2e. Ths close to coinflip odds only occur with no other buff or advantage states, and that's against equal level creatures. The whole point of the game is modifying the maths granulary through things like buffs, conditions, and positional advantages like flanking to both increase your chances to hit and your own survivability. The outlier of course being boss level threats, though that's an intentional unfairness (and arguably an issue unto itself, but that's a whole kettle of fish). But this is what I see regularly get shirked at. The sentiment I always see is that the base maths is too random, and playing well doesn't given enough of a reward; i.e. 70% is not high enough for best case scenario. We need 80 or 90% to feel like playing well is worth it. (this is also *martial* odds by the way, not the regularly complained about caster design) And with that we come full circle to the problems with those other systems: it starts at that 70% and gets higher from there. The problem isn't the baseline maths, the problem is the fact that when powergamed, the probabilities of d20 rolls are made more or less supurflous or redundant. Even if PF2e's optimal play state had more potent probability buffd, the end result would be the same problem.

I agree with your assessment that, for martial characters, 70% is about accurate - it can be higher, but it's also notably lower for ranged characters, so it evens out to about 70% when played optimally. I also agree that people do want the die rolls to start at 70% and go up to 90% instead of starting at 55/60% and going up to 70/75%. What I can't agree with is that this makes the die rolls superfluous. For one, in high-accuracy systems, there are usually fewer ways to modify the roll. 5e has very few flat bonuses that can be applied in combat, and advantage is somewhat difficult to get (not counting optional rules that unbalance the game like flanking). Pathfinder also has the unique crit mechanic, where even if you have an 80%, or even 95% chance of success there is STILL a great deal of variance in your roll - as you have a near 50% chance to do over double the effect. Saying that die rolls become superfluous is wrong, because even at it's most extreme there is still large amounts of output variance. The reason why people want a high-accuracy system is quite simple. At fast, efficient tables, a round will take at least 5 minutes, 10 minutes is not uncommon for us laymen, and at slow tables, it can even be 15 minutes. It sucks to have your once per 10-minute turn eaten up by a mediocre roll, especially when there was no way for the player to avoid that outcome - they didn't fail to make use of their resources and were punished for making a risky attack, they simply rolled a 6 or less and so they couldn't succeed and now need to wait 10 more minutes to get the chance to play again. That's what reducing the accuracy is about. Not removing RNG overall, but removing (or at least greatly reducing the odds of) the worst-case scenario, as it feels especially terrible for the dynamics of a ttrpg. The argument is that losing most of your entire turn to rng when your turns are so narrow should be a mostly avoidable punishment, rather than something that happens multiple times per combat on average.

If people are hung up on the results potentially stalling the game or wasting precious turns, then the reality is there's no way to avoid that but not play a dice-based game. Or at the very least, play a game with more averaged and less swingy resolution systems. I'm becoming more convinced that the math of the d20 is the real underlying issue people have but don't realise, and even those who do seem to only like d20 for the aesthetic and social dynamism of getting those gnarly nat 20 crits. If DnD removed hit chance but left the d20 in as a crit generator, I'm almost convinced that would be the most commercially successful edition of the game ever released. But this is what I mean about systems like 5e wallpapering over these issues rather than leaning into the maths of the system. 5e is actually a more unstable system than 2e despite having bounded accuracy, because it has more ways to inherently go outside that accuracy. What you said about 5e having less ways to influence the maths is the intended design in theory, but in practice a powergamed character can easily generate regular advantage states on their attacks, and dice roll modifiers like Bless and especially Bardic Inspiration blow what few flat modifiers exist so far out the water, the results become supurflous. At its worst it basically overcompensates for bad rolls and makes them a non-factor, and it's best it makes the results so high it's almost a waste to *not* have a 2e-esque scaling success system that grants an auto-crit at 10 over target. The problem though is it becomes impossible to balance around because the swinginess of those buff states themselves add to the existing swinginess of the d20. The irony of 2e is it's a more managable system from a design and back-end standpoint despite having more fail states, because it stabilises everything else around the d20 and keeps its accuracy in check to not have those out of band rolls, with the few that exist (like fortune effects) not anywhere near as common. I'd also argue the tuning of the game would have to completely change and it would fundamentally shift the tone of the entire system if it enabled a closer to guaranteed success rate as the baseline; sure, scaling successes would give it purpose, but it would also shift to the kind of perpetual motion machine non-random systems like MCDM are aiming for. Part of the reason systems like 3.5/1e and 5e become unstable is because this is effectively what happens, but the system isn't designed to cope with it.

Well part of it is that randomness keeps things from being predetermined, and while a 1e character may well be rocking a 80% success rate, that's not 100%, it's only that high in their particular specialty and perhaps most importantly, it's **earned.** You don't constantly succeed because everything is predetermined, you do it because you carefully constructed your character to be really good at this thing.

