KickStarter Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pre-DLC Thread [GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Fedora Master]

I made a little video. This is the first "real" random encounter on the way to the Ancient Temple/Thorn Ford I faced.



Remove the color spray, add more archers and you could run into similar situations right outside of Candlekeep, to be fair.

 

[Utgard-Loki]

and I still don't understand why some retards favor a system of creatures-as-xp-piñatas.

because the act of killing and overcoming something powerful should be the thing that is rewarded, not the status report to the questgiver.

A quarterstaff +1 SHOULD BE a rare magical item that has a lot of value. Therefore, be happy

yeah, thanks for the vendor trash.

like any other simple weapon would have been fine.

 

[Luckmann]

I have to say that all this whining about difficulty makes my mouth water. I wish I had the time to try it out myself, and see if I have what it takes to beat the game.

If you never have to reload, then it's not worth your time.

I enjoy high difficulties too, but the fact of the matter is that (at least early on) PF:K does it rather poorly. It's not really "difficulty", just massive "swingyness", leading to reloads until RNGesus favors you, combined with poor feedback from the game as to what is going on and why. For example, right at the beginning, even the minor buffs enemies get on, say, Hard, makes a huge difference, and a single hit or miss can kill either you or the enemy, resulting in a game of randomized rocket-tag.

As an example of the poor feedback (sans UI issues, which makes it hard to know what people are affected by or what they are even doing, combined with little to no info on how something is mean to work (I only now figured out that activating Rage mean it'll activate automatically from then on, same goes for Bard singing, which are exhausted quickly) there's the spider-swarms, in your first "real" subquest. In the quest, there are spider-swarms, and you can try to hit them all day without success. This is because spider-swarms can only be hit by AoE effects, but the game never tells you this at all, nor equip you with the necessary items to use (because no-one you've met up until that point has any means of AoE damage, so unless you're a Wizard, Alchemist or Sorcerer, you're basically SOL). And how many Flasks of Alchemist's Fire or Acid do you need? Well *I* needed 10ish, which is a crazy assumption that the player would have at that point.

I'm not really complaining about the difficulty in itself, it's more of a feedback, expectations and pacing issue. I suspect that it'll get significantly better as the game continues, stats even out, and system familiarity increases.

 

[Tacgnol]

You can go all out and be like my old DM: Experience is only given for completing tasks (and subjectively given by the DM for good roleplaying). If you fail to do the quest, and just murder everyone, you get no experience. Completion of tasks is the only way to gain power.
This led to a very static, railroaded experience for the group. If we wrote down our adventure down it would make a better script, but there were less laughs and honestly less fun. Breaking games is fun. When you've played games for so long, winning isn't the main challenge, you want to beat the game designer as well, by breaking his system and exploiting his rules.

Well most Pathfinder APs give you XP for completing events. So there is no opportunity to grind.

Talking your way past a group of elite guards would give the same XP as killing them, same if you sneak past them or employ some other trickery.

It's generally the best way to do things as it doesn't penalise certain playstyles.

 

[Serus]

Are people using optimised builds/parties and get roflstomped or roll with random builds and then cry?
Another good reason to pirate the game is that you can keep this early version of the game before they nerf the difficulty.

No, not really. The difficulty setting are so customizable in this game that even when they lower the base values to something reasonable in case of enemies with too bloated stats you will still be able to choose "unfair" difficulty (or even "custom" if "unfair" doesn't max all difficulty options) and have all the stat bloat/difficulty you might ever want. This game is REALLY customizable when it comes to difficulty.
And also is somewhat buggy so not updating would be insane.

 

[Luckmann]

because the act of killing and overcoming something powerful should be the thing that is rewarded, not the status report to the questgiver.

Key word overcoming. Nobody said anything about quests or questgivers, you fucking mong. If you overcome the bear by sneaking around it, there is no reason you should not get experience, and if you resolve something peacefully (often giving extra XP because you didn't kill everyone) there should be no added advantage to turning around and killing everyone after the fact (which is often the case).

You can go all out and be like my old DM: Experience is only given for completing tasks (and subjectively given by the DM for good roleplaying). If you fail to do the quest, and just murder everyone, you get no experience. Completion of tasks is the only way to gain power.

