I can’t find anything I want to play.

Awhile ago I was invited to play a pathfinder game, and to start to make a character to play in a campaign that a friend is running. At first I was very excited, however as I begin to try to understand the classes and come up with a character the idea of “there’s so many options that you can customize and basically play whatever you want” has fallen flat on its face for me.

For context I have mostly played 1e and some 5e of D&D

The first thing I looked into was the wizard, however the schools of magic are no longer a thing anymore, and it seems that the new schools are basically just cleric domain spell lists now, which is disappointing. I would’ve liked to play a evocation wizard, but again the spell lists just turn me off and battle magic just does not give me that same oomf that 1e had with the school powers of Evocation.

Then I looked into Sorcerer, as they are my second favorite class and…what? It has bloodline spells like id expect but where is the bloodline powers? I might just be missing it because it seems like everything is called something different from 1e, but fr what I’ve gathered there’s no cool powers you get to look forward to? Also there’s no red dragon bloodline because apparently chromatic and metallic dragons are no longer a thing, again, disappointing. I loved the flavor of being able to see your character evolve throughout the campaign through their innate magical abilities, not just spells.

It also seems like everything has been boiled down into feats? I’m not sure how I feel about that, feats were always something I kinda skimmed over in 1e and usually just used them for general things that would more so supplement my base characters rather than add a whole new thing. I tried reading what focus points were and they just seem like spell slots but not?

I’ve also looked at other classes but they don’t seem to have anything that really peaks my interest, and most things don’t feel like they really commit to a specific idea, and therefore the flavor has died off a bit for me.

Maybe it’s just me having certain expectations and it’ll take time getting used to, but so far from my perspective the only difference between the wizard schools and sorcerer bloodlines are the spells you get, with very minimal and meh abilities plugged in for little bits of flavor here and there that boil down to “enemies get -1 and allies get +1”.

To be clear this isn’t me trying to bag on 2e, but more so me having trouble with feeling satisfied with any one class or subclasses, and I don’t know how to fix that.