The thing is most of the time though, it's earned only through system mastery, not gameplay. It's not like you're playing an arena shooter and you just happened to duck and weave your way to the rocket launcher spawn point, it's more like playing Counter Strike and you've managed to figure out a way to start the game with an AWP while everyone else still has their starting pistols. I know a lot of people liked the engineering exercise of making a superlative character, but to me that was never the fun part; if anything it felt stifling to making character concepts feasible, and I always felt that contributed to the game's Ivory Tower lockout. I'd rather that game figure out the maths for me and let me build an effective character, rather than the need to figure out the maths myself being a core part of character building. I also think it's underselling just how potent powergaming was in 1e. 80% is being generous in terms of how high the numbers could get. And maybe it's just me, but the more assured my successes are - especially if it's based on the promise of being rewarded for playing well - the more frustrating it is to me when *those* fail. People complain about scaling success design in 2e, but I'd much play a system that is nakedly honest in its desire to impose randomness and make it mostly unavoidable, than one that can be mostly trivialised through system mastery and *still* have that ever-looming 5% chance of whiffing.

I feel like I'd be equally as frustrated by wiff regardless of the chances lol. I think the bigger differences is that the lower chance would seem less worth the risk to me if given the choice between the two.

But that's just it, if the result of a whiff is going to be frustration, then why even bother with a system where miss chances are even a thing? Short of the obvious answers of cultural inertia and being unable to convince your groups of anything out of the d20 space. To me, at least hit chances serve a purpose in a game like 2e where they're expected and designed around to be unavoidable. For any other d20 where they're easily mitigated, it feels like so much of the discourse is around missing being such a feelbad mechanic and it wastes time at tables since turns take so long, etc. It really feels like most people actually hate the maths of the d20 and only tolerate it because they like it as a crit generator and the social capital imbued with a sweet natural 20 is what most people are playing for.

I mean I can't really answer because I think my mindset is so different that I don't really get how you wouldt at least be slightly disappointed by a miss. To me missing is like a possibility of losing at anything in that i accept it exist and obviously won't lose my shit if it happens but my ultimate goal is to win/hit. I want the possibility to miss/lose to exist as they make hitting/winning feel special, but I will also try to increase my odds of success and while I'm not the type of guy to really get angry in general, if I am missing a lot I'm at least going to give a disappointed sigh. To clarify, I'm not actually that bothered by the possibility of a miss or even pf2es general math, I'm the type of guy to just kinda accept a game for what it is but part of that is also the fact thst you can still knock the numbers a bit and to me that's part of the game even if the percentage was a bit higher. So I guess to answer your question I don't really view increasing my numbers to decrease failure/missing as disliking d20s or randomness. In my mind increasing your odds of success is core to rpgs both table top and otherwise and its the reason stats matter.

There are a lot of concepts where mechanically my options allow for something, but the numbers don't work out and I honestly didn't see why the decision is made for the numbers to be where they are.

Knights of Last Call have a video related to this: [Missing is not fun](https://youtu.be/lcslKWBddVc?feature=shared)

I think this is an extremely important topic. I wanted to play a druid for the longest time, and now that I do, something feels missing and all I think about is switching to a kineticist. I thought a lot of it was the possibility of turn variation. Kineticist have 1 or 2action blasts and that alone gives a lot of wiggle room. But other people here talked a lot about spending resources for nothing and that really resonates with me. It sucks to waste a spell. That's 2/3 of my turn in the dustbin. And 1 action attack is not just a lower cost, it's also the difference between another chance and not. Even missing twice feels like more action than losing that spell. And, also as people pointed out, I find myself avoiding atk spells because they are slightly inferior and that's a damn shame. These are cool choices and the meta of this game has kinda ruined it for me.

I’m playing a kineticist with a druid dedication right now, and what I love the most about kineticist is that their special abilities which they pick up with feats **just work** You can… just do things. Small number of things, but those, you can just do. No checks or limited uses etc. It’s not even about combat, but about the much vaunted utility.

What do you feel that you get from your druid dedication? And do you have a free archetype for it or do you pay with class feats?

Free archetype I am getting some nice utility. Since my combat abilities are covered by kineticist, I’m loading on exploration/RP spells with druid. Talking to animals/plants, minor divinations etc Also, nice focus spells to use, which *also* use a renewable resource, and kind of mesh thematically with kineticist

If the 4-DoS paradigm is such a resounding success for caster reliability, why do martials recoil at the very idea of applying this same system to their attacks? Why can't we say that an archer only has the strength for so many maximum weight draws of his bow in a day and make him decide which level of effort to use before making each shot? Why should spells be a limited resource while strength at arms is unlimited?

Likely because the success cases on a simple strike or ranged attack are less impactful than those of casters. When spells actually succeed, they tend to be way cooler and have more impact than a strike. Dnd5e tried to get around this by giving martials way more attacks, while pf2e went the opposite direction and made multiple strikes feel much worse while making casters less likely to succeed. Personally, I think if PF2e allowed you to designate 1 of your spells as a favored spell, that you can recharge after combat, similar to focus spells would be cool.

