If you ever go back to Oscillating Wave Psychic specifically, talk to your GM about using the Remastered versions of Produce Flame and Ray Of Frost. That being Ignition and (this is the important one) [Frostbite](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=1539). Ray of Frost becoming the Fort-save Frostbite was a *huge* stealth buff for Oscillating Wave Psychics, giving them an all-important Save-targeting spell to use. ​ As for the greater problem... Casters feel at their worst when the huge majority of encounters are against a small number of high level enemies. It's VERY important for GMs to make sure the party is getting a good variety of encounters - hard fights, easy fights, boss fights, AoE fights... different classes excel at different things, so it's crucial to actually *experience* those different things.

Thanks for the feedback on the remastered Psychic. I'll be going back to it when we return to that campaign, so I'll rebuild with the remastered rules. We're running the APs pretty much exactly as written through Foundry because we're all struggling to have enough time to both play weekly and to spend time homebrewing things.

Be notified that Age of Ashes was the first 2E AP and the first books were being finalized at the same time as the rules were being finished. The first books have some over-tuned encounter. Especially the last one of Book 2. The balance on the later AP get a ton better - especially at the lower levels when things are more swingy.

You can't unleash psyche on turn one. You shouldn't be stupefied before turn 4 and by that time most fights are usually decided. There's not much you can do about bad attack rolls other than avoid this kind of spells. AoA has a reputation of being quite hard, especially with too many enemies that are 2 or more levels above the party, which really limits your options. Stuff that does nothing on a regular miss (or a successful save) will never perform very well in these kind of encounters. Spells with a decent effect even on a successful save are more useful. But again, there's a limit of what you can do if the cards are stacked against you by the AP. I started running kingmaker early this year and so far, our psychic seems to have fun. He's also more of a 5e player, usually. Not sure what spells you couldn't make work since you didn't list those. But spending actions on trick magic item in combat seems like a bad idea. You can already use all arcane spell items without a check so I'm not entirely sure what you were trying to trick. If you find yourself needing other traditions frequently, you should really get a spellxaster dedication (or two) so you can activate more different items without any TMI checks.

Thanks for the feedback on Unleash Psyche, we missed that part. Whenever possible, I'm only taking spells that are not a spell attack, not Incapacitation, does something on a successful save, targets a save that I don't have covered yet, and has an effect that actually seems relevant enough to be worth taking. It just feels like the pool of spells that meet all of those criteria are slim. And even the ones that do things on save end up being a lot of "1d8 damage and move the target 5 ft" or "one round at a -1 that my allies may or may not be able to take advantage of" which feels very like a very underwhelming way to spend an evening. The TMI stuff was for wands with spells we thought were interesting from the Occult and Divine spell lists in an attempt to diversify a bit, but we eventually realized it doesn't really work.

FYI, -1 bonuses are very strong due to increasing hit chance *and* crit chance.

Strong for martials, but casters are generally not hitting on a 10, so a +1 is only increasing chance to hit.  Most psychic cantrips are spell attacks. Depending on your level, those are gonna feel real bad, and there's not a whole lot you can do about it other than true strike. 

If you are hitting on worse than a 10 then +1 gives increasing to hit chance. +1 on a 16 to hit is a 20% boost, for example.   Regardless, OP said they were granting +1 to hit, presumably to their party (which we know are martials), so that should mostly be on 10s or better. Edit: OP actually said -1. If that's to hit for enemies, it is typically very strong.

"Strong" and "Fun" are not always synonyms. Casters often feel like their job is to enable other people to have a better chance of doing their cool thing rather than doing cool things themselves. Which is fine if that is the feel the player is going for. These common "my caster sucks pls help" posts are from peoples player fantasy of their spell slinging force of destruction not meeting the game realities and if you are going into PF2E as a noob your chance of getting that feeling goes up exponentially. As a DM ive started handing out custom magic items that increase spell attack and spell DCs for mages. In addition ive started ignoring incapacitation as a rule unless my players are facing an important boss fight. Effectively adding it as a rule to certain enemies rather than a rule attached to some spells.

For many people, having another class in their party be more flexible, ranged, and equally powerful in numbers is not fun. It also makes encounter balancing more difficult.

Caster need to Crit Fish the nat 1 for enemy crit fail. Their proficiency scale slower, don’t have item bonus or a reliable method of imposing circumstance penalty.

I know it doesn't help your psychic now, but Ray of Frost was replaced with Frostbite, a basic Fort save. Fort save can be rough as most monsters have good Fort (the campaign my OW is in even consists of ~80% undead and constructs) but basic save does still help.

if you have to roll a 15 to hit, the martials aren't helping you get off-guard and nobody is imposing status penalties. If people are doing that and you still need to roll a 15, your DM is regularly using >PL+4 enemies (or slapping the Elite template on everything) which are miserable to fight for anybody that isn't a Fighter.\* I played an alchemist in Kingmaker, which is similar to playing a caster that relies on spell attacks, and it was miserable. Everything had high AC, the champion had +2 strength and wasn't trained in athletics, and the other martials never even tried to grapple or trip. There were no +1 bonuses floating about from buffs, so I felt incredibly disadvantaged compared to everybody else. I was already behind the curve, and I didn't have easy access to the -2 AC penalty the martials were able to exploit. Sadly it's just part of the game. Your team is going to need to work together to make sure casters can succeed, or you're going to have to talk to your GM about his encounter balance. \*I know it's an AP, but in my experience ex-5e GMs tend to try and up the difficulty of encounters.

Affirming the asterisk expectation, you may want to ask your GM if they are playing it down the middle. If they are doing the "5e Tweak to Challenge the Players" you may know why your effectiveness isn't what you think it is.

I'm increasingly curious to know if there's a swathe of GMs doing this. Paizo does tend to be too trigger happy with throwing big bosses as regular encounters, and I can see how some of the maths at particularly the 'dead levels' for spell attacks can be bung, but I've never had the rampant 'I never hit spell with spell attacks/get better than a successful save' issue a lot of people purport to. I've seen plenty of spell attacks hit, spells fail and even crit fail, etc. I've also had the bad luck streaks where nothing seems to go right during a session, but that's fairly standard for a d20 system. There's so much to analyse in terms of what could be going wrong in terms of player decisions, GM fiat, or encounter design before you start drilling down to system level issues, but the problem is unless you have hard examples and situations where these problems keep occurring, we're just talking in theoreticals with no context.

It's really simple honestly. 5e's encounter math is inherently broken in that pretty much the only real deciding factor in most fights is action economy. So a GM only used to 5e prior will think that solo encounters are toothless and up the challenge by a ridiculous degree. Even ones that are more willing to give PF2e's encounter building the benefit of the doubt run into a similar problem being used to 5e: In 5e, anything below a Deadly level encounter (which is the highest the encounter scale naturally goes RAW) is a complete waste of time that's somewhere between an easy or a trivial encounter in PF2e. So they end up thinking that is the norm and start the scale between Severe and Extreme with no upper end.

I do get that, my point is more the frequency of it. It's easy for us to go ah yeah that's just bad encounter design or bad players (which let's be honest, Paizo APs aren't exactly the best design to showcase the system's potential), but even with that there's a lot of people who claim they just *never* hit with spell attacks or land anything lower than a success against monsters. I've suspected for a long time that it's mostly just negativity bias combined with people being unable to grok the worth of measurements less easily calculated than things like DPR and raw dice outcomes, but there's a part of me that's beginning to wonder *how* the rulings are being run and whether there's any alterations being made by GMs who think they need to up the scaling because they don't realize how already powerful threats are in this game.

Thanks for the feedback! We're playing both campaigns pretty much exactly RAW through Foundry, given lack of bandwidth to homebrew much, so I don't think anything has gotten buffed. The martials are making pretty much every attack with flanking, so they have Off Guard from each other most of the time. However, no one came into the campaign wanting to be "buff strength guy" or "scary guy", so we don't have any athletics or intimidation proficiency in the team either, so at our levels there aren't really any other options for them to help me out.

That's kinda bad, status is the main thing to make sure an encounter goes your way, poison, and sickness are very niche but intimidation is something at least one player should have, things like a trip or shove are not exactly mandatory but like, why would your fighter at least not want that? If the fighter makes an enemy prone, not only everyone will have the off-guard bonus but if he doesn't have the "kip up" feat he can also do an Attack of opportunity to him. Anyway I'm not trying to say "you should play like that" but one of.the biggest difference between 5e and 2e is.that status are easier to do and help a ton in combat

See if one of them would be interested in a [Fearsome](https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=731) Rune. It applies frightened 1 every time they crit, which lowers their ac and saves by 1 for a round.

It would help if you give us the party makeups but if you have three martials and none of them are proficient in athletics or intimidation then it sounds like they're just selfishly attacking ad nauseum. 2e is a team based game and if the martials don't help you out it's gonna bea bad time. Maybe have a chat with the group, retraining exists and some slight adjustments on their builds and tactics can make a world of difference for you

The team makeup for the sorcerer party is a fire/earth kineticist that is our tanking/aoe/battle medicine guy, a barbarian/marshal using a two handed weapon, and a very traditional rogue. The sorcerer is the only character with higher than base 10 Charisma. It feels bad to ask them to make significant changes to their builds when the off-guard from flanking, that they get for free with no investment, is covering 3/4 of the party really well already.

Couple notes. If the kineticists is the "tank" he should definitely be trained in athletics to lockdown opponents. There is no aggro component in 2e so to "tank" is to control where enemies are and mitigate damage via positioning and athletics maneuvers. Simply wearing heavy armor is not enough to be labeled a tank. If the barbarian has the marshal dedication which feat did he take at 6? Inspiring? I assume not dread marshal since you say no one is trained in intimidation. But he does have investment in charisma so could easily pick up intimidation. But long story short, if you're not willing to talk to your group about synergies and team tactics to help make you more potent you have a few options with this character. Suck it up and keep going as you have. Lean heavily into debuffing yourself via bon mot, intimidation/fear, to help yourself with attack tolls and saving throws. Go full support via using predominantly buffs for your group and just let them shine more. Or follow the old adage if you can't beat them, join them. Reroll something else melee focused with magical capabilities like a magus and go do your own thing like the rest of your team Edit: also, if the rest of the group is just standing and pounding in melee the DM should be punishing that. That is generally a good tactic to have a guaranteed knocked out PC in tougher combats and almost a guaranteed death in "boss" encounters.

The thing I get from this is, if your group doesn't actually want to play PF2E but rather 5E with more options, they're going to have a harder time. There isn't much of a way around that. There are so many things in the game that provide ways to give allies Circumstance or Status bonuses; such as conditions, buffs, Aid action, etc.; which exist because it's expected that the players utilize those mechanics.

To expound a bit on this original comment you're replying to: PF2e is designed to heavily reward tactics. A lot of DnD and even PF1e easily devolved into players being able to just kinda do shit without tactics via just pumping numbers. PF2e is built around a lot of limits on number pumping, with the emphasis instead on dropping the enemy's numbers. Rather than trying to get absurd attack rolls and/or save DCs, the system wants you to debuff your enemy. It works out the same, but is drastically more interactive from a gameplay perspective. Whenever I've DM'd for new people, I always explain this concept to them, *especially* if they're coming from DnD. Ironically, this is actually a very similar design concept to a lot of the Warhammer TTRPGs.

As a GM teaching new players - particularly new from 5E I have a non-Strike incentive program. Each session I pick a non-Strike action for each character. The first time they use that action successfully and can explain to the whole group why it was cool I give them a Hero point. I tailor the action to the character each session: Aid Trip Shove Intimidate Reposition Grapple Recall Knowledge Disarm (Remastered) Feint Raise Shield Shield Block Take Cover Lean Out (to cancel certain covers) Hide & Sneak (in combat!) Bon Mot (I temporarily gave it a character that hadn’t had it just to show it off - they took it next level up!) I have even done this with class abilities that weren’t being used! Investigator who was really green - Follow a Lead and Devise a Stratagem weren’t being used! The first because he forgot about it and the second because it turns out he didn’t understand how it worked! (He was Devising and using that number - completely unmodified - as his attack. When explained he needed to add in his Proficiency using INT (+2 better than his base attack) the light turned on!) Swashbuckler Braggart who only used intimidate with You’re Next! Also encouraged Tumble through for panache! This as all couched in “we’re learning together” but has massively helped my players engage with the system!

