Pathfinder Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Game of the Year Edition

[Grunker]

What’s your Mobility?

34 and 40 on the relevant characters.

I play rocket tag TBH. My characters don't have high AC... and mounts have only somewhat higher. But I try not to let the enemies live long enough to hurt me. Enemies generally don't survive my charges (when I can make them). CC helps too.

But that's exactly my point, as you'll recall:

You really can't be in melee without Last Stand in my experience.

I do the same as you appear to: either I kill the enemy, or I do not end my turn in a way where it's going to attack me (unless relying on a Last Stand turn).

Which was the starting point of this discussion: that Yosharian doubted how his character could stay alive without a mount, and me replying that my own character with the same limitation did so with Reach and Last Stand. Because again - if he's hitting something it has to die anyway, so mounted or not really makes no difference (except for the fact that mounted characters have a WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY easier time actually getting to full attack, which is where the true OPness of mounts is in my opinon, NOT in their defenses which, again, are dubious at best).

So unless I'm missing something, we agree: you have to kill stuff on unfair, you can't stay next to stuff (generally), and the reason mounts are good are primarily because they allow full attacks after moves (i.e. you can kill shit) whereas non-mounted characters have to rely on enemies moving to them, very long 5-foot-steps or similar things. Add Pounce to the mix and the point only becomes clearer: you zoom from enemy to enemy killing them outright.

This is also why my Wenduag is a bad build; without the ability to one-shot, it doesn't matter that her defenses are way better than the rest of the squad.

 

[Yosharian]

A mount can quite easily get 80+ AC lategame and it's possible to boost their saves significantly. And they have automatic Evasion

(and Haplo)

80AC will still be oneshot by the first nat 20 on Unfair due to double damage (and there will be multiple of these each enemy turn due to the high number of attacks). You really can't be in melee without Last Stand in my experience. Do you have double damage turned off, or is your experience different? I have a feeling it's either that or your builds are just way better than mine and you kill stuff fast enough you don't get one-popped as often.

I'm definetely playing this game again, and when I do it'll either be with really shitty builds on Core or just on Unfair without double damage.

Well, if you are only worried about getting hit on high rolls, chances are you're not getting hit that often

Not the case. There will be multiple enemy nat 20s enemy turn in most relevant fights.

and the mounted combat feat can possibly negate up to one hit per round which would significantly boost survivability.

I think Mounted Combat is bugged. I see it work very rarely.

Mounted Combat is fucking useless on Unfair. There is no way you are hitting those Mobility DCs even on a character with absurd bonuses. You would have to have 50 DEX with Skill Focus and +15 Competence and a ton of other bonuses in order to make it useful and by that point its irrelevant because the game is virtually over.

I respecced both of my mounted builds to only pick up Indomitable Mount which is absolutely fire, awesome feat.

 

[Grunker]

A mount can quite easily get 80+ AC lategame and it's possible to boost their saves significantly. And they have automatic Evasion

(and Haplo)

80AC will still be oneshot by the first nat 20 on Unfair due to double damage (and there will be multiple of these each enemy turn due to the high number of attacks). You really can't be in melee without Last Stand in my experience. Do you have double damage turned off, or is your experience different? I have a feeling it's either that or your builds might just be way better than mine and you kill stuff fast enough you don't get one-popped as often. Or maybe your movement is better than mine?

I'm definitely playing this game again, and when I do it'll either be with really shitty builds on Core or just on Unfair without double damage.

1. Who plays with 2x damage on, that shit is fucking retarded.
2. Protective Luck makes getting Nat 20'd extremely unlikely.

Unfair is a retarded difficulty level because the extra stats that enemies get makes it very challenging and an interesting puzzle to solve for optimizers, and then the 2x damage just comes along and takes a giant diarrhea shit all over that.

1. You know I do, I've stated this many times

2. Actually not really in my experience. I have protective hex up on my highest AC pet more or less 24-7, and odds are its getting hit by something at some point anyway, killing it outright (due to double damage)

Unfair is a retarded difficulty level because the extra stats that enemies get makes it very challenging and an interesting puzzle to solve for optimizers, and then the 2x damage just comes along and takes a giant diarrhea shit all over that.

I agree, I'll be turning it off if I do more playthroughs on Unfair. It's a fairly poor difficulty choice. But I'm kind of in for a penny, in for a pound on my current playthrough.