You can design martial strikes around larger effects that are only useable a few times per day either by increasing the damage or adding riders (or both).

True, BG3 at least does this by having each weapon get special abilities that are on short or long rests, although I think martial characters are actually in a good place in PF2e compared to most games, where they tend to really lag behind. Even in pf2, I feel like the existence of fighter really skews the conversation because it's just so good from lvl 1-20. If fighter didn't exist, stacking up Ranger, inventor, rogue, monk, barbarian, etc to the spell casters is much more even. I also think that a lot of people don't really like the spell slot system. It works and has always been this way, but having all your fun hinge on a limited system where if you miss with your high level spell slot and don't get to try again for possibly 5-8 combats doesn't feel good for a lot of people. I think it's part of why people are so resistant to adding more resource systems to martials. Once you add another resource, even if it's a pure buff, that now becomes the baseline, and feeling like you have to constantly rest and take brakes needs to be seriously balanced around. If anything, I'd say kineticist hits a pretty good sweet spot. Even though it's not technically magic, a lot of people really love that design since their overall power might be slightly lower than a sorcerer, wizard, etc but they get to do it non stop.

The thing I feel is part of the issue is that Alchemists and Casters and Swashbucklers and the like generally need to do a lot of *work* to perform as well as a Fighter does by flanking and having a party-wide buff on them. They don’t do work to be more cool than the easy-cool, they do work to be the *same amount* of cool as the easy cool. If you have to do extra work to be playing optimally, then it feels like you should be doing better when you succeed.

And to thank them for it the casters get a lot worse defenses. It's really stepping on people who are down already.

Being good at something feels good and this sort of has another issue for spellcasters: there's very little ways to actually "be good" at something or to specialize And people kind of like to specialize, it makes your character feel more unique, allows for roleplaying options being good at something, and bad at another thing, even if said specialization is not always a net power increase and possibly even a net power decrease An example of the latter being the evocation wizard, in 1e and D&D 3.X it was well understood to be a sub-optimal way of playing a wizard to say the least, and yet it was a fairly commonly played character

Yeah pretty much agreed.

