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

[Sheepherder]

Demon works well with Two-hander Standard actions (Cleaves/Vital Strikes) since Charge/Leap is a Move Action IIRC. Can get AC from other sources but can also just slay. Or you know both.

I already used a big weapon before, I'll use a big shield now.
Managed to make the TTT tower shield feat work. And since tower shields can have their max DEX modified, this TTT mythic feat now works on them too:

It feels like it's a bit too much, when combined with the STR to AC feat, since the max DEX increase can replicate a large benefit of the Tower Shield Specialist.

Also are Missile shield and Ray shield feats worth it?

 

[KeAShizuku]

So I was playing the entire game in RTWP because fuck tedious turn based combat but I encountered one stupid quest that forces you into TB.
That's just stupid Owlcat.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

Sheepherder TSS is a good kit, but I don't think you'll get much mileage out of the AoE and Ray defenses. Enemy spellcasters aren't very common and the ones that do exist typically target will.

This is one reason why I can't ever take TSS. I really appreciate (Armed) Bravery and the weapon training feats. There are enough busted ways to stack AC in WoTR where its chief advantages don't get used. Also, archers will go for your backline wearing robes. I am also in agreement that shields aren't the best tool for demon mythic, but I guess you can bash with them. Maybe do something with that. I recall that being well supported in WotR.

 

[Sarkile]

Demon works well with Two-hander Standard actions (Cleaves/Vital Strikes) since Charge/Leap is a Move Action IIRC. Can get AC from other sources but can also just slay. Or you know both.

Greatsword demon charge mythic vital striking Bloodrager was my first build and typically worked well against most enemies.

 

[Desiderius]

Sheepherder TSS is a good kit, but I don't think you'll get much mileage out of the AoE and Ray defenses. Enemy spellcasters aren't very common and the ones that do exist typically target will.

This is one reason why I can't ever take TSS. I really appreciate (Armed) Bravery and the weapon training feats. There are enough busted ways to stack AC in WoTR where its chief advantages don't get used. Also, archers will go for your backline wearing robes. I am also in agreement that shields aren't the best tool for demon mythic, but I guess you can bash with them. Maybe do something with that. I recall that being well supported in WotR.

I like Burst Barrier, Touch AC boost, and eventually getting Improved Evasion (to go with Burst Barrier) along of course with eventually cancelling downsides of Tower to skills, DEX bonus, and to hit. But yeah since companion gets it in P:K best to enjoy it there and try new stuff in Wrath.

 

[Pathfinder: WoTR]

So I was playing the entire game in RTWP because fuck tedious turn based combat but I encountered one stupid quest that forces you into TB.

You mean the literal backer quest paid for by codex? Lmao git gud

 

[Yosharian]

Demon works well with Two-hander Standard actions (Cleaves/Vital Strikes) since Charge/Leap is a Move Action IIRC. Can get AC from other sources but can also just slay. Or you know both.

I already used a big weapon before, I'll use a big shield now.
Managed to make the TTT tower shield feat work. And since tower shields can have their max DEX modified, this TTT mythic feat now works on them too:

It feels like it's a bit too much, when combined with the STR to AC feat, since the max DEX increase can replicate a large benefit of the Tower Shield Specialist.

Also are Missile shield and Ray shield feats worth it?

> sheilds

 

[ERYFKRAD]

sheilds

Like shields but used by sheilas

 

[KeAShizuku]

So I was playing the entire game in RTWP because fuck tedious turn based combat but I encountered one stupid quest that forces you into TB.

You mean the literal backer quest paid for by codex? Lmao git gud

Ah the backer quests nobody actually likes lmao.

 

[Desiderius]

So I was playing the entire game in RTWP because fuck tedious turn based combat but I encountered one stupid quest that forces you into TB.

You mean the literal backer quest paid for by codex? Lmao git gud

Ah the backer quests nobody actually likes lmao.

Are there any backer quests anyone likes?

 

[Pathfinder: WoTR]

Are there any backer quests anyone likes?

Blackwater is cool

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Did Varnhold's Lot. It's pretty cool, though the last dungeon is a bit of a slog.
I went with a premade undead bloodline sorceress because I didn't feel like making a character from scratch. She was fine and spamming blind was pretty fun, but the 3 generated party members they give you are shit.
My character

Spoiler

turned into a mimic

in the end, which was kind of interesting and might be something cool to see in the base game. Maybe I should have just walked through the portal though.

 

[Yosharian]

> She was fine and spamming blind was pretty fun, but the 3 generated party members they give you are shit

As opposed to the base game, where...oh wait

Also this is the Wrath thread my man

 

[Supermedo]

So I was playing the entire game in RTWP because fuck tedious turn based combat but I encountered one stupid quest that forces you into TB.
That's just stupid Owlcat.

What quest? I beat the game last year in RTWP and I don't remember a quest like that.

 

[mondblut]

Are there any backer quests anyone likes?

The Blakemoor's Grimoire quest in Kingmaker. How can we NOT love it?