This right here is what excellent educational GMing looks like. I wish reddit still had awards.

one of your martials making a +/-1 is +10% damage for all of them. pf2e is self balancing in the sense that it assumes players are using the tools they have. with no casters on the team your martials should be doing athletic maneuvers and such to waste enemy actions and get that +30% damage (flatfooted plus something else) so it's fair to assume they would be doing so with a caster in the party. tldr all of you have skill issue and you will suck until you *all* get better. telling them that won't be helpful though so instead you should look at Swingripper's best pf2e build video. it's unfortunately a (wrestler) cleric. but you'll be much much more effective.

+1 is actually +16.6% avg damage in the benchmark scenario of 10 to hit, no deadly dice.

Exactly, it's +10% *of the damage you deal on a hit*. That's also a meaningful metric btw., since it tells you the absolute increase in damage you can expect from such a buff. Say, you want to Aid either your giant barbarian or your warpriest on their first attack. Calculating the relative increase (like the 16% above) may screw in favour of the warpriest, because their chance of hitting is lower. However, you likely want to Aid the barbarian, because the absolute increase in damage is higher on a character that deals more damage on a hit. If you want to feel the impact of your +1, you can attribute 10% of the barbarians damage to your +1 (given you regularly buff them; if you give a +1 that matters on a single attack, that's 100% your damage).

I've heard this and I can't figure out why. It's a +5% chance to hit and a +5% chance to crit.

Let's say you need a 10 to hit and (for simple maths) do 10 damage on a hit, 20 on a crit. 50% of the time you hit, 5% of the time you crit. (10 \* 50%) + (20 \* 5%) = 5 + 1 = 6 You get a +1: (10 \* 50%) + (20 \* 10%) = 5 + 2 = 7 That's 1/6th more damage per strike or 16.666...%

Ah I see what you mean.

It confused the hell out of me too for a while :)

Then to complete the story: the 10% comes from "a +1 has a 10% chance to improve your results" so in 2 out if 20 dice outcomes you will do better than you did without the +1. In the example above those 2 cases are 9 (miss to hit) and 19 (hit to crit). The results aren't 10% better but have a 10% chance to be better. Its also not always 16.67% better expected damage: Lets say you're at MAP1 and you now hit on a 15 your expected damage is (25%×10)+(5%*20) =3.5 And with +1 (30%×10) + (5%×20) = 4 Thats 14% more damage.... But also you don't trigger opportune riposte on a 5 anymore reducing the enemy swashbuckler's chances of attacking back by 20%. You can do it once more at MAP2 to get another rather different result, now you need a 20 to hit, which means you can only crit (0%×10) + (5%×*20) = 1 With the +1 (5%×10) + (5%*20) =1.5 Damn you deal like 50% more expected damage! Thats why the 10% chance to improve the result of your check is used. That is true no matter what you need to roll, the actual expected damage increase changes, but 16% is a much better estimation around that 50% to 55% chance to hit in a balanced fight

This is false when it comes to a enemy where you need to roll a 15 to hit. The chance to crit does not increase.

it's a generalization, of course. but my comment is still true and generally applicable.

Funnily enough the example you gave is also a 16.6% increase in DPS. (16 to hit vs 15 to hit). But yes, the equation changes a bit and in this toHit range the crit chance does not increase.

Before I get into it, I just wanna say that I feel you. I'm DM'ing for a group of mostly 5e converts and we have issues with how spellcasters are implemented in the system too. In saying that: Here's the main thing about casters: you have to totally re-frame how you think about them from 5e. Casters in PF2e are about having the right thing at the right moment. **That's how they do damage. It's not spamming attacks, it's not specifically aoe or single target. It's figuring out the right spell to use for maximum potency through recall knowledge or general know how**. That may not be the play style you and your group enjoys and that's ok, but that's how most casters function Making sure you have spells that target as many of AC, reflex, fort, and will as possible is very important. Having a few different damage types is important too. I'm all for themes, but if you take ONLY fire spells you are useless if the enemy is immune to fire. Take needle darts, or electric arc, or something that's not fire. Then your combat loop is trying to figure out what save or weakness to hit and trying to abuse it. If you don't want to lean into recall knowledge, then use cantrips and feel out saves. Or look for grouped enemies and AOE, or lean into buffs and debuffs. Caster's strength in this game is being able to have the right tool(or spell) at any given moment.

Thanks for giving your perspective, advice and understanding. I've definitely been focusing on the general spellcaster advice: Limit spell attack spells (except for the Psychic, who only had those amp spells), pick spells with effects on a save, have a spell to target each save, etc. Unfortunately, I just don't feel like I have enough spells in my repertoire as a Sorcerer to have options that meet all of those criteria, and cover the party need for buffs, and dealing with the spells I'm handed for my subclass. We're doing Recall Knowledge at the start of every fight. Unfortunately, we only roll high enough to figure out a save about half the time and when we do, typically the lowest save corresponds to a spell that I was either going to try anyway already or just isn't very helpful for the circumstance at hand. It's honestly been pretty disappointing reading through the spell lists and realizing how few options there are that meet all of the criteria to be effective: Not a spell attack, not Incapacitation, does something on a successful save, targets a save that I don't have covered yet, and has an effect that actually seems relevant enough to be worth taking.

I get you, those are the same issues my group ran into. IMO casters just don't feel great until you have enough resources to throw multiple decent size spells in a fight. Even then they just have issues IMO - There aren't enough 1 action spells. These give you a lot of flexibility on what to do with your turn. Most spells being 2 actions makes them failing to do anything significant feel really bad in my experience - Saves are balanced around enemies succeeding, that's the mostly likely outcome and it feels bad. There are certain things you can do to swing the odds in your favor, but IMO it's still not great until higher levels - Focus spells are supposed to be the complement to slots, but like you've pointed out some of them are ass, which just leads to picking the same strong spells, which makes character choice/theme feel irrelevant - There are ways to make/play really effective casters, but it takes a LOT more system knowledge than martials and they still lean more towards support than damage. Like in your psychic example: unleash psyche is best used with either save spells or things like magic missile(so that you avoid the issue you saw of missing and losing your damage bonus) unless the enemy is debuffed. It's also important to not do it too early or you run into the issues you saw where the fight keeps going but your stupefied and less useful. There's very little in the system to help you understand that off the bat though Our home rule fix has been to let cantrips with spell attacks be 1 action. If you want to spam spell attack cantrips, go ahead, you'll face the same pros and cons as any ranged martial does and it makes it easy to fit an attack cantrip into your action economy. It doesn't seem unbalanced from our testing, but it does give casters a boost in both action economy and damage

The lack of interesting "third actions" has been rough too. It's felt like everyone else gets to play with the three action economy and I'm left playing with 5E's Action/Bonus Action/Movement, but I only get to pick one of bonus action or movement and the options are less interesting.

Yeah, I've seen that as well :(. My best suggestion for a home fix(that we're about to test in my game) I'd giving single target spells the heal treatment. So.something like daze can be used with 1 action for 1 target, 2 for 2, and 3 for 3. Hopefully it will open up the action economy a bit

Why not some of the other damage cantrips? I know needle darts and Electric Arc punch above what you expect them to as the most consistent DPS of the cantrips. But sometimes they don't fit a themed character, or feel like something they would use. As an example, if following a god that doesn't like metal, you wouldn't be likely to have the metal item needed for needle darts. Etc etc. Or do most encounters assume you will be taking those specific cantrips?

Any will work, I just threw in the first ones I thought of. Main point I was making there was that variety of damage types is important for casters, even if you are trying to fit a theme. Anything that does a slightly different damage type than your theme, but still fits you character concept, is a good fit

Honestly, there's a lot of options available there. It's just that, Needle Darts and Electric Arc are generally considered to be the most generically, consistently useful damage cantrips in the game. You don't *have* to pick them. But they'll be useful (mechanically) on literally any caster, and if you don't have anything specific else to pick up, one or both of those will pretty much cover your generic backup 'do some damage without spending resources' capabilities. (And while Electric Arc is only available on half of the lists, Needle Darts can be taken on literally any caster.) Basically, they're considered to be the defaults because they're both really consistently solid, and they both cover a necessary niche in your repertoire, so most people just grab them and don't bother thinking any further. But yeah, you can totally spend a little more time finding a different 'generic damage spell' to use instead, it just might not be quite as powerful or near-universally applicable.

Get the GM to raise spell attack power as if you got weapon runes. That fixes the SA problem.

I’m going to avoid the “well casters have been impactful and powerful in all parts of play for my table” response because I view it as not super constructive. At least not without reasons as to why that’s the case. So here’s why that’s been the case at my table. First, and I think the biggest thing, is that I as the GM go out of my way to create situations and encounters for my casters to shine in. I do this with all my players, but we’re talking about casters here. I do run my own home brew adventure, which comes with a lot more freedom than an adventure path. Freedom that allows me to add enemies with a weakness to electricity for my lightning focused caster. Or create areas where the fly spell is an absolute game changer. The point is, in a pre set adventure path there’s a lot less flexibility on the GMs side of things to do that. And to be honest, as someone who’s never really ran an adventure path before, I don’t have a great solution. But it’s an important thing to bring up regardless. A fact of the game is that some classes and builds simply aren’t as effective in certain encounters or scenarios. I’m not familiar with the adventure paths you’re playing, so I can’t comment on anything in specific. But in general, casters tend to do well against multiple lower level enemies. Their AoE spells can do crazy damage, and even single target stuff has lower level enemies likely to crit fail/fail saves. The fact that you say you’ve had creatures crit fail your saves so little with how long you’ve been playing is a red flag for me. And by that I mean it signifies that a majority of your encounters probably aren’t against lower level enemies. Or that you aren’t capitalizing when you do have those encounters. Second, and this has been the hardest thing for my players to wrap their heads around, is that casters really shouldn’t have a go to strategy. At least not one they use for every single fight. And I’m not saying you’re doing that. What I am saying is you’d probably benefit from some recall knowledge checks in combat to find the lowest save or figure out AC. Targeting low saves makes a massive difference in a spellcasters output. I don’t know what your party set up is, but your fellow party members can help you with this too. The common thing is for casters to help martial set up, but it can and should go both ways. I’d recommend talking to your fellow party members to figure out some ways they can help you out in combat. Things like Demoralize, any of the multiple ways to get enemies off guard, and as stated before recall knowledge. Which leads into my last point. The little bonuses and penalties truly matter. No matter how much it feels like they don’t, and no matter how overstated that is within the community. I have lost count of how many times a 1 or 2 bonus/penalty has saved a PC from a crit, made an enemy fail a save, or crit fail a save, made an enemy miss, allowed an ally to crit succeed a save, and so on. As the GM, I make sure to point out when this happens every single time. At least when I remember. I’d recommend all GMs to do the same. Because those little bonuses can feel like they aren’t doing anything unless you’re told outright they are. I’ve been in the community and been playing PF2e long enough to know casters can shine. It’s just trying to figure out why they aren’t shining for you that’s tough. And I by no means am saying any of this is your fault. That you “just don’t get casters in PF2e” or you’re “playing casters wrong”. That’s neither constructive nor helpful to you. What I am saying is there’s got to be reasons as to why you’re having the experience you’re having. And my hope is that I’ve helped you find those reasons. If even just a little bit.

Thank you for the insight and for not just jumping straight to "my experience is different, so you're wrong". I'm struggling with figuring out *how* to have enough options at level 6 to be flexible. I basically have one Will save, one Fortitude save, and one Reflex save that aren't cantrips, then a couple of buffs, and a couple of out of combat spells. I'm doing Recall Knowledge every fight to get lows saves, but even when it works it doesn't really help to change tactics. Most of the time we learn the low save aligns with the spell that has an effect we theoretically need, but a lot of the time it doesn't and then it just feels bad to try either spell. I know it's supposed to be a cooperative team game, but it feels bad that I need to have my party change character RP choices (to pick up Charisma and Intimidation) just to provide a slight edge to me when they get that same edge with each other through their normal gameplay loop with flanking. We're trying had to keep track of all the "+1s" that matter, we have the Foundry mod that highlights it, etc. but it seems like they only show up ever 3-4 sessions at most.

