Why the hate on PF?

Having player choice is nice, but there are SO MANY feats and tons of them are terrible. Half the time they're barely even feats, rather they're feat-enablers for something else down the line. It's very easy to get caught in a shitty feat path and then borked forever if your GM isn't kind.

When people talk about ivory tower design, they're usually talking about the absurd amount of system mastery that's required to determine which feats aren't a waste of space, or which seemingly-useless feats have a god-combo together.

Mostly because 3.5 has a fuckton of bloat/bookkeeping and balance issues up the ass. Some classes are powerful enough to render others completely redundant, while other classes are painfully underwhelming and underpowered unless specific gimmick-builds are used and the countless trap-options were avoided. PF fixes some of these problems but the devs weren't willing to deviate enough from 3.5 to really fix its problems and tried to pretend some of them weren't problems at all.

Some splatbooks also tried to fix the issue, but the system was fucked on such a fundamental level that it's like putting a bandaid over a sucking chest-wound.

Have you ever been to a Pathfinder General Thread?

Pathfinder has become the game of choice for people who want to play furries, little girls, robots, and whatever other magical realm bullshit needs to stay the fuck out of adventure/fantasy game.

Yeah, I did a little bit of research into my first feats(human druid, went with spell focus so I could get augment summoning). We just leveled up to 2, so I have another level to to, but I don't know which feat I'm picking next. Though I know I'm taking nature spell at 5.

the PF general here is hijacked with cancer

That is one thing I've noticed. I know this is Veeky Forums, but the sheer amount of players that I see in /pfg/ that roll little girl warriors that have penises is fucking ridiculous.

Dude every general is cancerous as fuck.

Just go to /vg and go on any mmo general. It's full of erp and other cancers

Pathfinder is 3.5 without understanding the game, WotC began to realize the game was inherently broken so in Krypton's last days they started making subsystems that were interesting, but none of them was inherently better than another (except for truenaming, but we can brush it under the rug.)

But you could run a game with a binder, a shadowcaster, a swordsage, and an incarnate and each could share the stage versus a more traditional party with a fighter, rogue, cleric, wizard then the cleric and wizard would just do everything.

Instead of learning from 3.5's mistakes paizo they doubled down on them, they made fighters need even more feats and made wizards more resilient. And there's shit like Paizo deleting any math posted to their forums and pushing social justice bullshit.

Don't mean to hijack the thread, but what exactly is wrong with GURPS? I mean, it takes a good deal of elbow grease to get into perfect condition, but it runs significantly smoother than most any other system.

Ok, so atleast a part of the hate is just cause, kinda relieved^^
Have only played till lvl 3 and thinking about keeping it below 6 or 12, will see about that. And i already saw some examples from the paizo forums, still nice for idea and rule questions.
What other system would you recommend?
the filename kinda fits the thinking behind that^^
i think its quite a nice board ;)
there are some must haves for low level though, might be a plus or a minus depends on your view
Any tips on how to fix martial/caster problems? I am atm nerfing spells that make others obsolete (invisibility/fly/etc) and having my players discus what spells they take, and "soft-banned" wizards and clerics
Yeah, I informed myself about that, and have banned summoner, and soft banned cleric/wizard, anything else you'd recommend? Which splatbooks are worth to have? maybe something for martials?
Well i've been there, but at least in my group ppl are fairly normal till now^^ I have around 12 players and the wierdest thing i got is 2 tieflings, 1 aasimar and a kitsune, who is only in human form for the last 2 sessions^^

Have you looked at an epic 6 or epic 8 campaign? Those do tend to stem the system's bleeding a bit.

Are there special rules for that, or do you just stop leveling then? what about class features that are unlocked later?

OP, I ran D&D 3.0 ior 3.5 for years. In the last 3 years of that I had come to recognize some but not all of the serious flaws in the game, but I still loved the game, so I tried my best to fix them.

It sort of worked; it worked well enough that we were able to get one good long 3-year game out of the system; but I was having to work harder and harder for less enjoyment for everyone as things went on.