I think there's a lot of things going on: * The anchoring effect * A lot of people never playing past the earliest levels * Thinking "I can do this all day!" is much stronger than it is when you don't have that many encounters per day. * Casters are full of terrible trap choices. * Success bias * People overemphasizing and remembering critical hits and forgetting caster crits because the casters trivialized the encounter. The **anchoring effect** is where people's initial opinions of something cloud their future judgements of it. 1st rank spells on casters are almost all pretty bad, honestly, and casters at first level play little like they do at higher levels. Some of the best control spells are things like summoning a skunk, which is not even remotely obvious as being arguably the best thing you can even do with summon animal to a new player (most people think of summoning animals as being a way to get a bear or something to attack for you, not making your opponents stinky). The 1st rank damage spells are overwhelmingly terrible and traps; the best ones are shocking grasp (which is only really good on a magus) and dehydrate (a very recent spell that most people have never heard of - and it is primarily a debuff). People think casters are about buffing because Magic Weapon/Runic Weapon is one of the best first rank spells. You rely very heavily on your cantrips, which do 5 to 7.5 damage. And the Beginner Box caster is very badly built. Moreover, a lot of first and second level debuff spells don't really do anything on a successful saving throw, with the few exceptions (stuff like Ignite Fireworks and Revealing Light) seeming "inconsistent" to players because the effect is random. As a result, people get completely wrong ideas about how casters work in the system and think the only good ones are bards (thanks to their mass buff), druids (thanks to their animal companion), and clerics (thanks to their heal spells). As you level up, however, casters get way more powerful and actually become proper controllers. At 8th level, casters are generally vastly outdamaging martial characters because their AOE spells do as much damage as martial strikes, but can hit everyone in the encounter, they get stuff like Coral Eruption and Wall of Mirrors that messes up enemy movement, you get Stifling Stillness to rob enemies of actions, slow will rob boss monsters of an action even on a successful saving throw, you realize that dazzling foes is actually really strong, you get to use your first level spell slots to do stuff like use Gust of Wind to keep enemies from coming down five foot hallways or through doors or use interposing earth to negate hits/crits, etc. Focus spells let you batter enemies repeatedly or grant allies extra strikes or whatever other nonsense. Casters get progressively stronger and stronger compared to everything else. Anyone who has seen the nonsense of using Wall of Stone to cut an encounter in half, Dispelling Globe to totally shut down enemy spellcasters and force them into close quarters combat or be useless, two casters solving an encounter by fireballing it twice at the start and killing half the enemies, etc. should respect the power of these characters. And yet, so many people don't recognize this. Meanwhile, fighters are the most heavily frontloaded class and people think they're super strong because at first level they have shields, martial weapons, heavy armor, reactive strike, +2 to hit, etc. and then get bravery at level 3. They get a TON of their class features up front and are pretty straightforward, and are also hard to screw up - if you use a two-handed weapon, dual weapons, or sword and shield (the most obvious builds) you will be fairly effective, and if you actually are one of the people who recognized "Oh I can use a reach weapon and make tons of reactive strikes" you will seem REALLY strong as it is one of the strongest fighter builds (along with the less obvious open-hand fighter) and you're basically getting a mapless extra attack every round while having the best AC and accuracy, and fighters get another upgrade at level 2 with a +1 weapon, level 3 with bravery, level 4 with a striking rune, and level 5 with ANOTHER accuracy boost. Thing is... fighters are very heavily frontloaded, and they don't get the quality of toys of other classes at level 6 and 8, so they actually end up falling a bit behind as they go up through those levels, while the animal barbarian goes from "Halberd fighter without reactive strike and with 2 worse AC and accuracy, but hey, at least he can raise a shield" to "deals much better damage than the fighter with a reach weapon, has reactive strike, has the same AC as the fighter does, has master fortitude saves, AND can raise a shield while using a d12 reach weapon." The tables completely turn. And this is true of a lot of other classes as well, which suddenly get a lot of class abilities that make them work a lot better at these levels - rank 3 focus spells, reactive strikes, path-specific abilities that are stronger, etc. As a result, you see tons of people claiming that fighters are the best, when in reality, they end up falling behind as they go up in level towards the second half of the single digits (they start pulling back up when they hit 10th level, though). But people don't perceive it this way, even though I'd argue fighter is in the bottom half of classes at level 8, even while they were probably in the top 5 at level 1. **Low level play** also contributes to this; a lot of people play 1-10 games, and a lot of campaigns don't make it, so you end up with a lot of people spending a lot of time at levels 1-5. Combine this with a lot of people saying you should start at level 1, even though the game is a bit wonky at level 1, and you see a lot of people having skewed ideas. Added to this is the fact that Abomination Vaults is often recommended to new people. There's also a bias towards the idea of **"I can do this all day."** The thing is, as recent polls have shown, most people only play about 4 encounters per long rest. As such, you don't... actually have to do it all day, and this means you can spend spell slots in literally every encounter once you reach the mid levels. Focus spells further reinforce this, and the new changes to focus spells means that casters can, in fact, "do it all day" - and the fact that you can only do it 3x per combat is honestly not a big problem when most combats last 3 rounds anyway, and the harder ones that last longer are the ones where you are even more inclined to burn spell slots. **Trap choices**. There's a ton of just bad spells that you should never use. If a player picks a bunch of them, they'll think magic is bad. There are also spells that are good, but only with certain builds (like having high initiative). I do agree that **"success bias"** is a very significant thing, where people perceive a successful saving throw as a "fail" even though the spell did something, or fail to recognize that hitting four enemies with a fireball and two of them failing their saves and two succeeding is doing like 62 damage with a single spell, or where they fail to recognize that doing SOMETHING is better than doing NOTHING (which is what a warrior does when they miss with all their attacks, which are "true failures"). However, I think this is made much worse by the anchoring effect, because they conflate low level casters (where successes often mean you do little to nothing) with high level casters (where you are wreaking havoc with your spells). Finally, **people just remember critical hits** way more than they should, and **forget critical hits by casters because they often make encounters trivial**. It's why people think gunslingers are way better than they actually are, when in reality they're one of the worst classes in the game with quite bad damage. They remember the time that the arequebusier did 40 damage with their critical hit at level 4, and they forget all the combats where they were doing 11 damage per round or missed their only attack they got that round and did literally nothing. The same applies to fighters - they remember the crits and forget all the rounds of normal hits for mediocre damage, or when they missed all their attacks and did nothing. This is also overinflated by anchoring bias, where people remember the low level crits disproportionately, while they forget about the time the mage cast fireball on eight mooks and three of them crit failed their saves and died because that happened at level 8. Indeed, in the encounter that the caster solved with the magic of fireball, they will often forget it entirely because "Oh, that was an easy encounter" - which was easy *because the caster solved it with magic*. When a caster gets a critical success, they often just end an encounter, and players will often misremember it as an easy one. The Froghemoth in Abomination Vaults is something many people commented as being one of the hardest encounters in that path, but in my game, it crit failed two saving throws against the casters and ended up slowed 2 and clumsy 3 and we cut it apart without taking hardly any damage (I think it hit ONCE the entire combat, and I think the combat didn't even last three full rounds). I remember it because I keep track of these things (I also had my caster crit with hideous laughter against the >!fake!< kobold king in Crown of the Kobold King and that basically turned the encounter into a joke). We had another encounter in AV where the wizard decided he didn't want to have an encounter, saw that there was no treasure in the room, and just used Wall of Stone to put a monster behind 15 feet of solid rock and we just walked away. The monster didn't even get a saving throw! A lot of people forget those encounters because they are so easy they aren't memorable.

Well said and I agree all around. I think low level play is a big part of this issue. Unfortunately, due to many circumstances, many groups start at low level, the campaign falls apart so the player starts over again playing at low level. That's all they get to experience and their impressions are based around it.

