Wow, there's a lot of useless, vitriolic dreck in the OP, much of which is out-and-out false.
FrankTrollman wrote:No. In this case, the "playtest" was a lie. Destructive playtesting was not only not encouraged, it was actively and specifically rejected. The Paizo leadership only wanted to hear about whether people had fun or not. Which means that the most pried playtest reports were seriously ones in which the players spent all night in immersive roleplaying or where the fun centered around "awesome" artifacts that broke the rules. In short - things that didn't use the rules at all and didn't demonstrate anything. People who actually ran apples to apples comparisons, same game tests, or repeated experiments to get controlled results or regressed bugs were not only ignored, they were banned from their forums.
False, and a quick trip through the still-open Playtest Forum proves it so. I personally made quite a few posts that brought up mechanical issues and I've not even received a warning, let alone a ban.
Pathfinder does the opposite, and mysteriously makes spellcasters more powerful and fighters less powerful. Thus, it's more unbalanced.
False. Spellcasters are less powerful; spells are weakened, spells per day are decreased, and non-spellcasting class abilities that were considered overly powerful before (ie, wild shape) are nerfed. At the same time, fighters are more powerful: they get the same number and list of bonus feats, but now they also get actual class features.
Specialist wizards essentially don't even have spell selection limits anymore, but they still have bonuses/
Again, demonstrably false. Read the Wizard preview. While it's true that there are no TRUE banned schools, it takes two spell slots to memorize a "banned" spell. That's a spell selection limit.
Anything you'd want to do with combat feats costs more feats now. The +4 bonus from Improved Disarm has been divided into two feats, for example. Spell Focus is unchanged of course.
At the VERY least, this is misleading. We have absolutely no indication of how the feats section has changed from Beta to Release. We do know that they significantly boosted the strength of Power Attack over the Beta version, though.
Power Attack, they nerfed it.
They streamlined it. Instead of having to keep a spreadsheet at the table to figure out the optimal reduction to provide the biggest damage increase, Power Attack is now -1 to hit/+1-3 damage per 4 levels. It IS less powerful, but it's also much easier to use, and it's still a good investment for a 2h fighter.
Not only are the rules specifically in a state of flux, with Jason going in and rewriting stuff with and without blog messages to that effect all the time
And this is the point that most clearly indicates that the Trollman has a serious bias in play, here. At the time of the Trollman's post, he was telling an
out-and-out lie, because the rules had been frozen for several months at that point (because the rulebook was already out to the printer and
couldn't be changed even if they had wanted to).
Those options don't seem to exist in Pathfinder, so every Bard is doomed to gradually lose ground to mediocrity and finally obscurity in all fields and never justify their existence or regain the spotlight in anything.
False. You can use Sublime Chord, Seeker of the Song, Lyric Thaumaturge, etc, completely or almost completely unaltered. As for Snowflake Wardance, it's an easy conversion, depending on how literal you want to be -- either you make it use 1 round of music per round of dance, up to a maximum of the duration described by the feat, or you use 1 round of music to activate it and it lasts the duration described by the feat.
Is Polymorph Fixed Yet?
No.
That depends greatly on how you define "fixed". It's no longer an instant-win-melee-combat button, which was the major game balance problem. There's still the "finding the perfect critter" problem (which is a meta-game, non-balance problem), but since the stat gains are static and the granted special abilities fairly low-key, that's really only something you have to do if you're OCD about maximizing every possible facet of your character.
These have a tendency to be shit like demon claws that are frankly really lame.
... at first level. On the other hand, they also have the tendency to be things like "cast metamagic spells without increasing casting time" at the higher levels. But that'd be telling the WHOLE story, eh Trollman?
So while the Necromancer wizard gets a free doubled control pool on his skeleton horde, the Sorcerer gets his choice of a wide variety of flavors of bullshit melee combat schticks that he will literally never us because he's still a fucking arcane spellcaster.
Ah, yes, the 5 first-level "at will" abilities out of 9 or 10 bloodlines that have a melee touch component. None of the bloodlines have any melee combat schticks past first level except for Aberrant, which gets extra reach with touch range spells.
No. Like pretty much anything else that you'd really want someone to do a giant overhaul on because the original system didn't work and no one uses it or integrates it into other subsystems, Jason pretty much ignores it.
The stated goal of PFRPG is to maintain backwards compatibility. Blasting them for not doing a giant overhaul of an original system while at the same time blasting them for not being backwards compatible enough is just more blatant bias.
If you're a Dread Necromancer you can cast remove disease spontaneously if you happen to worship that goddess whose name starts with U - so all of them presumably do.
Demonstrably false, since the Dread Necromancer isn't open content and thus Paizo is unable to touch it to provide a bonus like you claim they have.