I feel like I've still barely scratched the surface of this book, but I've got thoughts guys. Mostly good ones. I keep noticing a feat or spell that existed in the playtest and I took for granted as remaining the same, only to notice their is a subtle but awesome improvement. Sometimes it is as simple as moving a high level feat to a lower level. Other times it is from a tweak to the general rules from the playtest I don't immediately notice. So many goodies.

First off, skill feats. They are significantly improved. Some could still use some more improvement and some skills still feel under-served. So I have decided to keep my re-writes in play for the time being, with some exceptions where the final CRB solution was better than my own, like Assurance. if nothing else, there are some things like Object Reading that will probably get printed by Paizo eventually but serve as fun design space to explore in the meantime.

Next up is class feats. Good gosh guys, there are so many good class feats. I'm not sure they have fixed the customization bottleneck of the playtest, but part of that is that I just want all the class feats. Especially the higher level feats-- there are so very many good options. And while I really like the idea of giving players more class feats, be it through auto-scaling feats or more extensive class paths or just class feats at odd levels as well, I have also noticed that this takes character building into overly confusing territory for some of my players. It might be LESS confusing if these were built in assumptions that are written into the book, but Paizo might have known what they were doing with setting this as a baseline.

I find the Ranger a particularly interesting case study. First off, lots of improvements to their core chassis for combat between stronger edges and not being forced to pick a weapon group. There are a few duds in their class feats that feel like they should have been made a scaling benefit of a previous feat (Monster Warden) or are a glorified skill feat (Swift Tracker). But even these feats are appealing to certain players-- one of mine really wanted Swift Tracker for example. I gave it to her as a Ranger exclusive benefit of Experienced Tracker, but she would have been perfectly willing to pay the skill feat for it, and frankly she would have still been fine as a combatant. Meanwhile, some feats that fit these criteria in the playtest are now strong enough to warrant a class feat. Snare Specialist, for example, now lets you make free snares each day the way an alchemist makes free items. That feat alone made Snares viable, IMO.

There are some interesting oddities in feat prerequisites. For example, Sudden Leap no longer requires Sudden Charge. Lightning Snares is basically an improved version of Quick Snares, but it doesn't require Quick Snares. (It does require Snare Specialist and master crafting.) I think this means some feats are meant to be retrained if you can replace them with their top end version. That's a very interesting design space, especially when you consider any given specialty for a class seems to have at least one feat per level dedicated to it. If you pay your best feat towards your specialty, you can use your lower level feats to get lesser benefits towards other things. That seems like it has potential that would have been worth further exploration. For example, what if you when you got Incredible Companion, you could retrain Mature Animal Companion? I'm very intrigued by this idea, and would like feedback before trying it out with my players.

The new armor paradigm takes some getting used too-- in general, if you have high strength and decent dex your choice of armor feels like it is mostly a flavor decision. But you can still get some pretty sweet benefits without it feeling punishing or locked into any particular class.

There are more errors in the book than I'd like-- I guess I just had unrealistic expectations for a first printing with this many revisions, though. Usually I can suss out the intent based on other rules or developers commentary, and I'm sure most of this will get fixed eventually.

I like that they added Jousting to lances. Still not sure how I feel about the lance not giving you reach while mounted, but I'm gonna try running it as written for now. It seems like the lance having deadly and extra damage on a charge makes it a decent trade-off for only doing a d6, compared to most d8 one handed weapons, even if it loses reach. I guess having the reach would make it the default option for mounted combat like PF1, which they probably want to avoid, and it matter less than the playtest given weapon specialization replacing some damage dice. Still trying to make heads or tails of the Horse support benefit, because it makes no sense as written, but I'm assuming it was intended to work like the playtest for now. Alternatively, it might have been intended to do quadruple the jousting charge damage, but that seems excessive.

I'm not sure how striking an unattended object works-- usually their AC is so low most characters would crit them on a strike, but I don't think you should be able to crit a wall for example.

Finally, I want to say I love all the language and steps to make the game more inclusive. The playtest did a lot on this front, and the final CRB does even more.

I love this book and am gonna have to buckle down and read it cover to cover.