This led to a very static, railroaded experience for the group. If we wrote down our adventure down it would make a better script, but there were less laughs and honestly less fun. Breaking games is fun. When you've played games for so long, winning isn't the main challenge, you want to beat the game designer as well, by breaking his system and exploiting his rules.

Your old DM was shit. You should get experience for reaching goals and resolving situations/encounters, not for finishing his shitty idea of a quest in the specific way he wanted it to be resolved.

 

[Salvo]

I have to say that all this whining about difficulty makes my mouth water. I wish I had the time to try it out myself, and see if I have what it takes to beat the game.

If you never have to reload, then it's not worth your time.

I enjoy high difficulties too, but the fact of the matter is that (at least early on) PF:K does it rather poorly. It's not really "difficulty", just massive "swingyness", leading to reloads until RNGesus favors you, combined with poor feedback from the game as to what is going on and why. For example, right at the beginning, even the minor buffs enemies get on, say, Hard, makes a huge difference, and a single hit or miss can kill either you or the enemy, resulting in a game of randomized rocket-tag.

there's the spider-swarms, in your first "real" subquest. In the quest, there are spider-swarms, and you can try to hit them all day without success. This is because spider-swarms can only be hit by AoE effects, but the game never tells you this at all, nor equip you with the necessary items to use (because no-one you've met up until that point has any means of AoE damage, so unless you're a Wizard, Alchemist or Sorcerer, you're basically SOL). And how many Flasks of Alchemist's Fire or Acid do you need? Well *I* needed 10ish, which is a crazy assumption that the player would have at that point.

I agree with you, those that are not familiar with Pathfinder and its mechanics are going to have a hard time learning about all the nuances of the system due to the way they are presented. That's why they're working on a hotfix that should at least deal with the spider problem.

Direct quote from the devs: "We hear a lot of comments about the spider cave Bokken is sending you to. Swarms are difficult, as swarms of tiny creatures are immune to weapon damage in Pathfinder and require special handling with fire, alchemical fire or AoE spells. From hotfix 1.0.2 Bokken will be warning you of those dangers and provide the party with means to handle them at least partially (several alchemical fire flasks). There will also be separate tutorial messages about difficult to notice mechanics on enemies (like damage immunity or damage reduction, regeneration and similar)."

Rest of the post in the link below

Spoiler

https://steamcommunity.com/app/640820/discussions/0/1734340257883177224/

 

[Serus]

The deer in this game don't fuck around. Attacked in my camp by like 4 or 5 Thylacine, I had no problem with them. Then three deer attacked out of nowhere and nearly wiped my party. Fuck you Bambi, next camp I'm roasting and eating your(delicious) ass....unless my guy burns the food again.

Reminds me of CataclysmDDA. In that case it was the deadly... moose - bane of countless inexperienced survivors. At least in some versions, not sure how deadly it is these days.

 

[Fedora Master]

The deer in this game don't fuck around. Attacked in my camp by like 4 or 5 Thylacine, I had no problem with them. Then three deer attacked out of nowhere and nearly wiped my party. Fuck you Bambi, next camp I'm roasting and eating your(delicious) ass....unless my guy burns the food again.

Reminds me of CataclysmDDA. In that case it was the deadly... moose - bane of countless inexperienced survivors. At least in some versions, not sure how deadly it is these days.

It's still deadly. There's a reason the standard tileset gives it red glowing demon eyes. You can shout at it until it goes away now though.

 

[Luckmann]

Why are people here defending the difficulty as "incline"? Is facing 35AC enemies (same AC as a fucking Tarrasque btw) at level 3 who one shot everyone "difficult" or just a quickload simulator?
Is a DEX AC mod of +12 something you'd find in a normal PnP session, or only something a DM who fucking hates you would throw at you?

Because they are grinding internet cred by being OH SO HARDCORE and calling people who dislike statbloat casuals and normies.
Ignore these people, play on normal, have fun with the suboptimal story characters and ignore the empty mercs.

Difficulty-by-stat-bloat is the laziest way to inflate difficulty, and is either irrelevant to the actual difficulty of the game (because the difficulty relies on other metrics, such as positioning or proper use of abilities/circumstances) or frustrating (because it leads to the aforementioned reliance on RNGesus, resulting in rocket-tag and subsequent save-scumming).

There is nothing impressive about it at all. All it proves is that whomever succeeded on it was some form of autist mining e-peen.

