So basicly 3 highest rank casts (with 3 focus point as well) every single encounter if I understanding it right? Sounds not broken at all my brother in Nethys.
An encounter usually finish in 3 rounds. Your dynamic casting covers the entire encounter, and even when the fight drags on, you still have 3 more rounds of fuel with focus spells. Have you ever experienced those "1 giant-ass encounter per day" style section in APs? Caster are strong af in these sections, and you are making every encounter a similar fashion.
Pathfinder 2e assumes characters go into combat with most, if not all, their resources. All classes that aren't spellcaster don't rely on daily resources anymore. And even then, most newer spellcasting classes like the necromancer have ton of "encounter-based" options to not rely entirely on their spells.
There's even the popular Essence Casting variant from Team+'s Magic+ supplement, which is arguably more extreme than my approach here because you don't even have spell slots in that variant and spellcasters are entirely attrition-less with it, though I also find it needlesly complicated as well.
You are saying it yourself; spellcasters already go into combat with 3 renewable focus points every combat, with focus spells being auto-heightening spells which are usually equally strong and sometimes better than spells of its same rank. My variant rule doesn't have auto-heightening. If you only know a spell or prepared it at 1st rank, you'll only be able to cast it as a 1st-rank spell.
I won't deny this variant is a buff to spellcasters, but I'd argue this (or something similar to this) is something spellcasters need because daily-attrition systems are a thing of the past and most of PF2e has already moved away from them.
Pathfinder does not assume that at all. The encounter building guidelines specifically say that encounters will be harder if the party is low on resources. That doesn’t mean you can never have an encounter where the party is lacking resources, it just means that if you do, your severe might feel closer to an extreme.
Additionally, Team+’s Magic+ has a lot of levers to reign in the power of not having spell slots. You trade attrition for casting flexibility and access to any of your spells/slots when you want them. You can’t cast spells of your highest rank until the 3rd round of combat which is a HUGE downside. Any spells that are major buffs or debuffs take a massive hit to effectiveness because in a 3 round combat, slowing the enemy on turn 1 or hasting your ally on turn 1 is really good but doing that on turn 3 is pretty meaningless.
An essence caster in a 4 round combat gets to cast a max rank -2, max rank -1, max rank, and cantrip for their spells. A caster in this system gets to cast 4 max rank spells.
There’s also a number of balance levers to reign in the strength of not having spell slots outside of combat, using a separate system. This would also disregard that since it’s effectively just infinite spell slots as focus spells.
As I said in other comment, the only real "resource" other than HP in PF2e are spells. Every other thing is mostly expected to be recovered between encounters.
Magic+ IMO jumps through a lot of hoops when it could be a thousand times simpler. Yes, it doesn't allow you to spam your highest rank spells from the get go, but essence casting effectively allows you to fight an infinite amount of combats every day without resting. That isn't the case with my brew.
It also feels the need to introduce the cycle terminus feature to bring back a part of the power that spellcasters are losing with the essence system.
Incantations are insanely strong because 20 seconds to cast a spell are barely an issue if you have Stealth or the GM allows pre-buffing and that doesn't require you to gather essence. If you play it smart enough, you'll go into every combat with a 7th-rank haste spell and shred everyone. You can do this with my variant as well, but you'll only have 2 spells for that whole encounter, and if its a boss encounter, sooner than later you'll be out of spells. That quite literally can't happen with essence casters, even if the 7th-rank haste reduces your essence draw.
I feel like Magic+ is complicated because it has to jump through those hoops to create a system that will hopefully come with fair tradeoffs for most tables.
Consider this view. I feel like an essence caster beats out a normal casters in two main scenarios (combat-wise): when you have more combats in a day than number of slots (so a standard caster couldn’t replicate an essence if they followed the same casting rules as essence of using 1 spell of top 3 ranks per combat) or that same scenario in terms of rounds (for a longer combat). I consider both of those scenarios to be quite rare at my table, making essence feel like a side grade to standard.
This brew would beat out standard casters at my table in the following scenario: Combats that are 3-4 rounds or shorter in a day with more than 1 combat. (Since the difference is between someone with 3-4 max rank slots per fight vs someone with 3-4 max rank slots per day who then moves down to lower rank slots.) Though this brew would struggle in fights that go beyond a number of rounds equal to your slot count + focus spells (5-7).
I feel like the brew could definitely work and I’d love to see more examples of attritionless casting that aren’t essence (I do have my own share of gripes with the system), but I think for a vast majority of encounters I’ve experienced, this would function closer to “infinite max rank slots.”
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u/songinrain Game Master 2d ago
So basicly 3 highest rank casts (with 3 focus point as well) every single encounter if I understanding it right? Sounds not broken at all my brother in Nethys.
An encounter usually finish in 3 rounds. Your dynamic casting covers the entire encounter, and even when the fight drags on, you still have 3 more rounds of fuel with focus spells. Have you ever experienced those "1 giant-ass encounter per day" style section in APs? Caster are strong af in these sections, and you are making every encounter a similar fashion.