 

[Yosharian]

Speaking of Unfair, just killed this bastard. Tough fight. He kept ignoring my summons and killing my mounts. Without Lunge and selective Sirocco, I wouldn't have won this fight.

Spoiler

 

[Grunker]

Speaking of Unfair, just killed this bastard. Tough fight. He kept ignoring my summons and killing my mounts. Without Lunge and selective Sirocco, I wouldn't have won this fight.

Spoiler

Did you manage to negate his Concealment? I did it "clean" and without Sirocco and shit like that, but as you saw, it came down to the wire, and Concealment is DEFINITELY bugged for me. I have a save just before Playful Darkness and his Concealment cannot be countered in any of the usual ways - True Seeing and See Invis included. I haven't tested Faerie Fire.

This is the case for most enemies in my game by the way, and seems widely reported on reddit too. It makes the game mucho mucho harder.

 

[Desiderius]

Mounted Combat is fucking useless on Unfair. There is no way you are hitting those Mobility DCs even on a character with absurd bonuses.

Lol, watch me.

Again, not talking about bosses.

Indomitable is the really good one though agreed.

 

[Yosharian]

Speaking of Unfair, just killed this bastard. Tough fight. He kept ignoring my summons and killing my mounts. Without Lunge and selective Sirocco, I wouldn't have won this fight.

Spoiler

Did you manage to negate his Concealment? I did it "clean" and without Sirocco and shit like that, but as you saw, it came down to the wire, and Concealment is DEFINITELY bugged for me. I have a save just before Playful Darkness and his Concealment cannot be countered in any of the usual ways - True Seeing and See Invis included. I haven't tested Faerie Fire.

This is the case for most enemies in my game by the way, and seems widely reported on reddit too. It makes the game mucho mucho harder.

Bro when it comes to a boss like this, you are allowed to use anything. Sirocco is perfectly legit to use here.

I used Echolocation on my MC and he hit him with a Aeon Bane dispel that got his Displacement early on in the fight. My MC never suffered concealment rolls and neither did Reg who was wielding Finnean.

It seems that he might be protected against True Seeing somehow. Echolocation from a friendly BFT, & Finnean, are the way forward here. I should have used Blink on Woljif.

 

[Desiderius]

As with P:K, you can watch out for the the things that can one-shot you with double damage (in P:K that was things like Greater Zombie Giants) and focus on taking those out one way or another and survive a hit or three here and there from the other stuff (DR precedes the doubling BTW) if you're playing well and have a chance to get six-hour sessions in where you can remember everything you're doing. Also takes a lot of rest to keep rnd/lvl stuff up in some areas. Several quests/fights are one-offs tho where you can really load up with Bubble Buff.

With the shorter sessions I have now I'm always forgetting shit and like to be able to do several fights on one rest so Hard or Unfair w/o doubling works better there. Still fun to be able to test your skills on the hard stuff when you've got the time.

I should have used Blink on Woljif.

Seelah will have it up (via UMD) for the tank challenge.

I've cast like two Siroccos ever. Not really something that fits what I'm doing.

 

[Grunker]

Speaking of Unfair, just killed this bastard. Tough fight. He kept ignoring my summons and killing my mounts. Without Lunge and selective Sirocco, I wouldn't have won this fight.

Spoiler

Did you manage to negate his Concealment? I did it "clean" and without Sirocco and shit like that, but as you saw, it came down to the wire, and Concealment is DEFINITELY bugged for me. I have a save just before Playful Darkness and his Concealment cannot be countered in any of the usual ways - True Seeing and See Invis included. I haven't tested Faerie Fire.

This is the case for most enemies in my game by the way, and seems widely reported on reddit too. It makes the game mucho mucho harder.

Bro when it comes to a boss like this, you are allowed to use anything. Sirocco is perfectly legit to use here.

I'm not saying it isn't, I just don't enjoy it.

I used Echolocation on my MC and he hit him with a Aeon Bane dispel that got his Displacement early on in the fight. My MC never suffered concealment rolls and neither did Reg who was wielding Finnean.

Yeah both of those will definitely work. I've switched to Echolocation myself.

It seems that he might be protected against True Seeing somehow.

He might be, that's what I'm wondering. I'm seeing the Concealment bug on other enemies, but some of the reddit replies lead me to believe it might be intentional on Playful.

