This is interesting.
I cannot fathom why and how Paizo seems to go in the direction of 4E with lots of measured (=bland) "samey-feeling" powers, when that is what made 4E bomb.
Especially since they have 5E to look at, where people aren't complaining (about player abilities; defanged monsters is another thing).
It boggles the mind why Paizo would end up with something that draws comparisons to the failed edition while trying to avoid comparisons to the wildly successful and well-regarded one...
It's more like 5E than 4E. 4E was very video gamey like you were punching buttons every single fight because you had powers based on encounters.
Pathfinder 2 more like 5E, but not quite as bad. In 5E once you had advantage and bless, you were pretty much done using buff powers. Advantage by any means and bless was pretty much the most powerful combo in the game. Then just pile on damage with your advantage and bless bonus, rinse and repeat. It didn't matter if the ability giving you advantage was martial, magic, divine, or what not. At the end of the day it was just getting advantage. That's just super boring. I hate DMing 5E because of how boring it is, but I don't mind playing it if some DM wants to run it.
Pathfinder 2 doesn't go that far, so that was good. It's more that the powers, feats, and abilities are very low level, moderate bonuses. A great deal seems to be based on proficiency for every class. Certain classes like the paladin has been basically neutered from its PF1 form. It's no longer the powerful force against evil. It's more like a fighter with some divinely powered abilities. I think the paladin was the most disappointing class from PF1 to PF2.
The reason we're willing to give it a shot is because some of the base elements were pretty interesting. The new invisibility/unseen rules are more specific and work well with the action system. You just spend an action to attempt to locate an unseen creature. You can still attempt to attack it or move towards it. Really, the action system is the shining and fluid part of Pathfinder 2. It allows for more flexibility of action by the PCs that can drive story and seems like a more pseudo-realistic way to spend time. It was super nice to not have to move, attack, and maybe use a quickened action or immediate action. Instead you get 3 actions to spend as you wish. So you can raises a shield and cast a two action spell. You can move and a cast a two action spell. You can seek, move, attack. You can pick up magic rock, examine it, and put it in your pouch in one round without disrupting any combat flow and still have a reaction to shield block. It's a very nice action system. It is what sold us on trying the game.
The rest of it was hard to see. It's obviously powered down from Pathfinder 1. We want to see how the characters play once we run a campaign.
They got rid of power attack and the like. That was a huge plus. Those abilities scaled insanely and made crits nuts. Crits are flat double damage. You can do decent crit damage, but it's less than it was at higher levels.
So far monsters using the new action system are also more interesting. You can have a monster swoop in, attack with a single attack, and swoop out without a special feat or ability. Or use a spell like ability from afar, then move stealth into the bushes in the same round.
So far the monster scaling along with the action system seems better designed to challenge a higher level party and make monsters more interesting to play.
And they don't have pop up healing like 5E, PF1, or even old iterations of D&D. It can be hard to get back into the fight even with healing. I liked that quite a bit. Forgot about that part. You no longer are healed and automatically wake up. Instead if you get knocked to zero, you make a save. If you miss, you get closer to dead. Even if you get healed above zero, you have to make a save to become conscious. Your body is still messed up from getting downed and is trying to regain consciousness. This usually takes a minimum of 2 rounds once you're healed to 1 or more hit point. Once you're conscious if you lose the dying condition at 1 rank per round. So if you were close to dead, you may a take a while of being up to shake that off. That part was cool. Brought some of the lethality back without having to resort to just save or die or straight death at a certain hit point count.
Pathfinder 2 has a lot of interesting changes. Some of them seem very fun and should enhance the game. I'm hoping once we play the final product, classes will seem more fun. One class I did like more was the monk. Monk seemed like a lot more of a straight up badass martial artist than the mystical dude he was before. The modular system has made the monk more interesting. You can make many types of monks now. That was one class superior to Pathfinder 1.
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