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Gnolls? Evil demonspawn that can't stop eating people.
Owlbears? Violent and untameable.
Dragons? Greedy assholes that think they're better than you.
Various slimes? Will dissolve you. Can't even keep them as pets.
These silly glooby eye monsters?
Literally the most racist fuckers alive.
Wizards of the Coast please hire me to make your game better. OK that's all.
Switch to Pathfinder
same basic bear, far less racism
Also, their dragons are weirder and cooler
And yes, you can make friends (or at least temporary allies) with every kind of dragon because they treat them like living things with thoughts and personalities
Hell yeah now those are some good dragons
I haven't even gotten to the Requiem Dragons, Vorpal Dragons or Barrage Dragons yet
I have to say, and maybe it's my party/DM more than the system itself but I enjoy Pathfinder a LOT less. A few things that come to mind immediately:
The critical hit thing sucks, having to roll again and (in my experience basically never) confirm that you got a crit sucks ass, I've gotten like one crit in the entire campaign.
It still has hitler particles, my 5e DM had all kinds of interesting interactions and races weren't inherently aligned any way, my pathfinder 2e guy has told me that my goblin is mistaken for believing that he's good. We run into a bunch of people that are primitive/advanced good/evil etc. based on what they are, which I think he's getting from the books and guides, not (just) from his head. But I'll grant that this might be partially the DM being reactionary or something and not the system, I don't really know it well enough to say authoritatively.
This might be a Kingmaker problem but the building/management end is fucked. We tried it for a bit but you can fail to do basic stuff and just not get anywhere no matter what you do, it got so bad that the DM stopped doing it and we just theatre of the mind-ed it because the idea of continuing to do it made everyone balk. There's been similar weirdness with stuff like grappling and the like, it seems like things that I would know how to do in a straightforward way in 5e are like 17 extra steps in Pathfinder.
I feel like I can play Pathfinder badly, not because of tactical or strategic decisions I made poorly, but because of the type of person I play. 5e continues to distance itself from locking you into specific roles/archetypes by race. My experience with Pathfinder so far is that to play the game well I need to tailor what the character is to what bonuses that confers, so roleplaying choices directly cut against effectiveness. Which kinda sucks.
And I dunno, maybe a good DM could compensate for all of this and mine just won't do that, but he clearly knows the system very well and it's the fact that I want to make choices that the system disagrees with (good goblin) that's running me into these difficulties.
Your Pathfinder GM seems to be kind of bad at running a game
A) He shouldn't be telling you how your character behaves or believes, because that is your role
B) Pathfinder encourages the GM to come up with ways to keep the party moving forward even with bad dice rolls, so his failure to do so implies a lack of imagination
C) Archetypes aren't always about finding the best fit (if that were true, nobody would ever play humans), but rather about having fun with it. I've played and GM'd all sorts of interesting characters. Some were min/maxed and some weren't. But at the end of the day, my minotaur inspector performed just as admirably as my catfolk monk or my friends psychic umbrella. It's up to the GM to work with the players to make a positive experience.
D) alsp Pathfinder 2e doesn't have critical successes need confirmation. If you rolled a natural 20, you get one degree of success higher than normal, which is usually a critical hit. If your roll exceeds the DC or AC by 10, that's also a critical success. Your GM is not working with you, he's working against you
I wonder if he's using a mish mash of rules from previous versions of pathfinder or something then. When we roll a 20 we 'roll to confirm' which requires us beating the AC of the creature by an amount I believe (it's not always clear what the AC is when this happens so what exactly we are aiming for is unclear).
But maybe this reflects more of a confusion about how the rules work than actual weakness of the system in that case. Thanks for the feedback.