 

[Yosharian]

The one where I thought it was a bug was that bastard Succubus in Act 1. She has Invisibility and then when she loses it, she still has concealment so she hits your tanks flat-footed. I had to get Woljif, who had Uncanny Dodge, to tank it and that wasn't easy because at that point he wasn't really powerful.

 

[Yosharian]

So I just realised that I never completed the quest 'Middlegame' before entering Midnight Fane. Godammit. This quest is going to fail now, isn't it. Will it stop me from completing Endgame?

 

[Grunker]

As with P:K, you can watch out for the the things that can one-shot you with double damage (in P:K that was things like Greater Zombie Giants)

Lol. Everything (or near enough) will one-shot you with double damage. You might get lucky on a low roll and be reduced to 1/3 hit points instead by regular mooks

 

[Tsubutai]

A mount can quite easily get 80+ AC lategame and it's possible to boost their saves significantly. And they have automatic Evasion

(and Haplo)

80AC will still be oneshot by the first nat 20 on Unfair due to double damage (and there will be multiple of these each enemy turn due to the high number of attacks). You really can't be in melee without Last Stand in my experience. Do you have double damage turned off, or is your experience different? I have a feeling it's either that or your builds might just be way better than mine and you kill stuff fast enough you don't get one-popped as often. Or maybe your movement is better than mine?

I'm definitely playing this game again, and when I do it'll either be with really shitty builds on Core or just on Unfair without double damage.

The secret sauce is Protective Luck. Going from 1/20 chance of getting critted to 1/400 is huge.

 

[Grunker]

A mount can quite easily get 80+ AC lategame and it's possible to boost their saves significantly. And they have automatic Evasion

(and Haplo)

80AC will still be oneshot by the first nat 20 on Unfair due to double damage (and there will be multiple of these each enemy turn due to the high number of attacks). You really can't be in melee without Last Stand in my experience. Do you have double damage turned off, or is your experience different? I have a feeling it's either that or your builds might just be way better than mine and you kill stuff fast enough you don't get one-popped as often. Or maybe your movement is better than mine?

I'm definitely playing this game again, and when I do it'll either be with really shitty builds on Core or just on Unfair without double damage.

The secret sauce is Protective Luck. Going from 1/20 chance of getting critted to 1/400 is huge.

Protective Luck works wonders in Act 1 and 2, is very good in most of Act 3, but at the end of Act 3 as well as here in Act 4 it has been way less impressive for me. Enemies have too many attacks and too high AB's to reliably AC-tank. At least with my game knowledge.

 

[Tsubutai]

A mount can quite easily get 80+ AC lategame and it's possible to boost their saves significantly. And they have automatic Evasion

(and Haplo)

80AC will still be oneshot by the first nat 20 on Unfair due to double damage (and there will be multiple of these each enemy turn due to the high number of attacks). You really can't be in melee without Last Stand in my experience. Do you have double damage turned off, or is your experience different? I have a feeling it's either that or your builds might just be way better than mine and you kill stuff fast enough you don't get one-popped as often. Or maybe your movement is better than mine?

I'm definitely playing this game again, and when I do it'll either be with really shitty builds on Core or just on Unfair without double damage.

The secret sauce is Protective Luck. Going from 1/20 chance of getting critted to 1/400 is huge.

Protective Luck works wonders in Act 1 and 2, is very good in most of Act 3, but at the end of Act 3 as well as here in Act 4 it has been way less impressive for me. Enemies have too many attacks and too high AB's to reliably AC-tank. At least with my game knowledge.

OK, fine, protective luck and stacking dex + mental attributes to AC so you're always at least 20 ahead of the highest enemy AB you'll face. :p

 

[Desiderius]

As with P:K, you can watch out for the the things that can one-shot you with double damage (in P:K that was things like Greater Zombie Giants)

Lol. Everything (or near enough) will one-shot you with double damage. You might get lucky on a low roll and be reduced to 1/3 hit points instead by regular mooks

Lol I just posted a pic of Bismuth surviving two hits fine. Take advantage of temp HP (Rage and Burst of Glory are obvious ones) and DR where you can, and of course most of the usual debuffs debuff damage too.

A solid spell to give you some more cushion especially if you have a BFT (or a Wizard in TTT/Dark Codex with Idealize Arcane Discovery - I'm using Nenio for this) is Bear's Endurance, Mass.