 

[Trash Player]

Valerie's shitty Dex is barely workable on Normal; on higher difficulties I'd imagine she may never hit an enemy at all, short of crits.

Yeah she can't hit anything on challenging difficulty.

You are using her wrong then. She has a Masterwork Bastard Sword, on lvl 2 you give her Weapon focus for it. You got a bard that gives +1 to attacks every combat. If you got a cleric than you got a Bless with another +1 attack. Charge with her when you can. On lvl 3 the attack penalty from the Tower Shield is removed and on lvl 4 you can start raising her Strength. God damn people. We all used Khalid in BG1 and he had like 15 str that gave him only +1 to damage.

Alternatively, you can level her as a non-wizard caster, either is better than a pure martial character.

I made a little video. This is the first "real" random encounter on the way to the Ancient Temple/Thorn Ford I faced.



Remove the color spray, add more archers and you could run into similar situations right outside of Candlekeep, to be fair.

Composite longbow is something that is relatively expensive and rare to be found on some random guerilla foot soilders, on the other hand, it shows their boss mean business and actually bother to equip them.

 

[Jimmious]

and I still don't understand why some retards favor a system of creatures-as-xp-piñatas.

because the act of killing and overcoming something powerful should be the thing that is rewarded, not the status report to the questgiver.

A quarterstaff +1 SHOULD BE a rare magical item that has a lot of value. Therefore, be happy

yeah, thanks for the vendor trash.

like any other simple weapon would have been fine.

My point is that ,ideally, magical weapons should be rare and valuable and not vendor trash as you say.

 

[Urthor]

The conflict is real between taking the elf for the sweet, sweet +2 to hit with spells and having to deal with the absolutely terribly ugly faces, or taking the Aasimar for basically the same thing without the +2 to hit for my sorcerer.

Oh god those faces are ugly..

But the +2 is sweeeet

 

[Agame]

I just want someone to comment on the thread about the difficulty "fixes" in owlcat forum that they shouldn't overdo it with making everything easier...

Its pretty much guaranteed they will nerf the difficulty to try and appease all the crying and butthurt steam reviews. Anyone here who is getting their e-peen bent out of shape because hard is to hard should just wait awhile. Soon hard mode will be "normal" difficulty like in every other game released for the entitlement generation.

Its interesting to look at the two main styles of difficulty in current games, the dark souls "skill" based, and the nu-xcom "RNG" based, but there is so much more hatred for the RNG type. I guess because DS style difficulty allows for all kinds of janky messing with the AI and cheating eg. shooting bosses through fog walls. So you can feel like you did something awesome even if you abuse the system. With percentage/dice rolls regardless what you do the RNG gods will sometimes just decide to fuck with you. And leaving something to chance means a loss of control, which is a particularly heinous thing to do to the modern empowerment gamer.

 

[zapotec]

But when you are fighting these spider swarms and trying to hit them with a melee/ranged attack, don't you get an immune message of some sort?

 

[Sentinel]

I just want someone to comment on the thread about the difficulty "fixes" in owlcat forum that they shouldn't overdo it with making everything easier...

Its pretty much guaranteed they will nerf the difficulty to try and appease all the crying and butthurt steam reviews. Anyone here who is getting their e-peen bent out of shape because hard is to hard should just wait awhile. Soon hard mode will be "normal" difficulty like in every other game released for the entitlement generation.

Its interesting to look at the two main styles of difficulty in current games, the dark souls "skill" based, and the nu-xcom "RNG" based, but there is so much more hatred for the RNG type. I guess because DS style difficulty allows for all kinds of janky messing with the AI and cheating eg. shooting bosses through fog walls. So you can feel like you did something awesome even if you abuse the system. With percentage/dice rolls regardless what you do the RNG gods will sometimes just decide to fuck with you. And leaving something to chance means a loss of control, which is a particularly heinous thing to do to the modern empowerment gamer.

They only talked about modifying some early encounters, fixing random encounters (because they are broken currently), and fixing the retarded spider quest. Unfortunately they haven't even acknowledged the stat padding problem on "core rules" difficulty.

And someone already left that exact "please don't overdo the nerfing" comment on the steam comments section.