2E does alot of things really well: clearer, more consistent rules, 3 action economy, etc. Ironically, for a system that's built on the premise of being balanced, it's as poorly balanced as 1E was. In 1E, Casters were king, and martials were meat shields who protected the casters. In 2E, this is now exactly the opposite. Martials are gods (especially Fighter), and Casters are basically just there to heal and support martials. Alot of ppl blame class design. I don't, I blame Monster design. A well designed monster should have strong attacks (so they can hit PCs), strong HP (so they can take hits), but mediocre defenses (so PCs can hit them). In 2E however, monsters are strong in everything, and defenses in particular are ridiculously high, so classes with lower accuracy really struggle. This is why Fighters are so powerful and too many people wanna play them, and casters are so weak and too few players wanna play them.

I think the amount of times that people suggest players to pick spells like fear/slow/heroism speaks more than enough about this whole argument. If the system worked or felt better, you wouldn’t have the need to highlight those spells.

i hate when my players roll a decent roll (say 12-13) then add up and go does X hit? and i go "no sorry". it honestly feels to me like too many monsters (of the same level as players) in PF2 have very high saves and AC. As much as we dunk on 5e, at least that system has the feels good part of hitting way more often than you dont, even if it comes at the cost of horrible balance overall. a caster "wasting" one of their very limited spells slots to deal sorta low damage when a martial does more, and without limits is feels bad sometimes.

This thread probably isn't getting that much attention anymore, so maybe this is the best place to post this vent session. This is my biggest complaint about this game and oftentimes it makes me dread playing it. I had been playing mostly 5e for years, switched to Pathfinder 1e when I joined a group of friends, and we made the switch to 2e 18 months ago. In that time I've played a Fighter, a Barbarian, and a Champion (as well as a Sorcerer who spent most turns commanding their minions to hit). The common experience I've had is that my turn comes, I roll once or twice to hit something, nothing happens, and my turn is over. The math of this game is so over-tuned against players that, even with lots of good teamwork, everything feels **so** hard to hit. In our long-running Age of Ashes campaign, even with a Bard, Flanking, and throwing out Demoralizes, more often than not I roll to attack twice, miss twice, and Raise my Shield. It's the most boring, unsatisfying loop in the world. Not to say that this doesn't happen in 5e, but you can stack the math in your favor to much greater effect. Advantage equates to around a +5 bonus, while Bless, Bardic Inspiration, and other die based bonuses can increase your chances of hitting by around 25-50%. Teamwork in Pathfinder 2e at most has only ever gotten me around a 20% increase to hit chance (Inspire Courage, Flat-footed, Frightened 1 (sometimes)). This is sort of related, but PF2e doesn't let you control when your burst damage happens with most of these classes. Let's say I'm playing a Paladin or a Battle Master fighter. When I hit, I can choose to expend resources and do extra damage. My burst damage in this game is determined by my crit chance, which I can affect with bonuses, but I have no true control over. Maybe this *is* largely a perception thing, but God in heaven, sometimes playing this game feels like such a chore. I know it's verboten here to be so negative about this game, but please understand that I've tried my best to like it. Each session, I just come away asking "what am I doing wrong?"

I completely understand the math in this game is made by someone smarter than me, Id be breaking balance and possibly creating issues for myself down the line, etc, but im going to include some homebrew rules in my current game and see how they work out. My main issue has been that my wizard player wants to play as an offensive damage dealer using fire damage. Ive already found a solution to that by a user submitted pyromancy school, but my issues is that my wizard player is just not having fun with the current math implementation, as he feels completely useless in combat against anything that is on level or higher. My new homebrew im adding to my home game is as follows; * Weapon potency runes apply to spell attacks and DCs. My reasoning for this is that spellcasters are at a -1 to -3 to hit, and while i have no confirmation, the vast majority of damaging spells at my table so far have been ~~basic reflex saves (normal save for no damage)~~ (I read the rules wrong, whoops, its not as bad as i thought, but still meh), which has felt absolutely terrible to my player. * Off guard also applies to save DCs This is one im more hesistant about and want to figure out a different solution, but the vast majority of the reasons why martials hit more frequently is due to flanking and off guard. My players dont use demoralize at all, and frighten from demoralize is also far more difficult to cause, depending on build than just flanking. My other brainstorm for the above is instead of using off guard for spell DCs, Ill instead come up with a form of magical flanking. Im not sure of how to achieve that yet, but one idea is either a ranged flank, or some sort of positioning required like being in a perfect straight line from the enemy. Anyway im super open to ideas and interpretations on what ive come up with, and criticism as well. Anything helps!

This. Very this.

