Pathfinder Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous Pre-DLC Thread [GO TO NEW THREAD]

[fantadomat]

Turns out I'm discovering this playthrough that pretty much all the Mythic Trick lines require skill checks at some point. Should have gone Aeon. Oh well I'll be going Legend eventually.

If you hadn't fanta on ignore you would know that turns out shit

If he hadn't Grauken on ignore,he would have had a chance at redemption.

 

[Shadenuat]

dont pick opposing school abjuration else you cant dismiss your own aoe effect spells

I laughed out loud. I thought dismiss was universal. hahahaha

Abjuration has dismissal/banishment & greater dispel. And prot from elements if you need to free slots on someone else.
I am actually considering running an Illusionist/Abjurer. Basically Blue Deck from MTG.

 

[fantadomat]

Forgot to mention this yesterday, but it was an amusingly unexpected moment.

Spoiler

Poop succubus smears you with her stuff. You get permanent stat mods (+2 natural armour and Con, but -4 Cha for being a stinky bastard)

Yeah,the shit demon from the island.

 

[Lamiosa]

This chorussina fight... Completely ridiculously difficult.

Spoiler

She becomes literally invincible unless you kill like 5 dudes before they can cast a spell, in a game where 'surprise round' means you only get a half action except for the person who initiated

Dimension Door all your team on top of her at the beginning of the fight, avoiding the trap. Each companion kills one enemy, done.

 

[Delterius]

To add, the Arcana stuff works on extreme amounts of gear, but the tooltip only gets changed with weapons and armor.

It works on e.g. amulets of natural armor if you check the hover AC, fists amulets etc.

Well, those are technically armor and no true trickster will let a technicality go to waste.

You can, in theory, grab Nature trick 3 and Arcana trick 3, rest a bunch of times and then re-spec into whatever personal power mythic tricks you want.

 

[Desiderius]

This chorussina fight... Completely ridiculously difficult.

Spoiler

She becomes literally invincible unless you kill like 5 dudes before they can cast a spell, in a game where 'surprise round' means you only get a half action except for the person who initiated

Folks at this point you should know the drill: if it seems impossible you’re missing something. In her case she has no SR and isn’t immune to Poison. But no reason to fite her at all.

https://forum.owlcatgames.com/t/handling-blightmaw/43589/3

Game is never “too hard.” Game will expose players who’ve gotten too one dimensional.

 

[Shadenuat]

This chorussina fight... Completely ridiculously difficult.

Spoiler

She becomes literally invincible unless you kill like 5 dudes before they can cast a spell, in a game where 'surprise round' means you only get a half action except for the person who initiated

Dimension Door all your team on top of her at the beginning of the fight, avoiding the trap. Each companion kills one enemy, done.

One of times AT ability to disarm traps from distance does nicely.

 

[Jaedar]

This chorussina fight... Completely ridiculously difficult.

Spoiler

She becomes literally invincible unless you kill like 5 dudes before they can cast a spell, in a game where 'surprise round' means you only get a half action except for the person who initiated

Dimension Door all your team on top of her at the beginning of the fight, avoiding the trap. Each companion kills one enemy, done.

I don't have mass dimension door. Even if I did, the odds me winning initiative over all the enemies and killing each in a half turn with one character is fabulously optimistic. Especially when there's 8 cultists and 6 party members.

Guess I should have let them summon the demon.

 

[Jackpot]

Reminder that savescumming is a legitimate tactic but ONLY if you're going the Aeon path.

 

[PrK]

So did you people get past act1 yet or not? I don't see the expected complaints.

Complaining on the Codex would take time away from clicking on Gargoyles, and we'd never finish the game before the end of the decade that way.

 

[Sheepherder]

Anyway, can anyone confirm if Ascendant Element works with Alchemist's Bombs? I know the description make it sound like it does, but with how buggy the game is, there's a good chance it doesn't.

To answer my own question, yes Ascendant Element does work with Alchemist bombs!