Finally I convinced my friends to try something else. We did 4e, we did new WoD, we did HERO system, and a couple of others. It was fun experimenting.

All the while, Paizo was making money selling people a product that was less fixed than my own homebrew, and its fans treated it as the second coming of Christ because it let them keep using their old 3.5 books and wasn't quite as messed up (at first).

5 years later, the same people are still playing pathfinder and treat it like it's the best thing ever. Mostly they are people who have never played any other system or people who have a hard time keeping a group together.

Do I hate PF? No. It's possible to have fun with it; I have friends that still do it. But, I would never consider recommending the game to anyone. It does a few things well, but there isn't a single thing that it does best except having a million books in print.

Generally it's 'stop leveling at level 6 or 8'
Every X amount of XP later (usually 5k for E6 or 10k for E8) you get a feat to give a semblance of progression
Every 5 feats or so you should increase the CR of encounters a by 1 to increase difficulty

The long and short of it OP is that Pathfinder promised to fix a lot of the issues in D&D 3.x

It didn't.

And a lot of the devs came out about their ignorance and stupidity in several regards.

>Any tips on how to fix martial/caster problems?
There are a few. The first thing I'd do is remove bonus spells based on attributes. This helps rein in the scaling somewhat. You can also ditch all of the corebook classes because they're generally either far too strong or far too weak to make a balanced party, and use splat variants.

Eventually, though, if you aren't just giving martials spell-like abilities e.g. swordsages, you're going to either add more feats and more skills for martials, or add more class abilities, or both.

In older D&D mage classes had higher XP requirements than martials, so they tended to be a bit stronger per level but were always lower level than everybody else. When this was changed to flat XP for everyone, the power discrepancy didn't narrow, it actually got worse. So when a high-level mage or cleric is somebody who can warp reality with their mind or whatever, a high level fighter should be someone who can split a mountain with his sword, or shoot the sun with an arrow to cause an eclipse. If you keep Greek-style heroic mortals and/or demigods in mind as a base for martial homebrews, you'll be in a much better spot than the 3e devs ever were.

For a hobby about doing whatever you want, it sure seems to love making rules telling you what you can't do.

This looks like a good idea, i will check back with my group. I think we will try that
What system did you settle down with? You said as things went on you were having to work harder; at what level range do you think the problem starts? Any quick fixes you might wanna share?

Path of War get thrown around alot in that context, is it any good? I am trying to nerf spells that fill roles other classes should do like fly/invisibility and so on, do you think that helps? Is the slower progression still a viable option? and if yes how much faster should martials lvl?
I am not sure how unusual my "style" as GM is, but i rarely look up rules for unusual act my players do and come up with rules on the fly, if their char could do it i mostly dont mind them doing it (if they pass the roll), so that hasnt been a big problem for me and my group.

Slower progression isn't really an option because the XP cost for levelling a class is fixed and parabolically escalating. It only worked in old D&D because there wasn't infinite multiclassing and the XP curve turned linear after level 10-12. Your only real option is to try to make the classes balanced against each other as much as possible. Spell progression is still perfectly good if you keep to the base class chart. The problem comes in with the minimum 4-6 extra spells that a caster is going to have even at chargen. As characters level up and increase their casting stat, it only gets worse, because they're increasing not only the DCs of their spells but the raw number of spells they get per day.

Reducing the number of spells per day and getting rid of Rope Trick forces a caster to actually think about their plans, rather than just bringing a fuckhuge swiss army knife everywhere and resting after every encounter.

Many people say "GURPS takes too much effort!" or "GURPS is too complicated!" because either don't want to play anything but D&D or because their GMs were incompetent and didn't set clear priorities.

Too many people see a "universal" system and they decide to have people make characters in a vacuum and throw a campaign together that tries to fit these random people together.

>What other system would you recommend?
For dungeoncrawling? B/X D&D, Labyrinth Lord, or Basic Fantasy RPG. All are good, solid systems and you can port a lot of PF stuff into them if you feel the need.