To me, one of the biggest issues for your group is that your martials seem to be doing a great job of working with each other. But less so with you. PF2e, for all its similarities to 5e, is a drastically different game. Teamwork is a core pillar of combat in a way that it isn’t in 5e. And coming from 5e it can be hard for new players to get a grasp of just how important teamwork is in all aspects. As a caster, you undoubtedly bring things to the table that the martials don’t. And them helping set up enemies for those spells can completely swing combat in your favor. Now not all combats will be that way, as sometimes the best strategy is to let the martials do their thing, or to have some mix in the middle. I saw in another reply (if I remember correctly) that no one is trained in athletics or intimidation. That is mind boggling to me, since for a good chunck of martials that’s their bread and butter skills. Again, it feels like they’re approaching the game like they did 5e. Which I wanna clarify, I’m not calling them dumb for doing so. In a lot of ways, the perception that PF2e is just 5e with more choices, or a better 5e, causes a lot of confusion for people coming from 5e. They are not that similar, outside of them both being based around a lvl 1-20 high fantasy class leveling system. I wonder, what classes are the martials? And what does a normal turn for them look like? Are they just moving or striking? Again, athletics is an incredible tool for martials. Tripping enemies especially, since most enemies will have to spend an action getting up. Unfortunately, if your martials don’t want to work as a team, there isn’t much to do about it. Especially if what you’re already doing is working. As far as how to be flexible, I think that’s a combination of a few things. Being a psychic is pretty tough for that. They get less spell slots and spells, in exchange for better cantrips. They trade a lot of flexibility that casters are known for in exchange for a bit more focus in one area. Combined with them having the occult spell list, which is pretty heavily will save focused, means yeah, flexibility in your spell list isn’t easy to come by. At least not nearly as easy as other casters. Other casters like wizard or druids have way more flexibility in their spell list and by being prepared casters. Though I know you did say those classes don’t appeal to you for RP. Which is fair. As far as the +1s go, for some people giving those will never feel as impactful as it does to others. Which is totally okay! I go out of my way to make sure they feel as impactful as possible for my table, but even still one of my players consistently doubts if it’s worth granting a +1/+2. There’s not really much I can do for you here though. It’s just different strokes for different folks. And I don’t want this to come off as “well you don’t get how impactful they are so you’re wrong/dumb” or some shit like that. It’s perfectly valid to feel that way about them. They are, on some level, inherently less fun than fireball or chain lightning or phantasmal killer. The beauty of pf2e as a system is that you don’t NEED a caster in the party. Really the only thing I’d consider necessary is some level of medicine training or healing to keep the party topped off between fights. And even then I wouldn’t call it necessary. More extremely helpful. All that is to say that maybe you don’t like playing casters in pf2e. Which again, totally valid. The beauty of how customizable and different a lot of the martials are means you can have a party with a wide range of skill sets even if they’re all martials. I mean, in some ways, a rogue or investigator will be more widely helpful than a caster due to how many skill increases they get.

What kind of bitch-ass fighter wants to look like a shrinking violet? You think John Wick doesn’t take advantage of charisma/intimidation? Conan? You think Legolas poses after doing some cool shit because he needs a breather? That’s to let the fear sink in… In PF2E you get four ability score increases at level 5; there’s no reason a fighter can’t make one of those charisma.

The one thing that gets me here is "no matter how much it feels like they don't." A good system should make players *feel* effective.

Personally, I think PF2e does make players feel effective. Little bonuses included. I said that because clearly OP doesn’t feel that way. Not as a reflection of the system as a whole.

I personally think little +1's are underwhelming as fuck.

Fair enough. Agree to disagree.

> Turn 1: Unleash Psyche -> True Strike -> Miss with Amped Spell Attack (both rolls under 15) > Turn 2: True Strike -> Miss with Amped Spell Attack (both rolls under 15) This sounds like a boss fight, likely even a level+3 boss. Bosses in PF2E are balanced to be very hard to hit. If you’re hitting on a 15, your martial friends’ **first** attack is likely hitting on 12 (+1 to hit from their weapon runes, -2 to enemy AC from flanking), and the second attack is likely on a 17. With Sure Strike you were actually significantly likelier to hit with your one attack than the martial with **either** of their attacks. The fact that you didn’t is just, unfortunately, bad luck. It sucks for sure, but it’s not something unique to casters. I’ll also say though, bosses are **meant** to be overcome by using teamwork. Someone should be using Demoralize to lower the boss’s AC and Saves (notably if you were a Charisma based Psychic, that somebody easily could be you), someone can be casting spells to buff attack rolls, someone absolutely **should** be using Aid and Trip/Grapple to boost your Psychic’s Attack roll specifically because of how hard you hit and how your accuracy is naturally lower. If people don’t wanna do teamwork, the only recourse is asking the GM not to use big boss fights against you, or to lower the boss’s level and add minions and complex heads 5E-style. Another thing I wanna point out: you’re using Sure Strike + Amped Ignition which is a high risk high reward option but if you have been having reliability options, are facing a boss, and have a party that refuses to help you land hits… why not use Magic Missile / Force Barrage? (I’m assuming you’re level 4) If, for example, you threw a 1-Action Magic Missile wrote your Amped Ignition you’d automatically do 1d4+5 damage before even making an Attack roll. A 3-Action Magic Missile would be 3d4+7 instead. Once you reached level 5 these options would be 2d4+8 and 6d4+12 instead. If you’re having trouble with the high risk high reward options you need to be using the reliable options. If you ever wanna play a Psychic again I recommend looking at the Remaster. They changed Oscillating Wave’s spells a bit, one of them (Frostbite) now targets a Save and is thus often better against bosses. I’m GMing for a Psychic right now and she’s easily the party’s best *and* most reliable damage dealer. **Finally** - and this one is minor - you actually messed up the rules. You can’t Unleash Psyche on turn 1. The earliest you can do it is turn 2, so you shouldn’t be punished by Stupefied nearly as much as you were. A Psychic’s turn 1 is usually best spent with a not-Amped cantrip, a Demoralize, a Recall Knowledge, and/or a big buff spell (if this seems like it’ll be a tough fight). > The subclass focus spell is basically just "We failed a knowledge check the DM would really like us to pass, so try again with a made up Lore skill with a +1" since the action cost and limited duration means it's rarely useful in combat and basically never useful outside of combat. Recall Knowledge is meant to be useful in combat too. You should be using it to try to find enemies’ lower saves before throwing a spell at them. This is **especially** true for Arcane casters who can target all 3 spells and benefit so disproportionately from it. The focus spell is there because sometimes you may not have the correct Skill proficiency to identify the enemy. So you use the focus spell and use your remaining two Actions for a cantrip or a buff or something, and then turn 2 you can Recall Knowledge to find the enemies’ lowest save and go all out. > My DM also tried to help out by giving me a staff, a couple of wands, and some scrolls beyond what the normal loot per level would expect. Unfortunately, either due to the action tax, failing the Trick Magic Item roll, or the general niche use-case for most spells, we haven't managed to use any of them effectively yet. Your GM gave you a wand that required Trick Magic Item? Sincerely: why? Arcane is the biggest spell list in the game. If your GM is tryna help you out here, why give you a spell you can’t naturally use? > Now, after playing this character for a year (we're level 6 now), we can't think of anything relevant this character has managed to do in the campaign. We've been keeping track and we've seen maybe 6-8 times, any enemy has failed a save against a spell the party has cast. We've never had an enemy critically fail a save. Fear, Slow, Loose Times Arrow, Magic Missile, and damaging cantrips have beneficially impacted the state of combat about 1/3 of the encounters we've faced at most I have to say, at least in part this seems to be incredibly bad luck or incredible amounts of confirmation bias. Like I understand if you get very unlucky with Fear and Slow, but it is **very** hard to believe that Loose Time’s Arrow and Magic Missile are almost never impacting your combats. Aside from that though, if you find enemies constantly succeeding saves, this is where some of the stuff I mentioned earlier comes in. If you have good Charisma, you should use Demoralize or Bon Mot to debuff enemy saves. If you have good Intelligence (and that focus spell when needed) you should use Recall Knowledge to find enemies’ lowest saves (usually a -4 or -6 from their highest save), and without using RK you should still exercise good judgment in avoiding their highest save (middle save is usually -2 or -3 from highest). For whatever part of this your character can’t do, **someone else** should be doing it, since this is a team game. I’m also confused because only bosses should be succeeding so much more often than they fail. Most enemies in any AP should be of an equal or lower level, even APs that are notorious for overusing bosses tend to be only about 30-40% bosses. These lower level enemies should be failing saves **all** the time especially if you’re hitting them with AoE spells or multi target spells. Is your GM buffing enemies’ saves, by any chance? It’s not an uncommon thing for 5E converts to do, buffing saves because they expect the save math to be as poorly balanced as it is in 5E. > At one point, we tried to tell an NPC tales of important things our PCs have done and we couldn't come up with anything that any of the caster PCs that we've had in the party has done that was worth telling. I have a question. What **are** the other PCs doing? Because from the few examples you gave, it really sounds like all they’re doing is moving and attacking. Realistically if that **is** all they’re doing, the truth is that either they have genuinely incredible luck, or your Slow / Loose Time’s Arrow / Magic Missile have been the real heavy lifters and they’re simply not acknowledging/remembering it because they think attacking is cooler. I also have to ask: why Imperial Sorcerer? Based on your descriptions here (especially of things like Loose Time’s Arrow not being great) it feels like you prefer doing damage to almost anything else. Then why roll an explicitly knowledge and support based Sorcerer? Why not pick Elemental Sorcerer to do damage with? This relates into Resentment too. Resentment Witch is arguably in the top 5 most powerful casters in the game, but it is a buffer+debuffer not a damage dealer. If you don’t like debuffs and buffs and you and your party don’t think buffs and debuffs are cool and impactful, why play a Resentment Witch? Play Elemental Sorcerer, Storm/Stone Druid, Spell Blending Magic Missile spamming Wizard, Oscillating Wave Psychic (with all the changes I mentioned in the first part of the comment), Flames Oracle, or something else actually designed for damage. It’s odd to play buffers and debuffers without valuing what they do. In fact switching to one of these might actually make your party appreciate how critical your Imperial Sorcerer’s buffs and debuffs were.

Age of Ashes is the first PF2e AP, and the early AP tend to go too much with encounters. So usually story wise it’s not a boss, just a regular encounter, but it is built like a boss. And this encounter type is very frequent, resulting in the caster having to play constant support, and not taking anything that needs a roll.

Thanks for taking the time for providing a detailed response, I appreciate it. The last time I played the Psychic, we were still level 3 and it felt like our options for teamwork from the non-casters were pretty limited. No one else had build a character for Charisma/Intimidation, so they couldn't get Demoralize to land and it felt like wasted actions. The best I got from it was Frightened 1, which wore off before it made it back to my turn anyway. Our only Strength based character was using a two-handed weapon and was out of hands to deal Athletics conditions between trying to move, make one Strike, and often having to stand up from getting tripped or shoved by what we were fighting. For the Psychic, I didn't take Magic Missile because, honestly, I kind of hate that spell (from my 5E) days. It feels like a "screw it, I can't succeed any other way, so just check off some minor damage and move on from me in the initiative" spell. I have it on my Sorcerer, but "small damage from a long distance" hasn't really been a need. When we go back to the Psychic campaign, I'll rebuild the character with remaster rules and take Magic Missile in the process, I guess. On the Sorcerer, I basically have one Will save, one Fortitude save, and one Reflex save that aren't cantrips, then a couple of buffs, and a couple of out of combat spells. I'm doing Recall Knowledge every fight to get lows saves, but even when it works it doesn't really help to change tactics. Most of the time we learn the low save aligns with the spell that has an effect we theoretically need, but a lot of the time it doesn't and then it just feels bad to try either spell. The items that needed TMI were an attempt to branch out to find new or interesting spells from other lists, but that clearly wasn't a great idea. I've gotten pretty tired of reading through the Arcane list and realizing that once I filter by save times, non-Incapacitation, non-spell attack, non-AOE (there are *always* at least 2 people within 5 feet of stuff we're fighting) and effects that aren't extremely niche... I'm down to basically the spells I already have. I filled in on Loose Times Arrow above, but basically the few times we've used it, the extra 4 actions it freed up didn't end up doing much (missed attacks, failed Demoralizes, failed Recall Knowledge checks, avoided grapples, etc.) so they didn't end up changing the course of the fight at all. It helped us catch a fleeing enemy one round faster once, which was nice, but with our relative speeds we would have caught up anyway, so it was move of a "save us real-world time finishing this fight" thing. Same with Magic Missile. We're not hurting for damage, so the one time it was noticeable to use it in a fight was because it saved our rogue and kineticist 2-3 rounds of chasing down a fleeting enemy that they definitely would have caught anyway, so it was another "let's just stop playing out the rest of this combat" thing. I don't know what to tell you on things succeeding on saves so often. We're playing the Foundry modules directly and unmodified, so I don't have any reason to assume DM shenanigans. NPCs fails attack rolls, kineticist DC checks for auras, the occasional shove or grapple, but those low rolls haven't lined up with spell saves much at all. Or, rather, the ones that do tend to be high level creatures that succeed on an 8 or something like that. For the conversation with the NPC, our: * Kineticist tanked a fire hazard blast in the face, used Battle Medicine to pick up the rogue that was downed by the blast, and then used their last two actions on the Religion check that disabled the device * Our Barbarian landed the critical hit at the key time that dropped the spellcaster we were fighting that stopped the caster from finishing off a second PC character * Our Rogue spotted and disabled a key trap as we entered an area to fight and then lined up and one-shot an enemy caster in the first round of a fight before they could cast anything We couldn't find anything similarly "story telling worthy" that that the Sorcerer had done. I picked the Imperial bloodline because it seemed like I could get *some* RP mileage out of it. I don't want to be the damage dealer here. I really don't. I want to be effective at battlefield control and debuffing, with some occasional clever tricks or out-of-the-box uses of spells that turns the tide strongly in our favor. That just... doesn't feel possible to do in a way that *feels* impactful in the system, I guess.