 

[Shadenuat]

This chorussina fight... Completely ridiculously difficult.

Spoiler

She becomes literally invincible unless you kill like 5 dudes before they can cast a spell, in a game where 'surprise round' means you only get a half action except for the person who initiated

Dimension Door all your team on top of her at the beginning of the fight, avoiding the trap. Each companion kills one enemy, done.

I don't have mass dimension door. Even if I did, the odds me winning initiative over all the enemies and killing each in a half turn with one character is fabulously optimistic. Especially when there's 8 cultists and 6 party members.

Guess I should have let them summon the demon.

2x2 fireballs in the room BG2 style does job too

 

[Heroic Liberator]

I'm still trying to finish the defense on that tavern in Ch. 1 on Core difficulty and it's a bitch when aiming for all the defenses to be kept intact from those arsonists. Respecced 4 of my party members into ranged combat and I'm using grease on enemy chokepoints and it's still a bitch.

 

[Delterius]

Reminder that savescumming is a legitimate tactic but ONLY if you're going the Aeon path.

Incorrect. Aeon's time travel is in-universe and therefore weak. Trickster has achieved CHIM. One of our mentors is a time travelling god that trolls Aeons for fun. Therefore savescumming is ours.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Reminder that savescumming is a legitimate tactic but ONLY if you're going the Aeon path.

Incorrect. Aeon's time travel is in-universe and therefore weak. Trickster has achieved CHIM. One of our mentors is a time travelling god that trolls Aeons for fun. Therefore savescumming is ours.

By Asmodeus, Tricksters belong in chains.

 

[Fedora Master]

I'm still trying to finish the defense on that tavern in Ch. 1 on Core difficulty and it's a bitch when aiming for all the defenses to be kept intact from those arsonists. Respecced 4 of my party members into ranged combat and I'm using grease on enemy chokepoints and it's still a bitch.

Buy summoning and stinky cloud scrolls and spam em.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

I'm still trying to finish the defense on that tavern in Ch. 1 on Core difficulty and it's a bitch when aiming for all the defenses to be kept intact from those arsonists. Respecced 4 of my party members into ranged combat and I'm using grease on enemy chokepoints and it's still a bitch.

Buy summoning and stinky cloud scrolls and spam em.

Will do if I can't manage to do it my way with better positioning in a few more attempts.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Also, how many times can I respecc my party at that Pathfinder guy for free? Or is it unlimited (his dialogue would suggest that it is not)?

 

[Delterius]

Also, how many times can I respecc my party at that Pathfinder guy for free? Or is it unlimited (his dialogue would suggest that it is not)?

I tested it. I think it's unlimited atm. In Kingmaker you got to respec for free 3 times.

 

[Desiderius]

dont pick opposing school abjuration else you cant dismiss your own aoe effect spells

I laughed out loud. I thought dismiss was universal. hahahaha

Abjuration has dismissal/banishment & greater dispel. And prot from elements if you need to free slots on someone else.
I am actually considering running an Illusionist/Abjurer. Basically Blue Deck from MTG.

Re-rolls + Dispel, Greater work. Bit of Luck/Fortune + Leyline ability + Winter Witch caster level boost will get you there.

Jace the Ice Sculptor

 

[Sharpedge]

Finished the game.

Spoiler

The final chapter is exceptionally buggy, there were quite a few quests I could not complete due to them bugging out. Last few fights were also rather underwhelming to be honest, the fight at the end of the beta was more challenging than the final fight in the game. After finishing it here are my thoughts.

+ A huge array of character building options.
+ Lots of branching dialogues/quests.
+ Early on some of the best dungeon design in RPGs. Drezen is 10/10.
+ Some excellent item design and there are good items restricted to each path. Furthermore every item type is well represented.
+ Lots of missables, this rewards exploration.