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

> She was fine and spamming blind was pretty fun, but the 3 generated party members they give you are shit

As opposed to the base game, where...oh wait

Also this is the Wrath thread my man

I couldn't find the kingmaker thread in search, so I assumed it all got merged.

 

[Infinitron]

Here it is: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1184370/view/6564653885911203913

Flight of the Gold Dragon
Crusaders!

A few months ago, during the release of A Dance of Masks DLC, we showed you that the Devil is always in the details. You all seemed to really enjoy it, so it’s about time we take the next step and invite you to witness the flight of the dragons!

Yes, it is what you think it is! The long-anticipated finale of the years-long effort to flesh out the Mythic paths — the update to the Gold Dragon path — is here.

Coming in the impending major patch 2.5 that will accompany the launch of the Game of the Year Edition (you’ll learn more about that soon!), the update tweaks and improves many aspects of this Mythic path.

Let’s give you a sneak peek!

New Visuals
We’ll start with the shiny new visuals. While the original Gold Dragon always had a distinctive visual identity, we always felt that we could kick this up a notch.

With this update, the Dragon has received a few new spell effects and animations — this is how some of them look:

We also felt it was a good time to revisit the Corrupted Gold Dragon. Previously the followers of Dahak had no unique look, simply using the same visuals as the standard version. With this update, evil dragons boast an updated corrupted version of the portrait, updated scale color and texture, and their own alternative visuals for some of the spells.

While technically not a part of this update, we felt that it would also be appropriate to remind you that in the last major patch, alongside the other Mythics, the Gold Dragon received a unique weather effect in Drezen and a gorgeous new animation for the Sword of Valor. Whether you’ve already seen it or missed this beauty, we invite you to enjoy chilling in Drezen under the rays of shining light and shadows of dragons flying overhead.

Mechanical Updates
Let’s move on to the mechanics, and we’ve got lots to show here:

New Mythic Spellbook
The Gold Dragon has received a brand-new mythic spellbook with a total of 10 new spells, with followers of Dahak having their own, corrupted version of some.

Take a peek at a few of them:

Dragon Might

As a swift action, you increase your damage dealt by 50% for 1 round.

Summon Dragon

You summon 1d3+1 medium silver dragons (or 1d3+1 medium black dragons if you have vowed to serve Dahak). Summoned dragons attack your opponents to the best of their ability.

Thousand Bites

While in the form of a Gold Dragon, as a swift action, you gain 3 additional attacks for 1 minute. These additional attacks stack with the bonus attacks from haste and other similar effects.

Dragon Wrath

You blast your enemies with rays of focused dragon energy. You may fire one ray for every six caster levels you have (up to a maximum of 3 rays at 18th level) at every enemy within a 25-foot radius. Each ray requires a ranged touch attack to hit and deals 1d6 points of damage per caster level. Half of the damage is fire damage, but the other half results directly from holy or unholy power (if you have vowed to serve Dahak) and is therefore not subject to being reduced by fire resistance.

New Mythic Features
We have also added 10 brand new Mythic features related to various improvements to your dragon breath. Here are some of them:

Annihilating Breath

Your breath annihilates the life force of living foes. Living enemies struck by your breath take additional negative energy damage equal to your breath damage (a Fortitude save against the DC of your breath halves this damage).

Mind-Clearing Breath

Your breath dispels all mind-affecting effects applied by enemies from allies in the area. Additionally, you dispel all mind-affecting effects from enemies struck by your breath (including effects applied by your allies while affected by domination or charm effects).

Empowered Breath

Your breath damage increases by a number of damage dice equal to your mythic rank.

Rejuvenating Breath

Your breath heals allies in the area. The amount of damage healed is equal to your breath damage.

New Domain and Blessing
To support early-game affiliation with the Gold Dragon Mythic for dragon aficionados, we’ve also decided to add the dragon-themed Scalykind Domain and Blessing:

Improvement and Rebalance
After introducing new spells and features, we naturally felt it was necessary to also review and update the existing ones, such as:

• Moving some of them to be accessed earlier
• Having them Empowered and Maximized at Mythic level 10
• Allowing you to alternate between damage types
• Straight up increasing some of the damage and bonus numbers
• Reducing or even removing the cooldown on higher levels (in particular, the cooldown of Gold Dragon Breath)

Our goal with all these changes was to bring the Gold Dragon mechanically on par with other Mythics and make it considerably more fun and distinctive to play. Enjoy your new toys!

Narrative Updates
Last but not least, let’s get to the storytelling.

Instead of focusing all our resources on a single large quest like we did with the Devil in the previous update, this time we’ve taken a lighter but more sweeping touch, placing an emphasis on reactivity throughout the story.

We started from a concern voiced by many of our players — that unlike other late-game Mythics (Legend, Swarm, Devil), the transition to the Gold Dragon felt somewhat rushed and ‘‘out of the blue” for the Commanders who lacked an existing connection to a draconic heritage.

To address this, we prepared two new full-scale (pun intended!) dragon-themed religions:
Apsu
and
Dahak
, available at character creation.