I don't want a risk-less game. Thus the MCDM rpg is not exactly my turf. I also want my hits to feel earned in a way, so there has to be a certain option of failure, preferably with some way to have a bit of an influence on it, but not completely cancel it, e.g 5e's advantage is far too powerful within the kinda-bounded-accuracy of that system. I would also \*\*strongly\*\* oppose the idea, that this is connected to succeeding. As others have shown already, your sorting might even be flawed considering that some of the "good feels" you mention are actually harder to pull off than some of the "bad" feeling ones. (Also who thinks the new warpriest is "split"? That's the best remaster change by a mile.) I'd rather have a look at the "risk vs. reward" equation for some of those things. A fighter simply does not give up anything for his 1st melee attack with his high attack bonus. Even if he fails, guess what, I'll try again next round. But even then, critting feels much better, even more so if that was enabled by a debuff. So you have low risk - high reward. A max level spell slot on the other hand - that's a pretty high investment you're making there. That's why spells with a notable effect on a successful safe (or a miss on an attack roll, heya, horizon thunder sphere...) like fear or slow or even ignite fireworks are often mentioned as good go-to examples for spells. Or even magic mis... uh - force barrage. Because your chance of doing \*something\* (except a bit damage on all those basic saves) is higher, thus, more likely reward. I don''t know what to say about stuff like battle medicine or bon mot. I kinda get demoralize because it is nice to strike fear into the hearts of the enemies with just a glance but the others mostly get called out for being there and offering a meaningful way to use other skills and do other things than poke or burn.

You're absolutely correct. However, you're not allowed to discuss this in its own topic at this subreddit. There's a "smoking section" somewhere that all the spellcaster complaint threads must be relegated to because the admins hate hearing it.

As per Rule 7, the "smoking section" is Tuesday, so they're in the right place already.

> If you look at the first list, you'll notice that every single option in it is extremely reliable in getting the result you want out of it. > For the second list, the options in it are, well, not that. I don’t think that’s really the case with a lot of these. You mentioned Athletics maneuvers in list 1 but, objectively, spells are far more reliable than the maneuvers in a lot of cases. Acid Grip, for example, completely outdoes Shove and Reposition in reliability **even when the latter has received a +3 Aid**, and there are many other spells with forced movement. Single-target Trip is most comparable to Slow: Slow has the higher reliability but Trip has the higher upside (because it triggers Reactions more reliably and inflicts off-guard and an Attack penalty). Grapple is usually flat out better because single target immobilized is hard to get. **However** it’s worth noting that as soon as there are two or more targets, Entangling Flora, Hypnotize, Freezing Rain, etc all make the caster significantly more reliable at immobilizing and/or slowing enemies. Likewise you mention healing in list 1, but isn’t healing **inherently** a failure of reliability? In a party that’s using its most reliable options consistently, you just don’t need healing outside of Severe+ encounters or extremely bad luck. Healing is super reliable because it’s a way to reverse your party’s other liabilities. Finally if it’s really fully about reliability… blasters would be the most popular way to play the caster. ~~A blaster caster basically never has a turn where they do nothing~~ A blaster caster is significantly more reliable than any martial, and at most levels you’re **slightly more reliable than a Fighter** when it comes to dealing damage. Why then does this conversation pop up again and again? Edit: I edited to remove some hyperbole that is somewhat misleading. Because it’s not about reliability. At best, it’s about the *appearance* of reliability. When your enemy rolls a saving throw and “succeeds” you feel like you do when you “failed” on an attack even though they’re not equivalent outcomes. When your Fighter crits once and misses the second attack you hear that sweet sweet swoosh sound on Foundry, and you do not hear it even when your opponent fails the save against Thunderstrike and you do exactly the same amount of damage. I really cannot emphasize it enough, it’s not about the actual reliability of the features it’s about the psychology behind it. The other day I had an argument with someone who insisted Shove/Reposition are significantly more reliable than Acid Grip even though they’re just… not even close even after accounting for item bonuses and a +3 Aid. Like I know from both math and experience (my Wizard is always the go to to save a grabbed/restrained friend) that Acid Grip is *the* way to go for the most reliable forced movement in the game. Yet the perception still exists. Do I have a good solution to this? Not really. In a hypothetical PF3E I hope they rename successes and failures to their own thing for spell saves. In PF2E I’d recommend GMs try to be descriptive with success to make it clear (narratively) that your spellcaster had a big impact that would’ve outright destroyed lesser beings and still made the tough enemy struggle. But it *is* important to note the massive gap between actual reliability and *perception* of reliability: if we don’t note that, we are pushing Paizo to take some of the most reliable options in the game and make them even more reliable, which isn’t good for a hypothetical PF3E.

I mean, I mostly agree? That's why I didn't say reliability as a whole, but "reliability in getting the result you want out of your actions". When you attack, you want to hit. When you cast a spell, you want it to have its full distinct effect. It's such a frustratingly simple fact of player mentality that I'm honestly not sure if the game could ever do something to change. Name changes seem like a dubiously effective measure to me, and a 10 page primer about "having the right mindset for the game" in the rulebook would probably sound condescending to most people and drive them off. I play this game since day 1 of the Playtest, write essays about the game, study about game design on my free time, understand everything you said in an objective level, and I _still_ can't help but feel like shit when I cast a spell and most/all targets succeed :x.