- Whilst they improved the crusade over the beta, it is still not as deep as I would like it to be. Attacks against forts are not frequent enough and some of the enemy balancing is so out of tune its silly. They have super high defenses and no offense which ends up wasting many turns. Furthermore if you try to use auto resolve to save time here it feels like the auto resolve is trolling. If you use it on these fights as it will almost always lose or give you an exceptionally unfavorable outcome, so you are forced to manually resolve it where you easily win without losing any soldiers. The crusade does still feel a bit tacked on. It needs more work.
- There are so many bugs. SOOOOOOOOOO many bugs.

The puzzles are not a positive or negative. They aren't that challenging, but its nice that they are there.

Now, I haven't been following this thread because I have actually being playing the game in my spare time. Is it worth me reading over these past 164 pages to see what has been said, or should I just start my next playthrough?

 

[Desiderius]

Or just that Wiz that gets + 4 caster levels once a day or those Goggles or Oracle with Merge.

 

[Infinitron]

Rock Paper Shotgun, oh my: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/pa...g-belter-if-you-can-handle-your-fantasy-admin

Pathfinder: Wrath Of The Righteous is a CRPG belter, if you can handle your fantasy admin
Devils in the details




I had high hopes of reviewing Pathfinder: Wrath Of The Righteous this week. However, somewhere around six hours into the game, when I realised I was still honking great tracts of story away from even unlocking most of the game's core mechanics, reality set in. Without properly no-lifing it for at least the rest of the week, I knew there was no way I was going to see enough of it to give any kind of overall verdict. It's months' worth of game, before even starting on replay potential. And honestly? If you're a certain kind of CRPG player, that should be all the recommendation you need.

Wrath Of The Righteous, much like predecessor Pathfinder: Kingmaker from 2018, is an RPG. Specifically, the kind it's most pragmatic to describe as "a bit like Baldur's Gate 2": a high-fidelity recreation of a tabletop RPG system, viewed from a top-down-ish perspective, and involving party management, hybrid turn-based/real-time combat, and absolute truckloads of dialogue.

I'll be upfront about it too, and say that if you - like me - loved Baldur's Gate 2 to bits, you should be playing this game. For the reasons stated above, I am in no sort of a position to say whether it's as good an experience overall. But it feels uncannily similar to play in terms of tone, story and pacing, and I've had loads of moments so far where, had you asked my hindbrain what it thought my conscious mind was up to, it would definitely have said, "Playing Baldur's Gate 2".

I've recently realised that a lot of my adult life playing games has boiled down to a desperate mission to relive those moments from my adolescence, when I first encountered games that would go on to become all-time favourites. These are, for the most part, elusive dragons to chase. As such, when a game genuinely manages to immerse me in the Proust-hole like Wrath Of The Righteous has, it makes me really sit up and take notice.

Still, while I remain wowed for the time being, it'll be interesting to see whether I make it through to the end or not. Because one thing which has already been brought home to me by Pathfinder's talent for evocation, is just how much more time I had on my hands back when I first played Baldur's Gate 2. Honestly, I'm not sure I want to spend hundreds of hours in an RPG any more, no matter how compelling it is.



Pathfinder, if you don't know, is the name of a roleplaying system which is a sort of evolution of an old edition of Dungeons & Dragons. I've played it precisely once, and I played as a sea-worshipping dwarven monk who kicked a millipede in half. Just like in real life. It was cool. And if I'm honest, I had no idea what I was doing. This is because Pathfinder's old-school ethos eschews pretty much all rules streamlining, for the sake of offering the most detailed simulation possible.

Wrath Of The Righteous does this, too. It's an extraordinarily faithful adaptation of the tabletop system, in fact, to the point where, even with a PC doing most of the thinking for me, I have found myself bamboozled more than a couple of times.

Even the character creation process, usually a piece of cake, left me feeling like I'd woken up with a major concussion in a European supermarket, unsure of what I'd been sent there to buy. There are, quite genuinely, hundreds of things you can be; more than you could ever hope to play through in a regular human lifespan. A category so seemingly basic as "Ranger", for example, has more subclasses than many games have classes full stop, with each offering a full-on archetype that will radically change your experience of the game, right down to dialogue options.