A DSP-only campaign neatly sidesteps the whole caster/martial divide.
Incidentally, that's the only kind of PF I would ever consider playing.

user, how about a no 1pp campaign?

This is all personal opinion, but my beef with Pathfinder and d20 in general is that I don't like the feat system, mostly.

I think I'm echoing a lot of people when I say I just want to build a character and play the game and not feel like I have to play a sort of charop solitaire in order to remain useful. That issue doesn't always rear its head, but the game is definitely not balanced and has objectively shitty options so it's possible to screw yourself if you're not careful. It can really come to a head if you have one player in the group who's well-versed in 3.PF character optimization and is gunning for every bit while everybody else is just muddling through, there can be a major difference in effectiveness between pc's.

If everyone's on the same level it probably works out okay, but I've had a certain distaste for it. If my friends want me at the table for it I'll play because I like my friends, but it's not my game of choice.

Less seriously, there are a metric shitload of 3rd party splats, so socially oblivious fuckwits can mechanically represent any kind of fetish on their brand new waifu of a pc.

Hell is a pickup game of Pathfinder with randoms on roll20. Never do that to yourself, padawan.

A DSP-only game is a no-1PP game.
And DSP is the only company I'm aware of that produces quality content for PF.

A major problem of 3.5E was its unnecessary complexity. PF made it even more complex.

In 3.5 the problems start after 5th level spells basically. I don't have actual experience with pathfinder so I can't say, but from what little I've read that doesn't really change.

Right now I do 5e D&D which has its own problems but is quick and easy to run, and provides a decent list of player options.

But really the best answer is, "get an idea for a game you want to run, then seek out an ideal system for it. Tweak it as necessary."

If that's too much work, any system you work with is going to be fine as long as your players are okay. If pathfinder is working for you, and you don't have a great deal of free time, that's fine, you do you.

If you DO have the time, I would urge you to explore as many other options as you can.

Have you noticed that every PF thread here starts with an anime image of a scantily clad girl?

That should give you a big hint.

Because one person makes the threads on like page 2 after the bump limit and the rest of /pfg/ doesn't want to spam Veeky Forums?

My issue with it is that it requires about 5 core books to run for any knowledgeable group. Everyone wants to use traits and feats and use at least the basic dozen or so classes. 6 if you add the advanced race guide for extra races to play.

I've given up doing characters by hand and only use Herolabs to make them.

The other side is that players can really customize their characters with all of the options.

I still own a range of the books although i usually bring pdf copies to run at the game table.

>Why does everyone apart from /pfg/ hate on PF/3.5?
This board does not really do nuance or rational opinions. For pretty much any game discussed, you are going to see a good number of fanboys who are slavishly devoted to it and defend it aggressively against even the implication of criticism, and another group of haters who viciously attack the product just out of pure spite. More moderate opinions tend to get drowned out.

It isn't necessarily representative of the gaming community as a whole, and maybe not even of the people who read this board. It's just the nature of the environment, so I'd take what you see here with a grain of salt.

>Any tips on how to fix martial/caster problems? I am atm nerfing spells that make others obsolete (invisibility/fly/etc) and having my players discus what spells they take, and "soft-banned" wizards and clerics

Ban Tier 1 and Tier 2 classes. It also gives you a very unique world simply by having these classes.

Because Deendee is awful, not really an RPG, and absolutely filled with terrible mechanics.

Chiefly, Deendee suffers from being an ancient skirmish wargame which people have since its inception been loathe to abandon when appropriate - which is ALWAYS if you want to play a roleplaying game. Deendee is like the Kardashians, it's popular for being popular, it has no actual merits if its own.

The continued focus on pants-on-head retarded, cringe-y mechanics like alignment and class/level/murderpoint based progression in this day and age is frankly embarrassing and depressing. So many people come up through Deendee, permanently scarred, with a kind of brain damage-induced tunnel vision in every other, much better, ACTUAL roleplaying game, and 3.pf is the absolute WORST offender in that regard.