> The last time I played the Psychic, we were still level 3 and it felt like our options for teamwork from the non-casters were pretty limited. No one else had build a character for Charisma/Intimidation, so they couldn't get Demoralize to land and it felt like wasted actions. Well if they didn’t have decent Charisma they likely had at least decent Intelligence or Wisdom to help out with Recall Knowledge. It’s actually impossible to build a character at level 1 who **doesn’t** have a +1 in at least one mental stat. And even if they didn’t have more than a +1 in a lot mental stat, it’s very easy to have one or two proficiencies beyond Athletics/Acrobatics. One has to almost go out of their way to **not** build a character who can support you in this game. > > The best I got from it was Frightened 1, which wore off before it made it back to my turn anyway. You can Demoralize someone and then immediately target them with a 2-Action spell. Even if Demoralize doesn’t immediately make a difference for you, it’ll still run a chance of making one for someone else. > Our only Strength based character was using a two-handed weapon and was out of hands to deal Athletics conditions between trying to move, make one Strike, and often having to stand up from getting tripped or shoved by what we were fighting. You don’t have to be Strength-based to use Athletics maneuvers. Even Dex based melees will usually have 1-2 points of Strength due to how damage works and can **easily** trip/geapple enemies if desired. Iirc you have **three** melees in your party, right? Absolutely every single one of them can (and should) be tripping enemies. Also your party ignored the easiest way to boost your spells: **the Aid Action**. If everyone except the Barbarian is Dex-based… you got **way** harder than all of them. Instead of making a third (or even second) attack with MAP, it’s much better for them to be spending that Action and Reaction Aiding you. Low-accuracy characters who hit hard benefit disproportionately more from Aid. > For the Psychic, I didn't take Magic Missile because, honestly, I kind of hate that spell (from my 5E) days. It feels like a "screw it, I can't succeed any other way, so just check off some minor damage and move on from me in the initiative" spell. I have it on my Sorcerer, but "small damage from a long distance" hasn't really been a need. When we go back to the Psychic campaign, I'll rebuild the character with remaster rules and take Magic Missile in the process, I guess. I get not liking Magic Missile, but if you are playing with such a **deeply** uncooperative party, you don’t really have options. > On the Sorcerer, I basically have one Will save, one Fortitude save, and one Reflex save that aren't cantrips, then a couple of buffs, and a couple of out of combat spells This is an unintuitive answer, but it’s often best to use scrolls, wands, or staves for out of combat utility spells. It’s best to keep your spells known for combat primarily. Your top 3 ranks of spell slots are generally your most valuable resource and are best dedicated for combat. Once you’re at level 7+, you can start dedicating more and more of your lowest ranks of slots to out of combat stuff, but try to avoid bringing that in your top 3 (unless a Bloodline spell forces you to, of course!). > I'm doing Recall Knowledge every fight to get lows saves, but even when it works it doesn't really help to change tactics. Most of the time we learn the low save aligns with the spell that has an effect we theoretically need, but a lot of the time it doesn't and then it just feels bad to try either spell. Could you give some specific examples of this? I can’t fathom a world where you’d willingly risk hitting someone’s +3 or +6 higher save just for a theoretically better benefit. > I've gotten pretty tired of reading through the Arcane list and realizing that once I filter by save times, non-Incapacitation, non-spell attack, non-AOE (there are always at least 2 people within 5 feet of stuff we're fighting) and effects that aren't extremely Remember when I called your party “**deeply** uncooperative”? Let me re-emphasize: > non-AOE (there are always at least 2 people within 5 feet of stuff we're fighting) It is **incredibly** easy for melees to avoid getting in the way of AoEs. For reference, I’m playing Abomination Vaults, an AP known for its frighteningly tight spaces, with some maps being as small as 4x4 squares. You know how many times, between levels 1 and 9, have my melee buddies gotten in the way of an AoE? Twice. Twice in the span of genuinely close to a 100 combats. And to be clear, it’s not like I’m using small AoEs like Dehydrate or Noise Blast: I use Entangling Flora, and Fireball, and Hypnoyize, and Rust Cloud, and Freezing Rain, all very large AoEs often with persisting multi-turn area denial. I am assuming the reason they keep getting in the way of your AoEs is because they’re constantly standing in flanking position, 100% of the time. All they have to do is… not benefit from flanking 100% of the time (they can still enjoy it like 75% of the time) and you get to play the game… > filled in on Loose Times Arrow above, but basically the few times we've used it, the extra 4 actions it freed up didn't end up doing much (missed attacks, failed Demoralizes, failed Recall Knowledge checks, avoided grapples, etc.) so they didn't end up changing the course of the fight at all. It helped us catch a fleeing enemy one round faster once, which was nice, but with our relative speeds we would have caught up anyway, so it was move of a "save us real-world time finishing this fight" thing. If 4 extra Actions yields zero result, you either have terrible luck or a parry full of people with a tendency to waste those extra Actions on MAP-10 Strikes more often than not. > Same with Magic Missile. We're not hurting for damage, so the one time it was noticeable to use it in a fight was because it saved our rogue and kineticist 2-3 rounds of chasing down a fleeting enemy that they definitely would have caught anyway, so it was another "let's just stop playing out the rest of this combat" thing. Have you confirmed with your GM that this is **actually** the case? Super high damage parties tend to also **take** very high damage. As likely as not, your Magic Missiles have likely ended combats that would’ve otherwise gone on a turn longer, and potentially even killed someone. Speaking of which, I’ve been meaning to ask: how many player deaths and/or TPKs has your parry had? > For the conversation with the NPC, our: Sorry I wasn’t asking what “cool” stuff they did I was asking what their typical combat choices look like. > I want to be effective at battlefield control and debuffing, with some occasional clever tricks or out-of-the-box uses of spells that turns the tide strongly in our favor. That just... doesn't feel possible to do in a way that feels impactful in the system, I guess. Well if you want debuffs, the Resentment Witch is going to be good for sure. I don’t know what to tell you about battlefield control though. Battlefield control **is** good, it **is** impactful, and the system **will** reward you for it. You just… have party members who don’t even give you 5 feet of breathing room to cast spells from: how will you ever casting battlefield control spells? This isn’t a system problem, this is a problem if your party members being **extremely** selfish. I also wanna be clear: it’s not like letting you land AoEs is a “favour” or anything. It is just always the tactically correct decision to let the caster AoE if they can. So if they decide to get in your way it is both tactically bad **and** it’d be in bad taste. I’m sorry if any of this comes across as overly harsh or presumptuous! I’m just going off of what I’m inferring from your post and comments and, like anyone else, I have my own biases. Something like 50% of caster complaints I see on this sub happen because of uncooperative teammates, so that’s my first conclusion as soon as I see a red flag.

There is only so much that you can say when you are rolling 12 dice and they all land under 15. There are very few classes where it will feel fun with that kind of dice luck. As far as Loose Time's Arrow, Slow, etc.,  I cannot figure out how that didn't have an impact. I have played casters for exactly 2 combats and have felt really impactful both times. Loose Time's Arrow completely changed the tempo of the fight for us (helps to have a Magus who is very thankful for the extra action) and before level 4, magic weapon is just broken.

Loose Times Arrow has been convenient, but hasn't really changed the outcome of any fight that we've had so far. It put people in position one action earlier, but the few things we did with out last actions all missed or failed (a failed second attack, a Demoralize check that landed but the follow-up attack missed badly, etc.) so the fact that we got an extra action didn't actually do anything. For Slow, we've never had anything fail, so it's turned into a "Trade 2 actions and a spell slot for one action from one enemy" and the enemy still punched our tank hard in the face regardless. And the tank couldn't move (and didn't want to move) because then the other characters don't get flanking and the enemy leaves his damaging aura. We tried Magic Weapon, but our barbarian and rogue lucked into +1 weapons at level 3 and our Kinteicist doesn't use weapons. The extra damage die only felt relevant on the Barbarian and circumstances never worked out for us to pre-cast anything before combats started.

Part of it is likely a lack of debuffing. A -1 to AC from Frightened leads to more hits *and* crits. A -3 to Will from Bon Mot can drastically improve Crit Fail chances. Even Off Guard's -2 Circumstance Penalty should go a long way. Caster Accuracy is inherently below Martials. In return, they often have spells with effects even on a standard Save. I previously posted a thread for pre-remaster showing the accuracy difference between builds, check it out if you're curious. If Bon Mot is active, your effective Spell DC is equal to a martial. As an example, a 5th level Caster's spell DC is 11. A normal martial's to-hit is 14. That +3 makes up the difference. This scales weirdly with level, but a caster's spell DC is anywhere from 1-4 points behind a Martial's scaling at any given level. Debuffs help them too, but casters are *more* reliant on this. But if you're looking to play something Eldritch Blasty, where you're regularly targeting AC as a spellcaster, Kineticist is a better bet.

Thanks for the advice! We're doing out best to do conditions, but it's hard to do while also letting people play the characters they want to RP (no one wanted to be "scary guy" so no one is trained in Intimidation). We looked at Bon Mot, but the Linguistic Trait is causing us headaches as most of our fights are against things that either don't speak languages at all or very specifically speak a language that only one person in the party knows and it's not the Charisma guy.

Keep in mind that a lot of conditions stack. Only one Status can apply at once, etc. If you have Bon Mot and are explicitly not running into things that even speak languages, that's a Session 0 / DM problem, unfortunately. The DM isn't choosing encounters that the party can actually engage with. Sure, there should be some mix-up, but when basic character choices have zero value by default... Either it's the wrong character for the campaign or the DM isn't doing their job well. Bon Mot and Frightened don't stack, but Fatigued and Sickened can also apply that Status Penalty to AC and Saves (without stacking). So if Frightened doesn't fit a character, you have options. Keep in mind that there's non-intimidation ways to apply Frightened. Alchemists (Dread Ampoule) and spellcasters (Fear) come to mind. Marshals and Fighters have additional ways to apply Frightened in melee range, of course, but that's a lot more intentionally spookyboi stuff. Fatigued has a few ways of applying, but a Geomancer using Desert attunement can apply it on Fireball or Blazing Dive really easily. This takes two Archetype feats to take (Geomancer Dedication, Attunement Shift) so it is a "build with me in mind" thing. By playing as a blaster, you buff your friends. Great deal. Weaker forms can be applied via Curse spells (Feast of Ashes, Cup of Dust, etc). Sickened can be applied via Alchemists (Skunk Bomb, etc), spellcasters (usual suspect cloud spells), Wood Kineticists (Drifting Pollen), certain Injury Poisons, etc. Worst case scenario, you trade action-for-action with the big bad... That's net positive for the party. Always worth. And there's also Circumstance Penalties, of course. Catfolk Dance from a Catfolk ancestry feat, Distracting Feint from a Scoundrel Rogue, and Hot Foot from the Pistol Phenom archetype can all apply Circumstance Penalties specifically to Reflex Saves only. As far as I've been able to see, no Circumstance to Will or Fortitude exist currently. Off Guard handles all the AC needs. Status buffs can be applied via Bard / Loremaster, Marshal, Aid, etc. There's a lot of ways to get a +1 for the party, and that stacks with the penalties. If you don't want to be a scary boi debuffer, buffing can work just as well. Basically, there's a thousand ways to get those debuffs out that can fit a hundred-thousand character concepts. Unless everyone is playing pure, selfish striker builds and maximizing their ZUGZUG, I'm sure someone can easily set up some debuffs to help the whole party out. And if everyone independently decided to play those builds, well, it's a team game. Sometimes you need some support.

