Sources of designer comments#
Balance options around their performance ceiling, rather than the floors or the middle#
There’s a ton of permutations that could happen, but a weapon should be balanced to the performance ceiling otherwise it isn’t balanced at all, and the ceiling here is pretty straightforward- can the player control the engagement distance? Whenever that answer is yes, the [60ft range option] offers strictly better action economy on two different axes, which equates to more damage dealt and less damage taken (there’s also a point in time where less damage taken also converts into more damage dealt, that being when the action economy required to keep you alive could be used to continue DPR on the enemy but is instead spent keeping you functioning.)
As I mentioned, balance is about ceiling, not floor… Just about everything in PF2 is balanced against two very simple questions
“What is the most effective thing someone could do with this in a tactical environment?”
and “What is the most effective thing of this type anyone can do in a tactical environment?”
Those two questions establish your design ceiling. Everything below that is “safe” design space where you can innovate with different toggles and switches, but you should never break that ceiling, otherwise you’re introducing power creep.
The ceiling does not assume you have the perfect spell at all times#
The game does assume that e.g. your wizard, using those resources, likely has a spell that can affect a low-Will brute and some option on hand for shutting down a troll’s regeneration, because both of those functions exist within common cantrips and are otherwise achievable within a single wizard or within any other reasonably balanced party.
The way PF2 is designed assumes that even your “blaster specialist” is capable of targeting 3-4 defenses and at least a few weaknesses, though. The game simply wasn’t designed to handle characters who can consistently target something other than enemy’s strongest save choosing not to do so. The game knows you have versatility and expects you to use it, but that’s not at all the same as expecting a “Schroedinger’s Wizard” who simultaneously has all silver bullets at all times.
There’s a rough assumption of one top rank spell slot being used per caster in a moderate encounter#
Three [moderate+] encounters is basically the assumed baseline, which is why 3 is the default number of spells per level that core casters cap out at. You’re generally assumed to be having about 3 [moderate] encounters per day and using 1 top-rank slot per encounter, supplemented by some combination of cantrips, focus spells, consumables, limited-use non-consumables, lower level slots, etc. (exactly what level you are determines what that general assumption might be, since obviously you don’t have lower-rank spells that aren’t cantrips at 1st level.)
Some classes supplement this with bonus slots, some with better cantrips, some with better access to focus spells, some with particular styles of feats, etc., all kind of depending on the specific class in play. Classes like the psychic and magus aren’t even really expected to be reliant on their slots, but to have them available for those situations where the primary play loops represented by their spellstrike and cascade or amps and unleashes don’t fit with the encounter they find themselves in, or when they need a big boost of juice to get over the hump in a tough fight.
The game is not balanced around 3 encounters total per day. But it is balanced around the definitions of moderate, severe, and extreme encounters found in the CRB (which if you follow through with them, do imply that it’s unlikely for an average group to reliably take many more than 3 moderate+ encounters in a day). If you get too attached to a number of encounters per day, it will never be accurate for your actual situation and it will only make things more confusing. This is why the encounter building and adventure sections of the CRB and GMG try to explain the interactions between the encounters in the same adventuring day, rather than state a number.
There’s a rough assumption of party capability#
The game assumes that any given party has roughly the capabilities of a cleric, fighter, rogue, and wizard who are using the full breadth of their capabilities. You can shake that formula by shifting more of a particular type of responsibility onto one character or hyper-specializing the group into a particular tactical spread, but hyper-specialization will always come with the risk that you encounter a situation your specialty just isn’t good for, even (perhaps especially) if that trick is focus-fire damage.