Don't listen to faggots who say deendee is good, or acceptable, or whatever; it's shit, and it's radioactive. The best we can hope to do is isolate the affected in their own filth, away from the RPG community.

so what do you play

>Why does everyone apart from /pfg/ hate on PF/3.5?
Because, objectively speaking, it's a goddamn terrible system.

I have already banned the headbands of X and replaced them with Automatic bonus progression, so that might weaken them in the regard of bonus spells and DC. Also banned rope trick now, thx
Are the psionic Classes balanced against the Path of war ones?
Im am lucky, that all my players have just started and, so far, picked feats for fluff instead of crunch. I am the only offender in that regard, and i try to scale myself down a bit. But yeah i have noticed that, when we did a oneshot at lvl5:
i build a swashbuckler and the BBEG wasnt able to touch me...
Well it is working atm and im not sure if i can get my players into another system, but i#ll check some out. Any special mentions you'd recommend?
D20pfsrd has most of the things i need, and if my players found something they gotta show me the source and i'll check if i allow it.
I kinda thought so and will take it with a grain of salt^^
Would it be possible not to ban those classes and simply not give them lvl 7-9 Spells? Maybe give them some new class feature as a replacement? Because all the lvl 9 casters are tier 1 and 2 in the lists i found. Or is it the volume of spells they are getting?
Bait? What system would you recommend? Why isnt it an rpg in your opinion?
Any flaw you found that hasnt been mentioned yet? What are your recommendations?

>Are the psionic Classes balanced against the Path of war ones?
Pretty much. DSP content is generally well-balanced among itself.
Sure, there are still some exploits, but unlike Paizo's stuff, you don't run the risk of some player characters accidentally making others obsolete.

>look up Rope Trick
>level 2 spell
>most of the description explains how "it's totally anchored in a super-special-snowflake extradimensional plane that's even more special than the usual extradimensional spaces"
I'm... starting to understand what might be wrong with this game.
(inb4, never played PF in my life)

>Why does everyone apart from /pfg/ hate on PF/3.5?
Clearly you've never looked at /pfg/ if you say that they don't hate pathfinder.

>This is a fallacy pushed by 3.PF apologists.
>I don't play anything at all ever.
Most of the popular games are even shittier mechanically than PF - Rifts, WoD, Apocolatte World, etc.

How is AW mechanically shitty?
It's mechanically far more solid and coherent than most systems I know.

It has exactly one mechanic that turns everything into "raise your stats" and "focus on this stat for everything", and one mechanic for "fuck with people and get a bonus"

It's a single step up from FUDGE.

Never played it myself, but I heard it has flaws!!! *gasp*[/ spoiler]

heres the short explanation to bash it in
What it begins with:
>casters are unbalanced
Typically, when you are a developer of something like a game, particularly a roleplaying game, you want to give players freedom of strategy. and as such that means giving equal opportunity to the myriad of both magical and nonmagical classes, while also providing innate drawbacks to each that players will have to account for.
>in pf, it takes the same amount of time, with less effort and danger to simply wave your hand and kill 50 Guards than it does to hack them to bits like Grogar BloodButts over there.
this Creates a thing called "Dominant Strategy". It means players will follow the path of least resistance and take the route that gives them the access to LITERALLY RESHAPE THE WORLD in a standard action rather than do the hard yards of character development.
>but its a roleplaying game, surely that doesn't matter!
it -shouldn't-, but it does. and it matters because the system you use is the basis for your roleplay. in something such as GURPS or Tristatdx, there is a significantly stronger focus on the roleplay aspect of the game, lifting pressure from the players.
If you have a good GM (very rare) they will build their campaign to suit your party, an will encourage you to pick and build whatever you like instead of pressuring you to follow the caster supremacy flow.
>well surely every GM should be doing that anyway
they should, and even in a world without munchkins
it still doesn't fucking work. Why? because the party's token wizard still has the ability to oneshot the final boss with a wave of his hand and the utterance of "SPELL ICUP NIGGA" with negligible cost and zero risk.