Each of these new religions will serve as a smooth buildup toward the Gold Dragon path for players who want their story to naturally tie into this Mythic but don’t want to be locked into picking one of the dragon-themed archetypes. Both of these religions have a lot of reactivity across the game, some of it exclusively to the Gold Dragon.

Additionally, we’ve added two new story beats available only for the Gold Dragon, where their wisdom of millennia has a chance to make two certain well-known characters take an unexpected turn to the path of good and redemption. This will, of course, be reflected in the epilogue slides.

Can you guess who these characters are?
Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Oh, and while we’re at it, we’ve changed the corrupted Gold Dragon’s alignment to Chaotic Evil. Evil is evil!

What’s next?
While this update marks a very important milestone for us and for the game itself, we are not entirely done just yet. The game will continue to receive additional bug fixing updates, we will continue to accept your bug reports, and there might still be some QoL improvements in the future. However, we don’t have any more plans for new mechanics or story content after this update, so if you waited for the game to be complete — this is the time!

Stay tuned, and may your wings carry you forward!

Always yours,
Owlcats

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Don't care about gold dragon, but props to Owlcat. Good devs.

 

[Cyberarmy]

"The long-anticipated finale of the years-long effort to flesh out the Mythic paths — the update to the Gold Dragon path — is here."

lol only took more than 2 years+ development.

 

[Yosharian]

Seems pretty weak aside from the Swift Action abilities, and those are competing with other things

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Did the Devil Path ever get an proper update? I know it got a new quest but I don't see anything about mechanical changes.

 

[cretin]

I like how they are like "its finally here! ... coming in the next update ... "

 

[mondblut]

Damn. And here I was thinking about starting to play it. Ah well, another 6 months then.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Well since they're wrapping things up, I should start thinking about getting back to this.

 

[Pathfinder: WoTR]

Damn. And here I was thinking about starting to play it. Ah well, another 6 months then.

Even if they make it mechanically more interesting, golden dragon still SUUUCCKKSS thematically. It's like being a goody two shoes angel but with extra hypocrisy and without the cool factor of "lets smite evil with righteous fire".

Every single encounter with the golden dragons make them look like hypocritical idiots:

1. When first encountering Hal, he (in human disguise) begs you to spare a cultist's life. The cultist openly admits that he is not going to change his ways if spared and will continue his murder/rape/human sacrifice routine, which is a perfectly valid reason to smite evil his ass, even for a LG palading-type character. Not sparing him makes Hal call you an asshole and blocks the golden dragon mythic path forever.
   
   
2. If you go along and spare the cultist, Hal spends 20 minutes explaining his golden dragon philosophy of "i'm like super wise and compassionate and my earthly mission is to help humans, that's why I will never join your war against the objectively evil demons, but I will continue to provide healing to both sides. Killing cultists is evil too, you know ".
   
   A few dozen hours later during the second battle for Drezen he breaks his own vows of neutrality and appears to fight alongside you. When asked why, he just goes "Oh I just sensed that you were a golden dragon too, so I came to help my kin". So, apparently, it's okay to kill demons to help a fellow dragon, but fighting demons to defend humans, of whom Hal is a self-proclaimed protector, is bad. Alright dude.
   
   
3. If you choose to follow path of the golden dragon, the first quest given to you by Hal is helping a bunch of random people with their small problems, which is supposed to teach you humility and that sometimes you should stop doing the grand important thing you're busy with (saving the world from demons, duh) and help the common people with their everyday problems. Which would be okay at introducing you to the golden dragon philosophy, if it didn't turn out that ALL THE COMMON FOLK YOU HAVE BEEN HELPING WERE ACTUALLY DRAGONS IN DISGUISE TOYING WITH YOU.
   
   This honestly made me wonder if the golden dragons were purposefully written to be hypocrites, because going from "you should drop whatever you are doing and help the villagers collect the flowers (on the other side of the country), because helping smallfolk is what we dragons do" to "lol there were no villagers it was just other golden dragons having fun at your expense" is retarded to say the least.

Oh, and of course the canonic golden dragon choice of forgiving areelu vorlesh at the end of the game .

I had the same problem with it as I did with Arueshalae's plotline. Her entire arc is "oh I used to be evil and mind-raped people to make them commit atrocities against their loved ones and condemned their souls to eternal damnation, but now I NO LONGER WANT TO BE EVIL and want like a peaceful life in a forest cabin and tea parties with friends, which makes me good". IMO, her good ending should have been a sacrifice where she actually chooses to undo the evil she has commited as a succubus, and not just having a pretty tea party in a dream that magically changes her alignment to good, lol.

It seems like pathfinder/owlcat writers completely missed the whole point of redemption requiring some sort of a self-sacrifice to atone for the sins that you have commited in the past, and not merely declaring "i don't want to be evil anymore" like Michael Scott from The Office saying "I declare bancrupcy" out loud and thinking this removes loan obligations from him somehow.

This obviouslty comes from a warped concept of morality that is used in DnD/Pathfinder, where the "goodness" and "evilness" are innate characteristics of one's soul, and not the reflections of the choices one made in his past.