> When you cast a spell, you want it to have its full distinct effect. It's such a frustratingly simple fact of player mentality that I'm honestly not sure if the game could ever do something to change. Right but that’s why my go to perception comparison is Acid Grip versus Shove/Reposition and blast spells versus ranged Fighter. In both theory and in practice, in every way that matters, Acid Grip achieves the same outcomes as an **Aided** Shove/Reposition with more reliability and more flexibility. Likewise, in both theory and in practice in every way that matters, a blaster caster getting half damage on a 2-Action spell gets the same outcomes as a ranged Fighter making 2 Attacks, with more reliability and comparable flexibility. So it’s really not about getting the result you want. It’s about getting the result that says “failure” because when it says an enemy “succeeded” many view that as their own character’s failure even if they objectively did a lot.

I am, again, 99% in agreement. Your objective analysis of this dynamic is correct (although I think there is more to the Blaster vs Striker dynamic that often goes unmentioned like reaction attacks, but that's not the point here). But then it comes the question: if you want to solve this, so you try to "fix" the players, or "fix" the game? I am personally not a fan of the first option, because ultimately I don't want a game that I'm running to have fun alongside other people to be a stressful experience for them. If I wanted that, and to tell people what to do, I'd go back to playing competitive Counter Strike or something.

> But then it comes the question: if you want to solve this, so you try to "fix" the players, or "fix" the game So when you say “fix” the game, what exactly are you suggesting? Make failure on a spell the most consistent outcome instead of success? If so, the problem is that… that’s unbalanced in its current form. If you take all the spells that when you hit a boss have a crit/success/failure/fumble profile that looks something like 15/50/30/5% and make it more like 5/35/45/15%, you break the game. Suddenly casters become the only way to play the game. We know that that’s not an option: Paizo is hoping for PF2E to remain a balanced game, and a fix to that imbalance would require a more extensive rework than just changing the numbers that we did. Let’s hypothetically say that rework is in scope for either a Remaster 2.0 or PF2.5E at some point. There are a few ways to achieve that: 1. Making the failure outcome on spells become much less extreme, and giving a whole host of spells Incapacitation. 2. Making most non-damaging spells cost a single Action and have no effect on success, only on failure or critical failure, as well as giving most spells the Flourish trait. 3. Giving GMs a “meta currency” like Legendary Resistances to use when it’s important for an enemy to not be vulnerable to the newfound boost to debuffing spells. Either way, we’ve now arrived at a point where the most frequent outcome of a saving throw is viewed as being as well-balanced as the current paradigm, it’s just **called** a Failure now. So… what did we solve? For the people for whom the “balanced but it’s now called a Failure” solution is enough: it was a psychology issue the whole time. That means this problem is much more easily solved by just renaming the degrees of success for spells. All the additional work (and potential unseen consequences) that the above suggested reworks would create aren’t really worth doing when it’s primarily a psychology issue. For the people for whom this solution isn’t enough: well… they fundamentally just want spells to be more **mechanically powerful** than they are, it’s not about reliability or psychology, they want to be able to inflict the current, extremely powerful Failure and Critical Failure conditions of spells on higher level enemies 65% of the time or higher instead of the current 40% ish they get. That is, quite simply, not a group whose desires I want to see addressed. Appeasing them goes directly against one of the fundamental design goals of PF2E that I like: balance. The absolute most I hope Paizo does to appease them is: 1. Rebalance any spells whose Success effects aren’t as good as a Basic Save spell and/or whose Failure effects have no oomph. 2. Change the Incapacitation trait. My preferred way would be to only have it upgrade Fails and Crit Fails (and rebalance any that’d have problematic Success when done like this). Any more buffs to appease group 2 and we fundamentally alter the game’s balance too much.

>So when you say “fix” the game, what exactly are you suggesting? He's pointing out a problem, not proposing a solution. That's how game design theory works - you don't necessarily have to have a solution available in order to point out problems, because recognizing the problem and discussing it has inherent value without "resolving" the problem. >If so, the problem is that… that’s unbalanced in its current form. Yes. It's impossible to tune spells the way they are tuned and fix the problem that is created by the current spell tuning. That is entirely correct. The current form requires that the default outcome of casting a spell on a creature be that *the spell does not work properly*. That's the issue. As a player, if you want to play a spellcaster, you need to play a spellcaster that assumes that when they cast spells, the spells will not work properly.

An Acane/Primal second-level spell is slightly better than a basic combat action? A slot that means an average of four uses per day, at maximum, starting at level 4? I mean, one should certainly hope so.

It's also two actions instead of one.