Now with caster supremacy out of the way, on to the other issues
>The entire system is broken and a breeding ground for fucking munchkins because of casters being not metaphorical-but literal gods.

someone else with even fewer scruples should post it too

So you haven't even read AW. Good to know.

Okay, so the main point i need to address is caster supremacy? My ideas up to now is to remove strongest spells, maybe spells lvel 7-9 completly, nerf spells that render other skills obsolete, counter the 15min Adventuring day, make magic more unreliable and easier to counter by introducing a mineral that can be smelted together with iron/etc and grant magic resistance and induce wild magic, meaning your spells sometimes dont work as well and sometimes work far better than normal.

Using a different system already fixes some of those problems though, I don't see why people hack 3.PF into something unrecognizable instead of just playing a different game. 4e fixed caster supremacy and if that's not for you, 5e brought it back but in a much lesser form. Low level 5e games have no problems with it. And that's just D&D.

While it's not a terrible system, and almost no system manages to hinder a good group from having fun with it, there are simply better options almost no matter what it is you want out of it. 5e streamlines everything in such a way that almost anyone would recommend it over other editions because it's just simpler to run and play without removing anything of value.

all potentially good ideas, user.
this is what a lot of good gms do: houserule to bring mages down to scale
fortunately one of the good things about PF is that it doesnt take too many steps to do this
other ideas I've heard are:
>ALL spells require material components based on spell level, either being some obtainiable resource (mana powder, for example)
>casting spells are always full round actions, Quicken spell Metamagic reduces this to standard action
>casters must always roll concentration (you are concentrating to cast the spell, so it makes sense). no implied penalty
>arcane failure chance of [insert number here e.g. 33%] on all combative spells
>removal of all spells that bypass skills e.g. Knock, Dominate Person
and some others.

The thing is the best spells are in like the level 3-6 area. At the point you're at, you might as well play a different game.

Is right, if you want a similar tone, go with 5e. Caster supremacy is almost nonexistent at higher levels, from experience.

In the time it would take you to do that, you might as well write your own system from scratch.

>Caster supremacy is almost nonexistent at higher levels, from experience.
While there isn't a big problem with supremacy, my issue is more that martials have nowhere near as many interesting things to in combat. Lower levels it doesn't matter as much but when the casters can cast Wish it doesn't feel great to just get more damage. Casters may not be way better, but they are much more versatile and interesting.

>much more versatile
That is pretty much the core of Caster supremacy, or more specifically, the Linear Warriors Quadratic Wizards problem.

Martials can do one thing: Whack stuff. As they level up, they can whack stuff a little better.
Casters can do multiple things. As they level up, they can do even more things, do those things more often AND can do every single one of those things better.

I miss the times when the only answer to this would have been
>Lurk moar, faggot

said issues are cured by solutions in
Wish is "bargain with the GM to pull a fiat to cause major bullshit or pick from a bunch of witch hexes on roids" and like resurrect, the former gets outlawed for ending up being so lawbreakingly bad
and quadratic casters gets legswept when you remove all their bypass utility spells, suddenly all they're good for is Spellcraft and UMD rolls and blasting aka. Ranged damage barrages which can be further nerfed by giving NPCs magic retardant armor
one of the more creative ways I've heard of curbing casters is to cut their prep slots severely.

4e does so nicely by making fighters quadratic as well, which is why I'd recommend it, though I realize a lot of people disliked it (even if for some it was as simple as the name being "powers" and they didn't want a superhero game).

This sounds ropey and tedious, on top of being almost as much work as learning a new (similar and simpler) system.

>p6 codex is dead

If you go that route, buffing fighters using stuff like Tome of Battle/Path of War or other cool variants is better than just cutting too much stuff from casters.
Limiting their out-of-combat abilities AND their combat ones would just send them to the ghetto together with martial classes and d&D doesn't work well with low-power campaigns.