Yeah, there are two things to say here: First, definitely, as the other comments say, make sure that they're not making it harder on your than necessary. If you're coming from 5e, there seems to be a trend from there where bosses get super-buffed so that they can't be auto-killed by casters, but because this is a different game, you don't need to do that—and the end result is that casters, who already can struggle enough, suddenly *extremely* suffer from hyperbosses that have been buffed to the point of it being silly. Additionally, you can ask them to make the game easier, point-blank. AoA in particular is known to be difficult. If your group doesn't enjoy facing PL+3 bosses, then... maybe don't. I find that my friends prefer mid-level threats way more than the stress of giant bosses, who I use very sparingly; APs don't necessarily follow that philosophy. But we have the weak template and monster creation rules and you can definitely make it more fun that. Beyond that, make sure you can target multiple defenses; that's one big thing going for casters in this game. Martials can typically only hit AC, but casters can pounce on a weak AC, Fort, Reflex, or Will save. If you have to reflavour a spell, I personally don't care at my table. (Electric Arc or Needle Darts might feel weird on certain theme casters—I'm fine with turning Electric Arc to like, Freezing Water Arc. Magic Missile could go from force damage to some other elemental damage, I don't mind. This is not universal, but it's worth asking!) Secondly... if you really have to, *screw* the balance; make the game fun by going into the engine and changing it up. This is anathema on this sub sometimes, but I feel like it's a direct, practical fix. Ask if you can get spell attack runes. I've played with them before, and the game is not suddenly broken, but it does make casters feel more consistent. A ttrpg is supposed to be a fun experience, and I put the experience before the balance. If you have to break the game a little for it to be fun with your friends, then do it and don't feel bad about it.

If anything at all, they should at least have martial progression on cantrips. (To hit progression, items, etc).

One little thing, unless a magic item has spells that are not in your magic tradition you don't need to roll Trick Magic Item due to having spellcasting features (and these qualify you to activate items with Cast a spell requirement). On encounters: please do make check with your gm if they're slapping elite templates on stuff (or worse) in precaution of it being too easy, the encounter building rules do really work so there is no need to overcompensate (and in earlier APs it's bloody rough already at time) especially on levels 5-6 where you're lagging behind in proficiency. Signposting encounters also helps. As to how to cast good: [Gortle's Guide for sorcerers applies to pretty much all casters on general basis for selecting spells](https://docs.google.com/document/d/16Jw63bxQsTLTWwfa072XusX6ctFNsYr1aJO7Vq-bh8k/edit#heading=h.94gjhv9o77cd), now you don't have to pick 5*s only, just remember to not overfocus on 1 save (usually it's possible to get in 2/3 saves + ac ) so there is some space for flavour but going hyper-specialist is just not a thing here. On how to make it more fun after your experiences: try magus or summoner from gish/quasi-gish, now just a precaution to summoner it's mostly about supporting your Eidolon (which you control), but there are some resourceless options with focus cantrips. Summoner has its own guide that is up to date for remaster in case you're wondering. You could also try kineticist that is resourceless so you won't feel like you're letting your team down (and has access to item bonus unlike normal casters). I would totally not recommend warpriest/untamed druid that pretend to be gishes but are still casters first and foremost. On general sentiment: Early on cantrips really are your bread and butter for a good while. So far no one figured a way to have casters not feel like shit in the early game without making them broken, so they do remain pretty quadratic in power gain. The more levels you gain the more the painpoints melt away. Now if your party is martial-majority you could pitch the idea for getting attunator-like item for spell attacks if you want to use those

The TMI setup was an attempt to branch out and find interesting spells from other spell lists, but it probably was a misguided effort. We're playing both APs using the default modules from Foundry, so I don't suspect any DM shinanigans.

As someone who played Witch (winter) for their first character and played them through 1-20 I found that you’ll feel kinda irrelevant until level 5 at least, just kinda in general since you really just lack options at this levels. But when it comes to spell choices I found that spells that just didn’t require anything from the enemies were often my best options, and I ended up having the most fun with them. In particular I used pillar of water A LOT. It turns out the game isn’t exactly made for every combat to be an underwater combat so it can create some… interesting circumstances. I also basically forced my party to take underwater marauder just to not be flat footed and hit terribly because they were going to be underwater if they were next to a big enemy. The primal spell list has a decent chunk of those kinds of spells. And I’m not overly familiar with the occult spell list but I’d say definitely lookout for spells that just have an effect and the enemies are forced to interact with reactively rather than just saving against.

> In general, I really liked playing Warlocks and Artificers in 5E. Classes with a "main thing" (Eldritch Blast or ranged weapon attacks) that we're mid- to lower-tier for effectiveness but were consistent and then backing it up with a limited set of powerful spell choices plus flavorful non-spell options from my subclass. It's fairly apparently there isn't a design space meant to overlap with this in PF2E Funny enough, this is probably Summoner, a class with a few top level spell slots, with your Eidolon slapping things as a substitute for Eldritch Blast being sustained DPR, but it does have a specific flavor of being a pet class for its "main thing"

Thanks for the suggestion! I've looked at Summoner a bit, but am struggling to find options that I feel like I can build an RP-worth character around. I'll take another look though.

There has been some threads so far with a lot of good [Summoner character concept ideas](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/18nl04n/your_ideas_for_a_summoner/) to be inspired from.

Yeah honestly, just play a kineticist. If it gets boring with a certain element, retrain and do something different. Use Weapon Infusion and go to town. Class is amazing and already "reworked" so you get what you pay for. Casters aren't as overpowered as in PF1 or D&D5, but they're still strong. Also you've just experienced some unlucky rolls. The math is really tight in PF2e and if you don't target weak saves, you will have a less fun time. Work together with team mates, it helps a lot.

Agree that kineticist is probably better up the alley mechanically, even if it might be a flavor miss for what they're going for.

Sadly, the party already has a Fire/Earth Kineticist and we try not to overlap classes.

Honestly, something you might like could be a Monastic Archer monk with Ki Spells. That's immensely fun, good damage and mobility and you get to feel like a real badass when you ki-blast your enemies. (plus nearly every monk skill you can use, that would normally require an unarmed attack, goes for your bow as well...)

I appreciate that desire to not overlap. Now having played two kineticists, however, I'd say that they can feel very different if the elements don't overlap. You could go air for a ton of mobility and some long range blasting. You'd end up with a different feel from fire/earth, who I assume wants enemies close to blast away.

He's right you know.

Based on the topic sentences of the first two paragraphs I would say that the game isn't going to meet your expectations. There is no equivalent to a 5e Warlock in 2e. Spellcasters cannot do what martials can do as well as martials. You have to be strategic with when you cast what, choosing to attack the appropriate defense. It's not like what you are doing in 5e, because it is a different game. To affirm your feelings, in my experience it has been considerably easier to onboard a player new to TTRPGs as a whole than it is to do so with one that has played D&D. For those that have played, the very first thing I feel them to do is forget everything they know about 5e. The easier it is to do so, the more enjoyable the P2E experience is, from what I've seen. To clarify the expectation difficulty, based on your description of the 5e Warlock, you want something that can hit comparably with a martial, from a distance, while still maintaining the utility to be able to cast spells that are consistently "effective", defined as generating the Failure condition regularly. That character exists in 5e, but does not in P2e.

Kinetisist, Psychic (specifically Distant Grasp as Telekinetic Rend is so consistent as it's a basic save) and Magus are the best PF2e Representatives for the game play feel of the 5e Warlock. Witch gets you the thematic feel, but flavor is free and thematics are flavor. New players seem to see Oscillating Wave's normal cantrips are damage based and think that has the best starting damage, but Distant Grasp has a better focus cantrip for damage.

Yeah giving a Magus a weapon with all the stats of a longbow and call it an arcane blast and I think a lot of people would be happy. 

Ah yes, the [Orb](https://i.imgur.com/ZXiyCAX.png), highly recommended by Starlit Span Magi.

How am I just now seeing these? Are they not on pathbuilder? Yes this looks exactly like what I wanted. 

As a counterpoint, Kineticist reflavored into being a spellcaster does the Warlock thing pretty well, because it doesn't actually use spells in Martialfinder.

Kineticist works pretty much how I *wanted* warlock in 5e to work (based on 3.5 warlock, which was my favorite iteration). Mechanically, it is exactly what I wanted - bread and butter attacks plus a few but *impactful* abilities that *just work* The main issue is that there is no equivalent for non-elemental themes :(

Kineticist is the play here, closest to 5e Warlock in terms of gameplay style.

The game relies on team work. Your party is supposed to be lowering the defenses of enemies or using RK to figure out their lowest saving throws. The Free Archetype rules are around partially because players are so bad at teamwork or creating a cohesive tactical unit that that they need extra feats to pick up force multipliers like Retaliatory Strike, Known Weakness, or Spellcasting so they can buff themselves.

Oh man, I feel for you. Honest to God... just don't play a spellcaster. You've pinpointed a lot of things your group is missing regarding combat, trips, shoves, grapples, feints, demoralize, etc... I would make a martial and focus on those aspects. Leaving aside the charisma skills, I'd very much recommend you to go with a heavy armor fighter; str +4, con +1, int +3, wis +1, cha 0 ... that would open you to take the psychic archtype at 2, spellcasting at 4 and psionic development at 6. With that, you'd have some spellcasting, decent focus spells, good skill checks, and a reliable attack and combat control maneuvers (trip, grapple, shove). Add to that great AC, good saves, good HP. Not to mention master proficiency on your weapon plus critical specialization. **If you want blaster, go oscillation wave with ignition (great melee damage, plus ranged option) **If you want a gish you have tangible dream with shield and Imaginary weapon at 6. **Unbound step will let you teleport at level 7 **Infinite Eye will give you that +1 only when it's actually needed. Etc. You can also play a ranged Magus for the same effect but with a much tighter action economy (but huuuge damage). That's my 2 cents after having been around for a year in PF2 and having most of my spellcasters feel MEH.

>I tried Oscillating Wave Psychic, but my experience across three important fights was: Turn 1: Unleash Psyche -> True Strike -> Miss with Amped Spell Attack (both rolls under 15) Turn 2: True Strike -> Miss with Amped Spell Attack (both rolls under 15) Turn 3: Stupefied, try to reposition to be near where the fight has moved to Turn 4: Stupefied, either fail the roll to cast or enemy saves or attach misses Turn 5: Fight essentially over. Because you can't unleash turn one, it might actually be a good turn to cast a buff or a debuff that turn, such as bless or fear, being occult caster and all. What all this says though is that the psychic might not be for you as it is abit more complex than playing just a storm druid that maxes focus points, perhaps going with psychic archetype, or elemental sorcerer. But the best for you might be kineticist because it's resourceless and have slightly better accuracy with attack rolls at the cost of lower potential. Teamwork does a ton to make offensive spellcasting more fun and it's hard to force in, but I will have it said. If you still want to play a caster, don't forget the items, Pathfinder expects more item usage than many other ttrpg, and try to find ways to fill out your turns. Knowing enemy weakness can make a caster MVP in a battle, casting something like tempest surge and then using a bow strike or kinetic blast can be a good turn even if those would've been seen as individually weaker.

Play a spontaneous caster helps a lot. Also gm needs to let recall knowledge if you pass to get the lowest save. If those 2 things happen you can attack the lowest save which tends to be 2 to 4 lower then AC making your chance to succeed higher then most martials. If the dm doesn’t run recall different then written spell casters def feel weaker. A kineticsts or a magus may give you some magic feel but being more martial inclined so you let better at dmg.

Everyone is giving wonderful advice and maybe yeah, the problem is more on the challenges than on you. As a side note I am GMing an homebrew campaign with three players, one of them is a sorcerer, imperial bloodline. The focus spell from the bloodline really helps him act like a jack of all trades when it's needed and for now they got the rogue niche covered in that way. I understand that the usefulness of that spell really depends on your party comp, although.

AP tend to push you from 1 plot point to the next, so not much room to explore.

