To say that, by dint of simply not including them, they got rid of a few of the most powerful, either TO or nearly TO tricks is not a huge change for most people's games, practically-speaking.
I have been on these boards for a long time. And, to date I have never seen a Cheater of Mystra build at a table. Not at a convention, not online, not in real life, not in a pickup game. If that's all Pathfinder brings to the table, then it's ultimately not very much at all. Certainly not worth the price of admission. For the record, I think it does bring more to the table, I just think these arguments are poor ones.
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Also, I searched for 5 seconds and found a Incantrix build for a campaign from one of the very posters on this thread right away!
You have eyes but you refuse to see.
I know my eyes suck. I didn't even notice that they renamed "Cheater of Mystra" "Incantatrix" while I wasn't paying attention. Sneaky internet gnomes. You see, if I meant to say "I've never once seen someone play an Incantatrix," I probably could have included the word "Incantatrix" in my post. Even I, the stubborn denies of the One True Way, could have probably managed that.
And, really, your example of a borked build is an Unseen Seer with a splash of Spellthief?
"Players will seek to abuse PF as much as possible, but ignore the even more broken crap in 3.5" is a much poorer argument.
That would, I admit, be a pretty bad argument. But, again, I think I have just enough, barely, mastery over my fingers to manage to type something that might vaguely resemble that statement.
First off, my comment was in response to your (Oslecamo's) original comment bringing in the baroque things of charopp/debatedly TO beauty. So, it's bad form, and frankly childishly churlish, to then ignore the context in that case.
Second, what I was actually saying, and I'll spell it out here to avoid some more blatant straw manning (although I think it's pretty clear from my earlier post anyway) is that most games take place not in the rarefied expanses of theoretical optimization or nearly so. We do not, typically, play at those heights and aeries where Cheaters of Mystra and Omnificers roam. Rarely do actual games played by actual people (I make no claims w/r/t Protoss gaming groups) end up with characters along those lines.
Instead, most games take place in the hearty, if pedestrian realms of practical optimization. Indeed, that's why the very term was coined. And, in real live games played by real live humans, the few corner cases you listed do not come up. So, fixing them is of little practical import.
Now, if you want to make some argument that, in practice, meaning somewhere along the spectrum of practical optimization, Pathfinder games are more balanced, that might be another matter. But, the contention I was responding to was that Pathfinder had finally delivered us from our long, terrible night at the hands of the "Incantrix/IoT7FV/Cheater of Mystra/Planar Shepherd/Red Wizard of Thay."
Of course, one might be concerned that Pathfinder has simply consigned us to a different night, one plagued by Arcane Bonded Wizards and the like. But, that's an issue for another post.
It seems to me that you wanted me to be making some other argument, the one you were interested in. Something along the lines of "the most broken things in Pathfinder are just as broken as the ones in 3E D&D." Sadly, I cannot oblige. I'm not sure that's true one way or another, and, for reasons alluded to above, I don't think it's particularly relevant.