 

[Desiderius]

A mount can quite easily get 80+ AC lategame and it's possible to boost their saves significantly. And they have automatic Evasion

(and Haplo)

80AC will still be oneshot by the first nat 20 on Unfair due to double damage (and there will be multiple of these each enemy turn due to the high number of attacks). You really can't be in melee without Last Stand in my experience. Do you have double damage turned off, or is your experience different? I have a feeling it's either that or your builds might just be way better than mine and you kill stuff fast enough you don't get one-popped as often. Or maybe your movement is better than mine?

I'm definitely playing this game again, and when I do it'll either be with really shitty builds on Core or just on Unfair without double damage.

The secret sauce is Protective Luck. Going from 1/20 chance of getting critted to 1/400 is huge.

Critted or just hit? If you’ve got AC covered crit chance is 1/16,000 with Luck up (depending on crit range). Main benefit of Luck with early tank is ability to avoid getting hit at all.

Can use that throughout game vs bosses but hard to get up 20 there sometimes.

 

[onemananadhisdroid]

So, after over a year for me (bought upon release), Drezen has fallen. And two decades after Warcraft 3 I'm the Lich King commanding an army of undead. Which is kinda neat.

It's probabably been discussed in here, but last year I played exclusively TB. For Drezen and surroundings, I went Baldur's Gate mode though. (In TB it would have lasted hours -- it took me two weeks of holidays last year to even get that far.) Only that there is a shitton more stuff going on than in BG. Wenduag alone for me rolls two damage rolls with her first attack -- and then has another two attacks per "turn". Which is to say, within a second or so of real-time play apparently, she makes 3-4 damage numbers pop up over enemy heads. That's just Wenduag and it's nothing fancy (like weapons triggering AoE effects after crits, spells, concentration checks, etc.) To say the game's combat was "busy" would be an understatement, even if you keep on using the "v" key slowing time.

Granted, I'm coming back to this after having finished Solasta -- probably the first ever D&Dish game in which the combat log is "nice to have" -- but in which every important roll is actually displayed right in the actual gameplay. You can even change the appearance of the dice to your liking. 10/10. It's curious that Owlcat have only considered going TB exclusively with their next (Warhammer 40k) game. AFAIK it's a lot more "simple" / has less stuff going on than Pathfinder/D&D3ish.

Ah well, back to war.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

It's curious that Owlcat have only considered going TB exclusively with their next (Warhammer 40k) game. AFAIK it's a lot more "simple" / has less stuff going on than Pathfinder/D&D3ish.

Its so they can have a single development path that will also be marketable to console peasants.

 

[Desiderius]

It's because they pander to the whiners, and nobody whines like a TB jihadi.

 

[Yosharian]

Grunker could you do me a favour, do you have a Demon savegame at Threshold that you could upload to Mega or whatever

I want to test some theories about Destructive Dispel

 

[Grunker]

Grunker could you do me a favour, do you have a Demon savegame at Threshold that you could upload to Mega or whatever

I want to test some theories about Destructive Dispel

Yep, I’ll check when I get home tonight. By Threshold, do you mean any save in the Fane basically? Because i probably made a manual save there at one point or another, like before Darkness

 

[Yosharian]

Grunker could you do me a favour, do you have a Demon savegame at Threshold that you could upload to Mega or whatever

I want to test some theories about Destructive Dispel

Yep, I’ll check when I get home tonight. By Threshold, do you mean any save in the Fane basically? Because i probably made a manual save there at one point or another, like before Darkness

Thanks, no I mean Threshold as in the very last dungeon of the game, just before Noct gives you Darkness Caress and you start fighting those asshole Gallu Stormcallers

 

[Desiderius]

You’re not a TB jihadi, Haplo. They’re the ones who want to nuke RTwP altogether and looks like they’re getting their wish.

 

[Grunker]

Grunker could you do me a favour, do you have a Demon savegame at Threshold that you could upload to Mega or whatever

I want to test some theories about Destructive Dispel

Yep, I’ll check when I get home tonight. By Threshold, do you mean any save in the Fane basically? Because i probably made a manual save there at one point or another, like before Darkness

Thanks, no I mean Threshold as in the very last dungeon of the game, just before Noct gives you Darkness Caress and you start fighting those asshole Gallu Stormcallers

ehm, I'm in act 4 lol