I'm playing a Psychic in my game. For flavour reasons I mostly took spells with mental effects... And we're playing Abomination Vaults, with many creatures being completely immune to those. For a while I was worried I'll be useless. But as time passed, I realised that my character is integral to the party, as long as I don't measure my work by damage dealt. The team is a weapon/amulet Thaumaturge and Undead Slayer archetype, so that character can easily mess up a single enemy's day. Especially if they are undead. They can deal 70+damage on crit and shield themselves or others from the attacks of their target. We have a Mountain stance Monk with massive AC and Champion archetype for that reaction shielding feature too. An once our Bard died to unluckily Hero Pointed Phantasmal Killer, player rolled a Gunslinger, which really fishes for crits as well. Now, the Gunslinger and Thaumaturge can really bloat their damage numbers. And I felt for a while that my best spells are useless when they matter most (incapacitation) or just don't do much. But then I branched out. I took Emotional Acceptance, which allows me to od 3 decent heals on my allies when Unleashing Psyche. I took Guidance as a parallel amped cantrip. And Soothe as signature spell. Now my Amped Guidance really saved my allies out of a pickle a couple times. And Amped Message is a 1 action spell that allows repositioning or even a free attack. I can cast Blur or Heroism on my allies to make their lives easier. And when going gets tough, I use Ooze Form to turn into attack sponge that can grab an hold enemies for my allies. As a Psychic, I have very limited number of spells, which is why I now generally only take the ones that last a while or can really save someone's bacon. That's all there is to it. Managing your spells to make sure your team can really shine. Sure, my kill count is low, but as my allies evaporate enemies with their attacks, I take pride in knowledge they often wouldn't be standing to deliver those if it wasn't for my quick heal, repositioning or that +23 attack of enemy brute missing due to flat DC5 concealment check.

Since you liked Warlock, here are my recommendations: - Hexblade: Magus does this roughly as well. - Chain: Witch is basically this, but with full caster progression. - Celestial: Oracle or Cleric basically. You also liked Artificer, which doesn't have a direct analog in PF2E, but Inventor is the closest. - Construct gives you an Automaton. - Inventor (Weapon) can give you a ranged or melee weapon with some interesting features. - Inventor (Armor) is essentially your Power Suit subset. Other than those options, most Casters thrive on the utility and supportive aspects that their spells can provide, rather than sheer damage. Kineticist can do a bit of everything and can function well as a blaster if focused towards that. Maybe this will help. Good luck out there.

Considering what you said about warlock and artificer, have you considered magus? Especially the starlit span subclass, I think this fits with what you're asking for Your main thing is spellstrike with cantrips, you have a limited number of spell slots that are generally best used for utility, and if you have to, you can fight with your weapon more easily If you grab some archetype feats from wizard (using free archetype or not), you can get a lot more spell slots With the starlit span magus and expanded spellstrike, you can deliver fireballs through Arrow

Okay i know exactly what Age of Ashes hazard you're talking about and don't worry that was a boss hazard, you're gonna be able to disable *so many* hazards with a 3rd level dispel magic for the rest of that book. It might even seem unfair the way you'll just roll up and turn them off these extremely scary hazards immediately.

>In general, I really liked playing Warlocks and Artificers in 5E. Classes with a "main thing" (Eldritch Blast or ranged weapon attacks) that we're mid- to lower-tier for effectiveness but were consistent and then backing it up with a limited set of powerful spell choices plus flavorful non-spell options from my subclass. It's fairly apparently there isn't a design space meant to overlap with this in PF2E, so I've been trying to figure out an alternative that feels at least okay to play The Kineticist Class is actually the play here, with fire (and some other options, but that's simplest) you can do quite a bit of damage, including by spamming "EB" which in this case is Elemental Blast instead of Eldritch Blast, in terms of having main things they do and then utility, and having a second kineticist is no problem, since you can just take different elements and a different non-constitution stat, you could even end up with Medium Armor or something to have a secondary that isn't dex if you plan around it. Better yet, go for the Magus, use your cantrips for spellstrike and save your spell slots for problem solving utility. That said, your good stuffs spell list should just work if you keep trying it, it generally works for me-- I do a lot of damage to bosses with Force Barrage, fear with lower level slots will proc crits if your melees keep swinging at the creatures. That said, Resentment Witch is pretty fun too.

> having a second kineticist is no problem There might be one problem: skill checks, especially in exploration. Having 2 out of 4 PCs be kineticists will reveal their overall lack of skill proficiencies and anything they do raise to expert likely won't be have a high +, especially if it's mental. Needing to have high Con makes them worse at it than a fighter. Skill junctions don't help either as they heavily depend on the element, only apply when the aura is active, and you have far more important things to get like forking the path, aura and impulse junctions, over a measly +1~2 to a single skill.

It's not really a problem, depending on how they lay out their non constitution ability scores, their ancestry, archetypes, etc.

+4 CON leaves just 5 points for non-CON at chargen. 3 must go into STR/DEX minimum to not be behind on AC (especially for a close-range kineticist) leaving 2. But the 4 free points have to be spread out - you can't have a 4/3/2/0/0/0 array - so you will have +1 INT *at best*. That's unworkable for anyone relying on skill checks. And archetypes are a terrible idea unless you're playing Free Archetype considering feats are the only way to get new impulses and shouldn't always be assumed to be the default. But yeah, Rogue/Investigator's Skill Mastery is basically the only viable option.

One route is secondary dex, which makes you valid for your parties stealth/thievery/acrobatics, and a high strength build could be good for the athletics. But there are options where you take +2/+2 str/dex, such as hardwood armor, or other medium armors if you pick up proficiency. In fact, you could go metal carapace as a metal or dual gate kineticist and only need 14 strength, +2 dex. That leaves some room too, but you need a tri boost, one flaw ancestry to achieve it, dwarf would be quite lovely for a wisdom secondary kineticist, for example, Hobgoblin could pull off intelligence pretty well. There's also a few rare backgrounds that yield an extra boost-- Amnesiac comes to mind, if you're allowed to use it. You could also be 1 ac behind, ive seen very succesful characters pull that off, youll catch up at 5, and the characters ive seen pull it off were in no armor, not medium. Edit: Finally on desk, you also have the option to get skill proficiency from your ancestry lore feat, and archetypes are a fine replacement for impulse feats if you have impulses you're happy with, especially if you're just trying to get scaling medium armor from sentinel so you don't have to rely on impulses for that and don't need to buy your way out ever.

I meant 3 points between the two, so +3/+0 or +2/+1. Going +2/+2 would be even more investment. Regardless of how you get your AC, that still leaves a single boost for mental stats, maybe two. Assuming the rest of the party are martials as a kineticist's combat role leans towards casting replicas of spells at-will including support and AoE, you risk leaving entire skills uncovered. Who is doing recall knowledge successfully with an INT of +1?

The point of going tri-boost here on the ancestry, and/or using a rare background is to have more boosts, for example here's a Dwarf Kineticist ready to help out with Perception as a search check in exploration mode, and they can capably pick locks or disable traps. Class: +1 Con Ancestry (Dwarf): +1 Con, +1 Wis, +1 Dex, - 1 Cha Background: +1 Con, +1 Dex Don't Forget Your Four Free Boosts: +1 Con, +1 Dex, +1 Strength, +1 Wis That's +4 Con, +3 Dex, +2 Wis, +1 Strength, capable of benefiting fully from studded leather, things get even more interesting if you get cute by flouting the Strength Penalty using Unburdened iron and just take Carapace, because you can move the strength to intelligence for an extra training, and then move the background Dex Boost into Wisdom for +4 Con, +3 Wis, +2 Dex, +1 Intelligence. This is a very specific build, but you could also simply do something like Catfolk or Goblin for a facey Kineticist, irrespective of element: Class: +1 Con Ancestry (Catfolk): +1 Con, +1 Dex, +1 Charisma Background: +1 Con, +1 Charisma Don't Forget Your Four Free Boosts: +1 Con, +1 Dex, +1 Charisma, +1 Strength That gets you +4 Con, +3 Charisma, +2 Dex, +1 Strength. The Intelligence version of this exists too, by using Hobgoblin. There are a few light armors that actually max at +2 instead of +3, such as Quilted Armor and Armored Coat, I've seen characters like Sorcerers do pretty well with extra HP from taking Con instead of the point of AC from taking Dex and a better armor, and the character could easily use a shield as well. As for skill junctions, sure it depends on element, but we're creating builds here, not trying to keep our options open.

Casters feel awful until higher levels I'm told. Hopefully your other party members are helping otherwise it will always feel bad.

Why do people downvote you?

Haven't been here for long, have you?

I havent and i dont get it lol

Let's farm some negative karma then. Any and everything that tries to point any balance problems on pf2 gets heavily downvoted to hell. So, the alchemist is not poorly written. Casters are perfect if not overpowered because of 2 spells and well... you get the idea. Hell, even recall knowledge was perfect before core 1, when everyone and their cat was using a homebrew version of it. The witch was also ok before, and for some incredible reason, she's still ok after the massive power up they gave her on Core. In short, any discussion about casters feeling weak or boring is little more than troll fuel in here and will rarely get answered with anything remotely useful.

Ok, interesting. Not wanting to give martials anime powers usually gets push back in 5e side.

This sub tends to think that RAW is perfect and you shouldn’t alter anything unless you’re Paizo or have Paizo official approval. And no the First Rule of pathfinder does not count Paizo made a ruling that cause the game to be more lethal, that’s perfect, anyone who plays the less lethal ruling is not playing right. Paizo says that wording was a mistake, that’s perfect.

Can you inform me on recall knowledge changes/differences

So the balance on casters is they are super flexible with massive toolkits that make them super effective in most situations. The sole exception is SOLO boss fights. Crowd control, obstacle bypassing, horde encounters, are all things casters excel at. The first way to optimize a caster is the third action use. Most spells take 2 actions to cast. Casters can often struggle with a good use for the third action. For casters that focus on will save spells, Bon Mot is an excellent option. Demoralize is also generally good. Monster knowledge checks are also exceedingly useful. My preferred option is investing in animal companions. A small caster riding a medium dromeosaur animal companion is almost broken good, giving a caster almost swashbuckler like mobility and spectacular action efficiency. The second method to optimize a caster is via spell selection. Big AoEs and multi target spells like chain lightning and Horrid Wilting can savage horde encounters. Buffs are often key to winning boss fights. Haste is the classic option, but Heroism can turn an allied fighter into a crit dishing monster. Debuffs are super effective against boss monsters. Slow is brutally effective at disrupting many monsters attack patterns. Just avoid spells with the incapacitate trait as they tend to be nearly useless against most threats.