>Any tips on how to fix martial/caster problems? I am atm nerfing spells that make others obsolete (invisibility/fly/etc) and having my players discus what spells they take, and "soft-banned" wizards and clerics

This is the true answer. 3.pf requires house rules to make it something resembling playable. Fanboys will then take these house rules and declare that the game isn't broken because you can fix it. Protip: if it's not broke, you don't need to fix it in the first place.

It's also responsible for creating a generation of players who can't handle plots more complicated than "I hit it with my sword/fireball" because it's more of a skirmish game than an RPG, with rules focused almost entirely on combat.

Also try not to use emoticons/emoji/whatever; it will eventually get you shit on for not conforming to board culture.

Yeah, nah bro, it's always down to the group. 4th introduced HP bloat on steroids and more class restrictions than 2nd edition, with far fewer skills and minimal and shitty guidance for non-combat. 3.5 gave players a good broad tapestry to build on, and for every shout of caster supremacy I've seen, it's because the DM or group didn't live up to the game's balance.

>but I need to sleep for 8 hours after that dungeon
Suck it up buttercup, we're trying to outrace the cavalry to the castle. Make your damn roll to avoid fatigue while you're at it, Mr Low Fort save

>they stole my spellbook
Give the damn rogue your glasses wizard, he'll be able to pick the lock with one arm and you can mend spell them later.

>etc etc
When groups gloss over balance shit and then bitch about problems that they've created in doing so, it's a people problem. Not a system problem.

This is the problem. Right here.

Why the hell would you go through all this trouble hacking the system to pieces when you could just play a different game that doesn't require all the work?

3.pf fanboys cling to the system as if their life depends on it, constantly hacking it into something unrecognizeable or trying to fit it into a genre it's not designed for, when there's hundreds or thousands of other games that already do what they want without all the "fixing."

Just because the GM can bypass the problem doesn't mean the system doesn't have the problem, and especially new groups can not be expected to play around a system's imbalances when they do not fully understand them yet, in which case it becomes a problem. And even if you can limit it in play as the GM, it's just more work than playing a system that is already balanced.

There are no perfectly balanced systems, and there arr many which have imbalances that people don't recognize until they achieve the same level of system mastery as most 3.PF players already have in their system.

WoD for instance. Lots of people claim "it was balanced" but it really, really, really wasn't ever balanced. And when you come across a person who knows in what way it is imbalanced, you get people who wreck campaigns because suddenly everyone knows the tricks that break the game.

There are always flaws, and there are always those who exploit them. that they are more obvious and talked about in 3.PF is because they've had a longer time to uncover and exploit them all.

>There are no perfectly balanced systems
This is the most BS argument.

>There are no perfect meals, so let's just eat this banana peel from the garbage.

>There are no perfect doctors, so just go see that hobo with a scalpel.

They are not just "more obvious", they are bigger too. Are you seriously saying that 5e is just as imbalanced but just hasn't had enough time for people to figure it out yet? There are a few high level "exploits" like Wish/Simulacrum but they are very few. More options means more potential for exploits, like nuclear Ghandhi and Druid now with UA, but just in the base system there are way fewer exploits and imbalances. With the new UA Ranger fix there's really only one option I'd discourage a player from picking (Wot4E monk) and a few I'd warn them about for being not as good as others (berserker barbarian, bladelock and sorcerer) but that's at most 1 tier in difference from the rest.

The biggest flaw with Pathfinder isn't the system, it's the cancer that currently consuming it.

>false equivalency is correct arguing
Nice try.

Rifts. WoD. 3.PF.

These are the most well known games in the world, and not a single one is balanced. Obviously, balance isn't as important as fun.

>"Other systems do it better!"
Really, they do. Except they clearly aren't as fun because there are less people playing them.

You seem not terribly bright.

Fun has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Advertising budget and age does.

Most people know DnD exists. They don't even know the others do.

And people are finding more and more flaws in 5e all the time too.

There's also a few built in flaws that people liek you deliberately ignore - the CR system for example (a CR 12 enemy casting 9th level spells is surely not going to kill my 12th level party), the fact that you can get to level 20 and go no higher, and how about those totally balanced sorcerers and rangers in core?

and yes, there will be more faults found, and you're already advocating homebrewing and fixing the system yourself, limiting player choices and avoiding 'trap options'.