 

[Jimmious]

I will refrain from talking about the difficulty more as I didn't go too far in the game and TheSentinel seems to raise interesting points with the AC and what not. I do think people are over reacting though at least from the part that I've seen so far

 

[Infinitron]

They only talked about modifying some early encounters, fixing random encounters (because they are broken currently), and fixing the retarded spider quest. Unfortunately they haven't even acknowledged the stat padding problem on "core rules" difficulty.

Well somebody had better bring this up in the Steam and official forums before they ruin the game.

 

[Fedora Master]

But when you are fighting these spider swarms and trying to hit them with a melee/ranged attack, don't you get an immune message of some sort?

It just shows "0 damage".

 

[Agame]

I just want someone to comment on the thread about the difficulty "fixes" in owlcat forum that they shouldn't overdo it with making everything easier...

Its pretty much guaranteed they will nerf the difficulty to try and appease all the crying and butthurt steam reviews. Anyone here who is getting their e-peen bent out of shape because hard is to hard should just wait awhile. Soon hard mode will be "normal" difficulty like in every other game released for the entitlement generation.

Its interesting to look at the two main styles of difficulty in current games, the dark souls "skill" based, and the nu-xcom "RNG" based, but there is so much more hatred for the RNG type. I guess because DS style difficulty allows for all kinds of janky messing with the AI and cheating eg. shooting bosses through fog walls. So you can feel like you did something awesome even if you abuse the system. With percentage/dice rolls regardless what you do the RNG gods will sometimes just decide to fuck with you. And leaving something to chance means a loss of control, which is a particularly heinous thing to do to the modern empowerment gamer.

They only talked about modifying some early encounters, fixing random encounters (because they are broken currently), and fixing the retarded spider quest. Unfortunately they haven't even acknowledged the stat padding problem on "core rules" difficulty.

And someone already left that exact "please don't overdo the nerfing" comment on the steam comments section.

Fair enough, I am sure along with all the bug fixing that the game will also need difficulty balancing. I would just hate to see the overall goal of actually making a challenging game be compromised. The last thing we need is another IE type game with a "muh balance, everyone gets a gold star for participating" style system.

 

[Kruno]

I always question the quality of the RNG in most software simply because it uses the library default which is usually shit. PCG exists and I wish all these developers would use it!

 

[razvedchiki]

guys,will a laptop with a6 7310 with intergrated grafics and 8 gigs of ram run the game on ultra low?

 

[Utgard-Loki]

Nobody said anything about quests or questgivers, you fucking mong. If you overcome the bear by sneaking around it, there is no reason you should not get experience, and if you resolve something peacefully (often giving extra XP because you didn't kill everyone) there should be no added advantage to turning around and killing everyone after the fact (which is often the case).

then we are in agreement then, you fucking moron?

My point is that ,ideally, magical weapons should be rare and valuable and not vendor trash as you say.

ideally magic weapons would also do something more impressive than give +1 to attack and damage. i am really sick of that in general.

But when you are fighting these spider swarms and trying to hit them with a melee/ranged attack, don't you get an immune message of some sort?

a big fat 0 appears and i am pretty sure the log gives you an "immune to x" message. problem is, if you enter that cave without any AOE spells or items, you can reload your game, since you are unable to simply leave.

 

[Luckmann]

But when you are fighting these spider swarms and trying to hit them with a melee/ranged attack, don't you get an immune message of some sort?

None that I could see. Not sure if there's a way to check the math like in PoE, either way, there's no *clear* feedback. I don't even think that the character's cry out things like "I cannot possibly hit this" or "I can't hurt this!" or anything. Hell, even Magic Missile misses/is absorbed.

And even so, going from "I can't hit this, it has to high AC" or "I can't hurt this, it has too high DR" to "I can hit it with these bottles or AoE spells" isn't entirely intuitive. I realize it makes *sense* in a realism/verisimilitude kind of way, but it's not the first thing you think about when it comes to experience with CRPG subsystems. My first guess was that AoE would do *more* damage, but not that it would be the *only* way to deal damage *at all*, especially after throwing flasks and somehow missing (but graphically, it looked like a hit), the swarms seemingly just ignoring the flasks just as much as any other attack.

 

[Sentinel]

Not sure if there's a way to check the math like in PoE

Isn't that what hovering over the combat log messages does? It gives you info on rolls and bonuses that justify the result. Doubt it tells you they're immune though.