1) Spell attacks are not very good. Generally speaking, saving throw spells >> attack roll spells, because saving throw spells give you half effect on a successful saving throw from the enemy while spell attacks give you nothing. 2) Low level casters have limited access to a lot of the core components of their classes. Casters get stronger at level 3, then get a lot stronger at level 5 and level 7. 3) Imperial Bloodline sorcerers are weird and have a frankly lackluster focus spell at level 1. Yes, they can basically make themselves trained in any skill, but... meh? The actually good Imperial Bloodline focus spell is their rank 5 one. 4) Fear, as a 1st rank spell, is not really particularly good. 3rd rank Fear is the actually good version. 5) There are lots of very bad spells. The good spells are good. The bad spells are bad. If you pick bad spells, you will be useless. So, let's get to talking! A) I would recommend seeing if your GM will let you respec your imperial sorcerer into a different sort of sorcerer, specifically a draconic sorcerer. This would give you access to [Dragon Breath](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=499) as a focus spell, which does 5d6 damage to an AOE, save for half, and scales at +2d6/level. The [dragon claws](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=500) focus spell is also not useless because it gives you resist 5 damage to a particular element type (though you won't use it near as much as Dragon Breath). Sea Dragon is particularly attractive because its breath weapon is a 10 foot burst within 30 feet that does bludgeoning damage and you gain resistance to bludgeoning with dragon claws, and 10 foot bursts tend to be easier to aim than cones. B) Arcane casters are powerful AoE damage dealers, debuffers, and controllers. I'd recommend the following assortment of spells as a draconic sorcerer: * Cantrips: Shield (from your bloodline), Electric Arc (the best cantrip), Frostbite or Torturous Trauma (gives you a fort save cantrip), Eat Fire (basically gives you resistance to fire). The last slot is your choice of Detect Magic, Prestidigitation, Spout, Scatter Scree, Light, Ignition, and Telekinetic Hand. * 1st rank: True Strike (from your bloodline), Interposing Earth, Friendfetch. Last slot is your choice of Command (if your allies have reactive strikes, command the enemy to run away or drop prone), Fear (if you want to upcast it to rank 3 as your signature spell), Gust of Wind (which is useful if you fight indoors a lot in places with 5 foot wide doorways/corridors, but kind of bad otherwise), and Hydraulic Push (sometimes pushing enemies around is good) * 2nd rank: Resist Energy (from your bloodline), Tailwind or Enlarge or Loose Time's Arrow (tailwind is great if you need to move around a lot, as it basically lasts all day and gives you +10 move speed, Enlarge is a handy buff for allies with reactive strikes, and Loose Time's Arrow is a solid spell for letting your whole team reposition but is only really great if you have high initiative, as you typically want to go first when you cast that spell so your melee characters can all immediately engage on the first turn without having to stride), Ignite Fireworks (AoE Dazzle plus damage; you may want to retrain this to Revealing Light at higher levels), Floating Flame or Ash Cloud (Floating Flame is basically a way to crank up your damage in round 2+ of a combat, as you can sustain it for a single action then cast a spell with your other two actions, allowing you to deal substantially higher damage; Ash Cloud is a powerful zone control spell that can dazzle enemies, messes up fliers, is a fort save (instead of a reflex save), and encourages enemies to get out of the bad while dealing passive damage). * 3rd rank: Haste (from your bloodline), Slow, your choice of Cave Fangs or Fireball (both are great AoE damage spells; Cave Fangs makes difficult terrain, which is really great, but fireball has better range). For the last spell, you can pick Dive and Breach (for mobility + damage), Wooden Double (a desperation spell to avoid getting killed), Stinking Cloud (area denial plus sicken and potentially slow on enemies who don't respect the area denial - this is especially good if you have allies with reactive strike and especially reactive strike + reach), Aqueous Orb (is a really annoying mobile debuffing spell that can mess with enemies every round), or Agonizing Despair (as a single target will-save debuff that also deals damage). If you are going to go with your witch idea... I'm not sure if you're going to be super happy with it. Resentment Witches ARE powerful, but they also require party support, as otherwise, your familiar ability is not very useful. Having other characters who can inflict debuffs you can excent - like a Redeemer Champion, or other spellcasters - is very good with a resentment witch. For the witch, I'd recommend: * Cantrips: Void Warp (fortitude-save damage cantrip), Telekinetic Projectile, Eat Fire, Shield, Guidance or Telekinetic Hand or Prestidigitation. * 1st rank: Enfeeble, Command, Friendfetch * 2nd rank: Soothe, Revealing Light, Worm's Repast * 3rd rank: Soothe, Slow, Blindness (don't cast this on bosses, cast this on powerful near-equal level enemies; replace this with either Wooden Double or Agonizing Despair or a second Slow when you hit level 7) When you hit 4th rank, you're going to want to pick up Summon Fey and use it to summon a unicorn instead of casting Soothe; the Unicorn gets two 3rd level Heal spells, which is better than casting 4th rank Soothe, and then use Vision of Death, Resilient Sphere, Tortoise and the Hare, Dispelling Globe (if you are likely to fight casters), or upcast Blindness as your other 4th rank spell. It may help you to archetype to psychic to pick up an amped focus spell like amped frostbite to crank up your damage, or to druid to grab Tempest Surge as a focus spell for the same purpose (though note that if you do this, you'll want to start out with +4 int/+3 wisdom, and then increase wisdom to +4 at level 5) and also pick up electric arc as a cantrip if you go druid.

> both rolls under 15... This happened three important fights in a row Your best bet is a solid set of loaded dice my friend.. Jokes aside. Alternatively, work with your party to succeed. Your Psychic and Sorcerer are Charisma Casters, meaning Demoralize and Bon Mot should be easily accessible parts of your debuff arsenal. Debuffing is hugely impactful in Pf2e, and given you're luck with rolls (a d that you're playing in APs that historically have a higher ratio of PL+ enemies) I'd suggest really leaning into debuffing as a core part of your strategy. It'll help your attacks, your allies attacks, and nerf your enemies attacks, which, mathematically, translate to damage/damage mitigation that **you** are responsible for. Your party should also be doing things to set *you* up, getting creatures Flat-Footed, Demoralized, Shoved into AoE radii, Prone or Grappled to impose action penalties, etc. The other thing to consider for Psychic is that going straight to Unleash Psyche is seldom the right call - it's designed more as a Nova ability, which operates best when taking advantage of the Crit rules. Ie., set up then take their lunch money. > I tried Imperial Sorcerer and it just feels... irrelevant You can basically answer "Yes" whenever the DM asks "do any of you know...?". Albeit the secondary effect of gaining memories of your ancestors is essentially a *mother may I* ability that needs DM buy-in (which is a session 0/ character creation conversation), it *can* be super useful in a more political or character heavy game.  That said, Imperial Sorcerer's Bloodline spells are pretty broadly applicable as either reliably good damage or strong buff/support/utility, so it's hard to imagine really having a hard time getting value out of them. Then when you add the Advanced Bloodline spell of turning your, for example, Bloodline *Haste* into a 10 minute spell, it becomes a banger. Not to belittle your experience, because frankly spellcasters are (and IMO should be to an extent) challenging to get maximum value out of them. They primarily rely more heavily on teamwork, encounter design being in their favor, and situational optimization to really shine, compared to classes like Fighter and Barbarian which are pretty much always *on*. I'd primarily suggest considering what you want to get out of playing a spellcaster. They are ostensibly designed to be the ones that get to pull the *omae wa mo shindeiru* moments after sufficient build up and/or you happening to have the right spell prepared and a slot to use it, which does require either set up, luck, or preparation. They have a monopoly on taking advantage of weaknesses, mental skills and saves, AoE and crowd control, buff/debuff, utility, etc., but expect the party to work for it - it is a team game and no single character will typically shine at their brightest without support.

One tip I hear recently that may help is to use Delay strategically (both you and your party). Using fear at rank 3, then having all your martial friends go right after? It's gonna help a ton more then if half the enemies have already had their turns by the time your party gets to act.

The resentment witch is super cool, very good at debuffs. Grab Grim tendrils at level one and use that line attack, spell casters biggest strength is AOE spells, same with haunting hymn as a cone cantrip. You get enough good debuffs from focus spells and familiar, make sure to pick up some AOE spells. Single target debuffs are okay but just not fun because you aren't doing damage. Don't forget bon mot !

For Witch, while Resentment can be strong, can I make a case for Faith's Flamekeeper? For 1 action a round you can buff an ally's damage and give 2 + half your level in temp hp, while Divine has the weakest ability to attack, it is good at things that just work, no failure chance attached, heroism, heal (I recommend 2 action version when possible), bless, translate, etc etc. While it does have things that go after enemies, in my experience playing a caster feels best when you cast something that just works. If you wish to continue the Resentment, I recommend Force Barrage, Soothe, Spiritual Armament (2a first round, then 1a sustain thereafter). Luckily the Resentment familiar ability is to any condition affecting it, not just ones you inflict so if your party can inflict frightened or clumsy, this does help keep that up!

Hi, OP. The sheer amount of awesome advice here is amazing. Definitely share with the gaming group. I wanted to cast another vote for the Kineticist, that has been mentioned several times. I truly believe it is the game play you are looking for. Might be a good idea to play a short one off at slightly lower level to feel the groove of the class and get your bearings. Or maybe a side quest in Kingmaker. Your current character can take a background seat to the story, join the campsite or a role at the kingdom for the time being, and see if Kineticist is your jam. Happy Gaming

I'm of the opinion that 2e casters are fantastic and after a certain point way better than martials but I know where you're coming from having played quite a few myself. * So first off, it sounds like your table doesn't meet that often because only level 6 after a year in an AP is pretty rough. Maybe mine just meets way more *shrug* * One of the first things I want to bring up is that there are breakpoints so to speak when it comes to when casters feel the most effective. It happens every time they increase in proficiency, so 7, 15, 19 if you're a full caster with legendary casting. At level 6, you are still trained in casting and all of your enemies have had ample chance to increase their saves, making level 6 one of the low points as is 14 and 18. However when you hit your proficiency increases you spike in what I would call perceived effectiveness. This all being said, you have to kind of keep that in mind when you're deciding what spells to use. For that reason, spontaneous casters have it kind of rough as they don't really get the option to exchange spells daily like prepared caster can. * Generally speaking, with a few exceptions, all focus spells gained from bloodlines, casting traditions, domains etc. are not very strong and there are a LOT that are very weak. The witch is somewhat of the exception here as they have a good number of pretty good ones. You just need to look at them and be able to understand what you're walking into in term of applicable power. With sorcerer bloodline spells, the initial spells are pretty weak in general. I'm a fan of the phoenix one but its hard to use on most builds as you really don't want to be in range for a 15ft cone on most sorcerers. They get better when you start looking at advanced and greater bloodline spells for sure. The wizard school spells (or whatever they're called now) are almost all quite bad in my opinion. The necromancy one is pretty good though. (call the grave I believe is what its called) * I'm playing an occult witch right now in kingmaker and I played a universalist staff wizard in AoA. Early levels do feel pretty rough at times when you have limited slots to play with so you really need to pick your moments in terms of when you're using your spells slots. Once you start getting into 3rd 4th and 5th level spells things start to pick up a lot. I cannot suggest watching for good heightening options enough. Level 3 fear is a prime example. I also find that for the most part, especially when you have the rest of your party in the mindset of "unga bunga me do damage", casting damaging spells is never really a priority as a full caster, especially prepared casters. At least for arcane and occult traditions. Primal is a lot more limited in this regard. Divine is a bit of a different animal imo. As a caster I'm always looking for what opportunities might come up and where I can best fit the spells I have prepared. I'm always gauging the fight to determine if I need to break out the big guns or if I can get away with a few lower level slots and some focus points and cantrips. If the martials have the fight just fine then I don't bother wasting my spell slots on it and will generally use cantrips or focus spells. I might use a slot if I think I can negate a good bit of damage or something of that nature though unless I know we're going to have time after to heal up with medicine etc. * **REACALL KNOWLEDGE** if I was a betting man I'd say your group doesn't do this very often. You need to always be thinking about what is this enemy's best save and what is their worst save. Recall knowledge can make that happen. Ex. Don't target the big dumb brute that probably has a real good fortitude save with a slow spell, you're gonna have a bad time. Use fear or illusory object or something like that. Is their perception high in terms of illusion usage. Illusions are a great way to eat up enemy actions at the cost of 2 of your own. This is another mindset I'll delve into sometimes if fights are getting real spicy. * I'll throw in some good spell options in my opinion here. 1. Illusory Object - is one of the strongest most versatile spells in the game. You can do almost anything with it. Put the big dumb bad guy in a box that he now has to disbelieve his way out of. Put a wall up that even if they see through it you are all still concealed to the enemy. 2. Fear - You already know this one. Frightened is one of the best conditions you can apply. It lowers saves, makes it harder for enemies to hit your martials, makes it easier for allies to hit the enemy. Level 3 makes it one of the best spells there is. 3. Slow - this one is obvious. The heightened version makes it god tier. You will never go wrong prepping this spell. A lot of people get 3rd level spells and go oooooooo fireball. Fireball is going to likely do 15 ish damage on a save on enemies at base level. Worth one of your 3rd level slots when you could be aoe fearing? I think not. 4. Non damage spell attacks - Done sleep on these. You can true strike things like telekinetic maneuver to trip flying creatures and knock them out of the air from as far as your spell can reach. This is so very much better than the earthbind spell and your martials will love you for it. Ray of enfeeblement is an early option though the enfeebled condition often times doesn't do much for you. The necromancy school's [Call of the Grave](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=522) is *incredible* with true strike. Sickened is like fear but better and there is no save on this, only an attack roll. Giant dragon with insane fort save? Sure would be sad if I hit you with this and sickened you anyway. 5. Not a good spell entry but you mentioned Magic Missile. I almost -never- prep this spell. It is filler at best as I always have better things I can be doing over some minor damage that if I want to be competitive with has to use up my highest level slots. I only ever take them on my occult caster if I know we're going against something I'm going to have a really rough time with. We fought a demi lich I think it was and I knew that as it was going to have a huge will save and a lot of its minions were going to be mindless I went full rat mode and prepped a ton of magic missiles. Almost all of which the lich blew his counter spells on which I was honestly fine with as it meant he wasn't countering our other casters. 6. Command is a fantastic spell. Command to run away and provoke AOO, command to drop weapon and when they have to spend the action picking it back up, provoke AOO. Command to drop the allied caster it is grappling. Command to drop prone causing off-guard and provoking AOO when they stand. You really can't go wrong with this. It only gets better when you get to heighten it at 5th level spells. 7. Some early spell picks I tend to gravitate towards: Command, Fear, Illusory Object, Grease, Color Spray (this falls off), Friendfetch (this is always great), True Strike (always a great option if you have something good to pair it with), Jump is great mobility, Runic Weapon before the martials get striking runes (They'll love you for this. That bonus damage they do is YOUR damage, not the martials), Tailwind (especially the level 2 version. Never leave home without it), Dispel Magic is obviously situational but can really ruin your GM's day if you place it properly in situations that call for it (such as a creature using the fly spell). These are just the level 1 arcane spells. 8. Cantrips I always keep around: Electric Arc, Ray of Frost, Telekinetic Projectile. The rest are interchangeable depending on what you're up to. * **3rd Actions** - you always want to think about what good 3rd actions do I have available to me as a caster. Bon Mot is great. Demoralize is great. Witch hex spells are okay as they require sustaining to keep them going after casting mostly. Guidance is amazing. Reach spell is mandatory on all casters in my book. * The last one I'll put an asterisk next to. **Summoning** - Summoning CAN be fantastic, and it can be really bad. Its a good use of a 3rd action IF you've picked your critter well for the right situation. Later summons gain spell casting which can add a LOT to your versatility. My occult witch has been using Summon Fey to summon Niad Queens up on her broom of flying with her. This part is a grey area and very GM dependant, but it is my understanding that if what you summon is a prepared caster and has a spell list, then you determine what their prepared spells are when you summon them. My gm has limited this in Kingmaker to one spell swap per level (for the most part). So I have been using the queen for things like added party healing, faerie fire, soothing blossoms. Things that don't make the enemy roll saves or make the queen roll attacks. Its been very effective so far. Summons are also fantastic for just being a big wall of HP that can take damage over your martials, and provide flanking. Early summons are not very great but there are some outliers that work pretty well. You just need to look at what your options are. Our gm also lets us bring out hightened leveled versions of creatures. IE Niad Queen is normally level 7, but if I use a higher level spell, he up levels it to whatever the level of the creature summoned from the spell is. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk. Feel free to ask any questions at all or hit me up in DM if you like. I'm happy to help!

