@sleepingcatte ignore your friend?

@sleepingcatte Besides the obvious answer of telling them "You don't pay my sub" it depends a lot on what level you are. "Force" is not resisted by much and is a good place to invest a cantrip; also, both Needle Darts and Electric Arc are useful for your entire career, even if they don't make the big booms. In PF2E, as a wizard, focusing on utility and blasting means you're doing it right. Buff the party with haste, trap the enemies in tentacles or wall spells, and fear not! You will be very effective.

@sleepingcatte Create the character that YOU want.

Your character might not be optimal. Know what? That's okay.

You might not have coverage for all damage types. There might be a few times when your character can't do damage. Then have a few support spells to help those who CAN do damage.

But the goal of Pathfinder is to have fun.

@sleepingcatte I'm not much of a system master of pf2, so caveats and grains of salt here. Most of my experience is in GMing, which from what I've seen of the things my players get up to, is just so much easier than trying to build a character.

The way I see it, the options are:
1. Full passive-aggressive. Ask your friend to build a character for you. When you show up at the table, hand them your character sheet, since they want to play your character so badly. Tell them you'll be back at the end of the session to grab any xp and loot. This is a joke don't do this.

2. Tell your friend that you appreciate their concerns, but you'd like to ask the GM and the rest of the table how important this type of character optimization is for the game that y'all collectively are playing. If they say just focusing on utility and control is fine, then maybe your friend hearing it from other sources will lead to them worrying less about your playstyle. If they say character optimization is important, especially if you're running through a pregen, then you may be in for some compromises.

It's never too late to stop and talk about things that were missed in a Session 0.

Are all of the other characters also under scrutiny to have all damage types? Does the archer have a wide range of elemental arrows? Does the barbarian carry a half dozen greataxes enchanted with fire, frost, lightning, etc.? Does the cleric have a special prayer prepared to take advantage of a peanut allergy?

@sleepingcatte It is more an issue with your friends opinion than with the game. Buffing and enabling the group are really efficient - at least if there is somebody applying all these buffs to the enemy. I enjoy this as well, and there are a lot of spells for it, beginning with runic weapon at level 1 being the best "damage spell" by far.
Yesterday our Animist turned an encounter heading to a tpk around with a stone wall, we all cheered him on.
Maybe you can talk to your friend out of session about not enjoying the backseat driving. Or Grey rock it.
#pathfinder2e #ttrpg

@sleepingcatte I used to think the sign of a good player character was the ability to deal loads of damage. It was when I started to work around character concept archetypes that I became happier with more variety; and understood better how a party works together and how important support and utility are

Going to second everyone else saying “it’s not your friend’s character”. Roleplaying games have this nasty effect of attracting people that are focused on doing things “the best way” – they see the games as puzzles to solve – but what the best way of playing is is not a singular thing. And people have this weird tendency to also conflate things that seem similar.

Here, I suspect your friend is telling you that you “need” to target all of the different DCs: Fortitude, Reflex, Will, and AC. This provides you with the most flexibility as a caster, and the highest chances of actually getting the maximum effect out of your spells. Because of this, a lot of the online discussion around magic users in the game has actually focused on optimizing your ability to target all of these – because, again, the discussions are dominated by people who want to “solve” the game. But if you’re OK with partial successes and playing the character in a way that feels the most organic to you, you should do that. The game is designed so that you don’t need to be hyper-focused on optimizing your choices.

But if your friend isn’t ok with you doing that, then you should start asking them why they want to play your character for you.