Pathfinder 1E Specific examples of how easy Pathfinder is broken.

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Then the fighter turns invisible and you have the most boring fight ever.

I would count that as broken (specifically the combat breakdown due to invisibility). Exalted had a reputation for that (everyone getting perfect defenses) but no one in our group used them, so fortunately we never experienced that.

There's a few other broken things. I read a thread at Paizo about abusing the Mount spell. Apparently in Pathfinder you can summon numerous noncombatant mounts, and use them as meatshields in front of your wizard. At least that's assuming the horses don't act "realistically" (a problem because most of us are urban dwellers and don't know horses act). "Realistically" I think the mounts would trample, but they might head toward or away from the summoner, so it's ridiculously swingy. Being able to clog the battlefield is broken by itself, and no one wants to be making multiple trample checks/forcing multiple saves to see who is getting flattened every time that trick is used.

 

[Angrydad]

SNIPPED for length
Spells vs Skills

The same PC abused Greater Invisibility. That spell as written is broken. It's effectively giving you a +20 to Stealth, in a game where most skills do not automatically increase with level. My own druid would have difficulty spotting an invisible creature (at level 7, the minimum level to cast that spell, my druid would have Perception +13, from training as a class skill with levels and Wisdom) against a typical DC of 22 or so (wizards tend to have a little Dex). At minimum that spell should have a scaling Stealth bonus, starting a lot lower, or emulate the 4e "Hide in Plain Sight" mechanic instead. It's actually worse in Pathfinder than in 3e because the bonus is to Stealth, not just Hide, so you can't use your sharp hearing to locate them ... oddly enough.



A spell used by our witch when they joined the party. It's 3rd-level and covers a 40 foot radius cylinder. What is so broken about it? We once got in a fight with a bunch of barbarians. They had decent Dex scores but no ranks in Acrobatics. They had about +2 total to Acrobatics, despite high levels, because of the way skills work. The barbarians were lucky to make their checks and move at half speed, while our magus blasted them with Lightning Bolt. (They were also hemmed in by my druid's Spike Stones, which don't deal that much damage but cripples their movement even further, plus the Perception DCs are obnoxiously high.) Most spells that force skill checks aren't balanced in Pathfinder. The Create Pit line of spells is a great example. The good news is this is fixable... with house rules.

Random Nuttiness

We twice ran into really unfair swarm monsters. The first time the monster was a swarm of bats, which consisted of Fine creatures, so was literally immune to weapon damage. We ran into them in a tomb, and being only 3rd-level (without our wizard, who had left) that we had literally no AoE spells. We had to leave, and my druid prepped a Gust of Wind to deal with the situation the next day. That actual plot-relevant villains were easier to handle.

The second time, with a few more levels under our belt, we ran into swarms of ravens, which could pluck out your eyes as a standard action, at will, and of course this is permanent blindness. Half the party ended up blind. Worse, we didn't have a cleric, only a druid and oracle. Druids don't have Remove Blindness as a spell, and oracle spell lists are very limited. If your oracle doesn't have Remove Blindness as a known spell, then you're in trouble. Trudging to a town to get some potions was painful, and the DM didn't throw any encounters at us during that time period. Once again, the plot-relevant villains were not nearly so hard to deal with.

Long-term crippling effects suck. Also oracles just aren't as good as clerics, leaving me a little mystified about their popularity. (The oracle had the curse that prevented you from speaking in combat. No quips, no tactical discussions, no taunting, no warnings, nothing.)

The issues you guys have with spells and skills seems to be less an issue with the game being broken somehow, and more that the DM isn't mixing up encounters with varied enough creatures with abilities that can foil/ignore some of the spells' effects. Invisibility isn't an issue for creatures with tremorsense or blindsense, flying creatures don't find stone spikes annoying, etc.

Swarms are indeed annoying, and hopefully your party will remember to carry things like Alchemist's Fire in the future. I know it's impossible as a DM to prep encounters that will be fun, challenging, and well-suited to your party every time, particularly if the DM likes using published adventures.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

The issues you guys have with spells and skills seems to be less an issue with the game being broken somehow, and more that the DM isn't mixing up encounters with varied enough creatures with abilities that can foil/ignore some of the spells' effects. Invisibility isn't an issue for creatures with tremorsense or blindsense, flying creatures don't find stone spikes annoying, etc.

Creatures with tremorsense and blindsense are pretty rare, and if you have a wizard who will cast Greater Invisibility every encounter, you need to deliberately tailor every encounter to nerf that one spell... maybe the problem is the spell.

Those encounters were against similar NPCs (being humans and demihumans, they don't have wings or special sensory abilities). Had we faced spellcasters using the same spells, we would also have been screwed. (Enemies can cast Spike Growth at only 5th-level, when you're not likely to have a Fly spells. None of us could have made the Perception DC of 28 at 5th-level.)