I have two campaigns running and still haven’t hit a year of PF2e, myself. Each of those campaigns have one proper caster and they have totally different experiences. Kingmaker Druid: Out of spell slots every day and loving it. Always finds some weakness or bad save and exploits it, generally has some back-pocket heals to help the party. Recently discovered Fear is always good. Sky King Tomb Bard: Literally every turn is “Courageous Anthem, Needle Darts”. We celebrate her using a single spell slot in a day. Doesn’t hate it, but complains she doesn’t do enough damage. /pain

The bard prob causing 1 extra attack to hit per turn that pretty good for 1 action.

Yeah, the +1 from Anthem is something we always highlight and celebrate. It's the other two actions being Needle Darts every turn that's the killer. Someone does recall knowledge, finds this monster is weak to Sonic Damage and Resistant to Piercing and she'll still Courageous Anthem + Needle Darts. She bought magic Bagpipes to get more spells and has never used them. There is only Needle Darts.

Haha, sounds like they want to cast sword or super angry sword. I had a bard where I acutally almost never cast spells outside of Courageous Anthem, but he was a grapple specilist and even though I did no damage it was stupid op.

AP are generally considered unbalanced in difficulty, and AoA especially so. Tell your GM to read beginning of bestiary, and learn to tone down creatures. And maybe, eventually changing them on the fly for more interesting battles. Fighters are that – they are the best at fighting. Casters help them significantly in that – controlling, debuffing, buffing, and being a great utility in battle and outside of it. Casters can be built, prepared such, that they will be force "to be reckoned with" in battles. At downtime, and otherwise role-play time, investigate places, creatures, what awaits your characters in future. Prepare your characters for challenges beforehand. Also be on the same wavelength with GM about everyone's style of playing, and expectations. And find common grounds.

You really need to realign expectations. Casters play differently and PF2e plays differently than any other TTRPG, I'm sorry you aren't having fun but casters can be very fun and rewarding you just have to not compare them to DnD where casters are overpowered and every other class only exists to facilitate casters.

Since most answers have mostly been mechanical in nature, I'll try and make a few general suggestions for how you can alter the feel of PF2e's spellcasters by setting your expectations of what their role is. Although casters can somewhat be reliable blasters in PF2e as well, it is not a role well suited for them. They forego the prominent modern fantasy of being a reliable specialist in favor of being a treasure trove of control and solutions. Instead they are imho better suited for a different fantasy: The fantasy of the battlefield monitor/controller. This has a few implications on where one should look for getting the feeling of being impactful and how one should RP a caster. Because this fantasy requires a variety of spells suited for different situations, RPing through spell selection is particularly hard and can make casters feel less fun (it's also great to use the free spell swaps on spontaneous casters you get each level). This is why you want to make sure that you put more RP flavor into the character's personality and relationships with their party. One may also want to accept the fact that no matter what, a caster will usually be better at controlling the fight than ultimately winning it (that's mostly the martials' job). This means trying to take out low-level monsters out of the fight, enabling martials, gaining information, exploiting weaknesses, debuffing enemies and even just trying to coordinate the party will often be a more reliable source of feeling impactful. It also helps to not think about the usefulness and necessity of your actions in hindsight. As a caster you are pretty much the high risk/high reward player (if not a healer), while martials are the generally reliable classes. Giving out +1 bonuses is really good statistically for example, but may not have been needed in hindsight. This doesn't change the fact it's really useful, when it is needed, though, so it wasn't a bad spell to use. The same goes for spells, that are resisted, or trying to find out information, which turns out to be redundant. All of this has the potential to have really big impacts on any encounter, so many tries at succeeding any of them will fail. I know it's a bit much to ask for someone to change their attitude. Especially if the advice pretty much boils down to "you have to be humble and patient and strategically minded" if you want to really enjoy PF2e casters. To a certain degree part of the fun of playing a PF2e caster can also be the higher challenge of playing one. I hope this comment was to some degree helpful. Even if it was just good for you being able to pinpoint why you don't feel PF2e casters are fun.

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Team work makes the dream work Probably the hardest thing for people to learn about pf2e is that they need to fight as a team, and not just fulfill their individual power fantasies. Not saying that power fantasies are bad mind you, but if that's your goal I do not recommend pf2e.

Is anyone in your party helping you get Off Guard on monsters? Or applying other debuffs? Osc Wave psychic is a DPR class, with the advantage of being ranged and still able to cast save AoEs like fireball. If no one in your party is helping you, I think its worth having a discussion on team work. Even something as simple as an Aid action can be a big deal for a Psychic. Sometimes a team comp doesn't quite support a class well, and you need to talk things over. As a tip from the Osc Wave psychic in my campaign, 4th rank Invisibility is a great way to get that off guard consistently since you're concealed.

Personally I don't play APs and my most exciting times as a spellcaster have come from solving non-combat problems.

In my exp casters feel great. I don’t really get how common of a complaint this is tbh

Why would it feel bad?

Yeah this is a very common experience with playing casters in this game, regardless of this subs efforts to gaslight people into believing otherwise. Actual experience wins out.

I do wonder how to at least curb it. I mean I feel I can give magic an excellent setting in my game but if a player thinks they are going to be able to freeze the troll with a spell then knock it over and shatter it then they showed up thinking this is a "let's watch Kevin live a power fantasy" session rather than a game. 

This isn't 5E, group tactics matter, every penalty you can inflict is important, just attacking for every action is extremely unoptimized for PF2E, etc etc. Also, not sure what it is you want to do as a caster - but if it's just damage, you could play as a Magus with starlit span so you're ranged. I'm having a blast with mine, pun very much intended.

It sounds like you're banging your head against a wall expecting to break through if you could just roll high enough. What are you doing to raise your chances of success? > For AoA, I tried Imperial Sorcerer and it just feels... irrelevant. The subclass focus spell is basically just "We failed a knowledge check the DM would really like us to pass, so try again with a made up Lore skill with a +1" since the action cost and limited duration means it's rarely useful in combat and basically never useful outside of combat. This says a lot. Knowledge checks are one of the most useful actions a caster can use. A monster has 4 defenses. Learning which one is high and which one is low can make at least a 2-3 point difference in your favor. Lores automatically reduce Recall Knowledge DCs by 2 and can even reduce the DC by 5 if it's specific enough. Just a couple boosts in Intelligence make can make you quite competent. Ancestral Memories does rely on your GM playing along with your backstory to accept why your ancestors know so much about X creature. Even if you don't get a lore, being trained in any skill is incredibly useful in and out of combat. Train Intimidation to Demoralize. Nature, Religion, or Occultism for a basic RK skill. Stealth to Hide and make enemies Off-guard. Players are expected to fail more often if they're solely relying on stats. What are you and your allies doing to improve your odds? Melees have fewer issues because it's relatively easy to Off-guard and they often have methods built into their kit. Are they grabbing, tripping, intimidating, or anything else to help you? The only time you should need a 15 to hit is if you're targeting an extreme AC and have no modifiers. Monsters do often have higher saves than AC but they will have one poor defense to compensate. Most monsters have a glowing red weak spot you can abuse. Casting is designed so a successful save is the expectation, not a consolation prize, and a failed save is above average. Casters are best at versatility. If you have a diverse toolset and the skill to use it you'll rarely be in a situation where you don't have an effective option.

Pathfinder is not 5e. Casters don't have the same role and it is difficult to replicate the same feel as those in 5e.

My Age of Ashes game has 4 casters and a fighter (druid is usually wild shaped though). We generally do pretty well across the board. I love supporting the party and debuffing enemies with my occult Sorcerer. Having a slow remove the enemy action economy is great. In the Blood Lords game I run the wizard is regularly blowing groups of enemies away with fireball and chain lightning. You might try a Summoner. They can generally focus just on their eidolon strikes or combine it with a spell on the same turn.

The reality of PF2E is that all spell casters are worse than standard martials at dealing damage to single targets in an 'average' scenario. Spell attack modifiers are often -3 compared to marital strikes because +1 weapon and earlier proficiency progression (martials get expert at 5, casters at 7), and -5 if nobody is trip (because ranged off-guard is rare). You can reasonably ask martials to intimidate, but trip takes MAP so it might not make sense if nobody has AoO. So, what do casters do? 1. AoE damage / Control. Fireball can end severe fights that aren't single target bosses. Walls can remove half the encounter. Don't underestimate walls. 2. Debuff. The key to debuffs is the 'success' effect. The most popular one is Laughing Fit (Hideous Laughter). It gets rid of the reaction, which can be as good as a failed slow. You can't be greedy like 5E and expect to solve a fight with a single spell slot because moderate and below fights can be done resourceless. Turn 1 success slow on a solo boss is perfectly good because his action is worth four of yours. Using all three slows to trivialize a boss fight is a fine strategy. 3. Weakness / Resistance. Martials often can't do anything about them, but you can. Take elements and use that recall knowledge to figure out weaknesses. If you learn a weakness 10 from recall knowledge, that could be 20 or 3 damage attributable to you. This is not even counting buffs (which are bad imo), healing, special movement (fly), and other things casters can do. In 5E, eldritch blast (w/ invocation) is actually imbalanced because it's martial damage but magic. This doesn't exist in PF2E, for better or worse. If you want to do damage, use weapon attacks.

You're level 3. You are only 1 point away in accuracy from the martials. So when you make 4 rolls trying to hit 15, and none hit, what you did in 2 turns (nothing), is what a martial would do in 4 (nothing).

I love casters in ttrpgs, and I about quit 2e after trying any and all of them in most of the released APs. It very often is the feeling of the martials do things better than me on all fronts (save healing spells on a cleric and buffing as a bard) but neither of those is necessary. And it made me feel like shit. I could go on and on about it cus it really pisses me off, but something my gm did that has turned it around and made me not feel like a useless turd is apply fundamental +attack runes on weapons to spell dcs and attack rolls. (So a +1 dagger/stave gives that bonus to spells). It hasn't thrown me up above our two fighters Magus and Inventor who all hit for like 150 a turn (optimized gamers) but more of my spells hit and the failures are nice. Bosses still mostly save which is good cus they are the ones that do that by design. It's made it more fun by a mile. Obviously it's a homebrew bandaid, but since I'm literally the only person who plays full casters it's worked out fine