So, yes, I'm saying there will be more flaws the longer it gets played.

At least Paizo has recognized that Tier 3 is the way to go and has focused recent classes, builds, and systems to focus on that. They are fixing the system the slow and sure way, which WotC refused to do.

Gee I wonder..

Because rules-heavy settings are boring as fuck, but I would say the same for 3/4 of the rpg around... Go play CoC

...

I don't understand

Go to /pfg/ and you will understand

So you can't explain it then? Not doing a good job convincing me

Because unlike you I have had constant issues with 3.5 unless the DM knew about everything I hated about the system ahead of time and corrected for them, usually by banning classes, and PF did less than nothing to correct for them. It is not fucking fun to roll up a sword and board Fighter without knowing that they're garbage ahead of time and end up being far less useful than an animal companion is.

Here have a last (You) from me. It's fresh and tasty.

They didn't just not fix the issues, they actively broke stuff that was working before and that outweighs the stuff they fixed - like Paladins, eventually - by a mile.

It's fairly self-evident if you read /pfg/.

>At least Paizo has recognized that Tier 3 is the way to go and has focused recent classes, builds, and systems to focus on that.
Don't lie, Paizo manages to crap out PrCs and 9th level casters. I stopped playing in 2015, and somehow doubt they publicly announced major development changes.

When a game is so broken that the most obvious fix is to ban core classes and spells, you know something went wrong

'Enforcing spell components' is a shitty idea that devotes more playtime to spellcasters than the game already does.

I would take current /pfg/ in a heartbeat over the cesspit of retardation that was Pathfinder discussions prior to about 2013 or so. Having people unironically argue that Warblades were unnecessary because Pathfinder's Fighter is mechanically stronger than them was the last straw for me.

>At least Paizo has recognized that Tier 3 is the way to go and has focused recent classes, builds, and systems to focus on that. They are fixing the system the slow and sure way, which WotC refused to do.
Yeah, Arcanist and Kineticist sure are great T3 classes while Psionics, Tome of Battle and all the other subsystems WotC released did nothing at all to fix things...

WotC did a hundred times better than Paizo at actually fixing the issues. Paizo still focuses on catering to retards who think Barbarian is OP because of how much damage it can do(see Unchained Barbarian).

And how OP Monk is because they could block a single attack per round.

And how they accidentally made a Cavalier archetype better than the class it borrowed from, so they needed it a month after the book both were printed in. Or Jingasa, or "nerfing" scarred witch doctor by making it hilariously broken. Or any other retarded errata.

The issue mostly comes with class balance a trap feats. So a fighter no matter how optimised will not compare to a casual wizard after about 5th level-ish. This goes for both systems. The game just doesn't balance it very well.

The other glaring problem is trap feats, there's a select few feats worth taking and the rest are garbage, this was even intended in the original design (can't remember the term the development used pillars or towers, someone here probably has the image)

As for pf, if you want to see 80% of what's wrong with pf, look up one of the designers statements about monks.

A lot of people think that 3e had major problems with caster supremecy usualy due to one of the following things
>Fighters not using enough magic items
>Taking the major advantage in skill points wizards had over fighters which was the systems biggest flaw and extrapolating that to mean the wizard was op in other ways as well
>listening to people who did the above

Then pathfinder came back and was worse in literaly every single way except capstone abilitys and making the skill point alocation even worse and in general making the caster supremecy real alongside a huge host of other flaws

Such a huge drop in quality is bad enough but if you have misconceptions about 3e it looks even worse in comparison.

And then to top it all off for some godawful reason a lot of 3e players moved to pathfinder which makes retards who think they are still the same game (even setting aside quality there was enough changes that they cannot really be called the same game) think it was a case of 3abbos refusing to try anything new.

Sadly as the extra shit icing for some reason many pathfinder players do indeed refuse to play anything but pathfinder.

*then pathfinder came along
Not sure why i said back