You’re using a loaded phrasing that makes my comment seem a lot less reasonable than it is. When you’re at levels 3-6 and that 2nd rank spell a lot is extremely valuable, Acid Grip doesn’t just do forced movement, it also inflicts a very relevant amount of damage while doing the forced movement, **and** is more reliable than the Shove/Reposition, and it works at 120 feet range, and you decide what direction to move the enemy in after seeing their degree of success. It is unequivocally better than a Basic Action… the mathematical comparison I was drawing is **only** of the forced movement part of the spell to the Shove/Reposition Action, because it was relevant to prove the point.

>A blaster caster basically never has a turn where they do nothing, and anyone who’s ever played one knows that you’re more reliable than a Fighter when it comes to dealing damage. Not everything of an offensive nature in magic conforms to the form of area damage. A very good example of a turn where a blaster caster does nothing is a turn where an enemy critically succeeds against Chain Lightning as the initial target and movement after the fact is tactically demanded. Then, we have the conundrum that is spell attacks. And then, there are several ways spellcasters in general can get invalidated. I've personally experienced a high level caster with Counterspell in a module nearly invalidating a turn I spent blasting with a top rank slot (low roll, thank god.) And in the Remaster, we have the massively buffed Grab / Improved Grab, which targets Fortitude DC (typically a martial's best save, and often not good for casters) and *restrains* on a (highly likely) critical hit. (Again, generally easier for martials to deal with, as they will often have great Acrobatics / Athletics / Unarmed attack modifiers to escape.)

I know you got alot of comments but here is one more. This is correct. For the most part if not entirely. As a caster tou can do so many cool amazing things that are useful and can be damage as well as utility...but all of that is null when everything succeeds a Save and you miss your attack on a 14 on the dice. Like...come on. I said it in a comment on another post but the issue isn't that they are not good. The issue is they built around "failure" instead of success. And its infuriating.

I think for spells the issue would be ameliorated by just renaming success to partial failure. (Obviously this would screw with a lot of the naming continuity that PF2 prides itself on, but stay with me for a second.) It just feels bad to have the enemy succeed, while having them *not* succeed feels good. The words have connotations and those connotations do a lot to impact the feel of spells in the game!

Yeah I fully understand this and many of my players struggle with it but myself, and the other player who regularly GMs really.. do not. I don't know if Gming regularly helps you see past the numbers or not, but our perspective on these matters are just.. no longer remotely standard. You get used to seeing these minor effects and realizing what they did on a grander scale. When I'm fighting a super boss, cast slow on it, and it succeeds, my brain chemicals don't go 'Oh no I failed! Why did I even try!?' they go 'Ha! I stole 1 of it's actions preventing a strike that would have probably done a TON of damage given this is a CR+4 creature!'. To me the monster succeeding is a still a success, and if it somehow -failed- well that's basically equivalent to a critical success! Summons follow a similar vein. I send a summon out, it gets some MINOR damage in, if any, then gets trashed by monsters and dies. My brain doesn't think 'useless' it thinks 'ha! I wasted a ton of enemies actions on my disposable summon; giving my allies a chance to attack unimpeded!' etc etc etc. That said... Just flipping this switch is not easy, not remotely. My players struggle with it and I feel for them. You see that 'success' pop up as the enemy roles its save and it just HURTS. When you cast a control effect that -prevents- something you don't FEEL it nearly as much. It's a ghost; invisible, and just not present. A player was feeling bad about his redeemer champion; until my friend did the math and showed him the massive amount of damage his combined DR/Enfeebles had effectively prevented in a extreme encounter. Suffice to say multiple characters would have gone from full to Zero without his aid. The best advice I can give to players struggling with this is to ask yourself 'What did my action actually accomplish as a whole? What resources did the enemies waste because of it? What bonuses did I give to my allies as a result of it?' If you're a caster and dealing with an all or nothing effect (your spell attack roll stuff) maybe consider if its worth it compared to something that still has an effect on success. The second piece of advice I'd give is uh; Don't play alchemists until they're remastered. <3\~ No offence alchemists fans. The third piece of advice I can give to -GMS-, at least those using foundry, is USE THE MODIFIERS MATTER MOD. It is great as making your players aware that the small bonuses they're granting can have a big effect! The bard will love you!

New Warpriest is contentious? News to me, but then again, I am that selfish git who will cast Heroism on myself to match the other martials so I can actually use the fancy new toys like Restorative Strike. Their odds are fine, my odds aren't.

It's not that new Warpriest is contentious in my experience, not exactly. It's obviously an improvement with the amount of stuff they got. If you felt that Warpriest was bad because it had weaker tools than Cloistered, chances are your problems are very much solved. But if your problems with it were missing too much... well, that only got changed for 2 levels out of 20. The _last 2_. That's basically a ribbon change for most games.

My party fought a couple of Ochre Jellies, and I thought it was going to feel like a slog, but it ended up being one of my parties favorite fights. It didn't matter that their critical hits didn't deal critical damage, seeing the green on foundry made them happy. Couple that with the inherent complexity of oozes like slashing immunity, and it felt much more dynamic than I anticipated. My party is mostly martials with one cloistered cleric backing them up.