It's a paralysing amount of choice, with very few clues presented to the novice as to what meaningful differences exist between the options presented. Furthermore, knowing that you're committing to more than a week of solid game time whatever you choose, the decision becomes genuinely stressful: for me at least, it felt very much like I was choosing which 150-odd unique experiences to miss out on.

Spoiler

My character sheet, along with an example of the sort of tooltip which, although technically very helpful, causes my eyes to slide off the screen after a sentence or two with a feeling of vague panic.

In the end, I opted to play as a half-orc druid who reveres enormous beasts. Just like in real life. Among other things, this allowed me to start the game with a pet Triceratops called Basileus, and that made me well happy. It also emphasised just how broad the options presented to me had been. If I was packing a fucking dinosaur from the word go, then what wonders might have been hidden among the other 150-odd archetypes I didn't pick, and which I mostly skimmed through with a rising sense of bewilderment?

I am having a lot of fun with Basileus, and I am killing loads of devils. Wrath Of The Righteous' story is genuinely a bit of a belter, putting you in the shoes of an itinerant crusader who has travelled to a city in order to fight a sort of bleak forever war against a load of satans coming out of a hole. Unfortunately, the chief satan - a bloke with clouds of locusts for wings - bins the whole city the moment you arrive, and changes your plans quite drastically. You fall down a hole, find a weird god sword in a knackered underground church run by mutants, and things really get motoring.


This is what the campaign map for the army command subgame looks like, by the way. Mixing genres like this is a bold move, I have to say, but it's one I'm theoretically really into, given my taste in games.

Still, as I said above, I'm not sure how long I'm going to be able to stick with it. There are just a few too many numbers floating around for me to truly get lost in the story. I think it's the fights, actually. Since I'm nowhere near any level of mastery required to play them in real-time, and because a lot of them are surprisingly hard, even early on, I'm pausing with extreme frequency. This is really slowing things down for me. It feels a bit like I'm reading a 3,000 page fantasy novel, but constantly having to put down the book to decide how each fight gets won.

I'm more than compelled to carry on for now. Apart from anything else, I'm intrigued to see the parallel grand strategy game about leading an army, which apparently kicks into gear during the next act. But at the back of my mind, I'm already feeling a quiet dread about the sheer amount of RPG admin I'll have to do before I get to that point, and how much of the rest of my life is worth sacrificing for it.

If you're happy with a slower-paced, mammoth-scale RPG experience, and are the kind of person who enjoys being fussy over the numbers, I expect that dread will not be something you tend to feel. You will likely fall in love with Pathfinder: Wrath Of The Righteous. Conversely, if what you're hoping for is an action-RPG along the lines of Diablo... Well, this place is not a place of honour; no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.

Ultimately, I suppose I'm just a humble druid, looking to make their way through their world with their massive scaly mate, and I'm not sure which side of the fence I will eventually fall on. Still, another fifty or so hours should make up my mind, right?

 

[Desiderius]

I'm still trying to finish the defense on that tavern in Ch. 1 on Core difficulty and it's a bitch when aiming for all the defenses to be kept intact from those arsonists. Respecced 4 of my party members into ranged combat and I'm using grease on enemy chokepoints and it's still a bitch.

On core?

Three Grease + Marching Terror FTW. Ember spamming Slumber, Lann Pumping lead. If you hit Tower first you can hit level five beforehand.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

I'm still trying to finish the defense on that tavern in Ch. 1 on Core difficulty and it's a bitch when aiming for all the defenses to be kept intact from those arsonists. Respecced 4 of my party members into ranged combat and I'm using grease on enemy chokepoints and it's still a bitch.

On core?

Three Grease + Marching Terror FTW. Ember spamming Slumber, Lann Pumping lead. If you hit Tower first you can hit level five beforehand.

Spoiler

I haven't recruited neither Ember (yet) nor Lann.