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

[thesheeep]

Guys, play now or wait for patches for bug fixes? I am sure it's in a better state than PK was, but is it good enough? Cheers!

I would say so, yes.
There are bugs, and not few of them, but I honestly haven't seen anything game breaking so far.


After playing for 50+ hours now, I must say one thing, though:

Some of those battles & boss fights can go eat a bag of dicks.

Seriously, when my barely lvl10 party goes into Wintersun and there are lvl 26 creatures just casually roaming about, things get ridiculous. E.g. a certain spectre that just casually pops up and doesn't even give XP when killed. Wtf.
Or the boss of that same location (Marhevok) - when it's his turn he just casually kills off 1-2 of my spellcasters with his 8 or so attacks per turn and nothing you can do about it. Even my 34AC tank (at lvl10, I'm fairly proud) gets shredded in 2-3 turns by that.
Oh, and he has a little pet dragon with 43 AC....

You can buff yourself to hell and back, there's just no good dealing with this.
You will not be able to get to attack bonuses that can reliably hit that dragon or an AC on your mages that will prevent them from getting rekt in a single turn.

The only solution to bullshit like that is exploitative cheese:

• Marhevok cannot see invisible, so casting greater invisibility on your entire party makes the fight a walk in the park (the dragon is super hard to hit, but not particularly dangerous damage-wise).
• 1-hit-kill-spells (e.g. Phantasmal Killer) and reload a few dozen times until one of them actually goes through.

But honestly, all of these solutions I just find dumb: they turn something way too hard into something entirely trivial and require prior knowledge of the situation in order to resolve it.
That's just bad design. Any non-optional situation should be resolvable by a party that is decently specced and rested and by a player making sound decisions in combat.

So what I do instead is significantly lower the difficulty for these bullshit fights.
Which also sucks, because the difficulty is fine outside of these few singular fights.

Other side note:
The game should tell you before you create a character that more than half of the enemies you'll be facing will be practically immune to fire damage. And electricity, for some reason - honestly, why are demons immune to lightning? I don't get it.
A DnD-style game in which fireball is borderline useless... that's NOT something I expected.

 

[ArchAngel]

NJClaw or anyone else are mounts still buggy as hell?

If you count lack of mounts buggy then yes.

 

[NJClaw]

I could not make him a druid, because I want Azata. I did not make him a ranger, because my Kingmaker baron was a ranger.
I am a bit nervous because of medium BAB progression. I play on core, and I hope all the goodies that a straight hunter gets will make up for it.

Somewhat thinking about rerolling as a Primal Druid, since the dinosaur flair is perfectly for what I am building here. Also the large size bonusses go really well with longspears I think. Also full casting is nicer than half casting.
I am nervous about the alignment restriction however. Is it possible to be a neutral good Azata in this game? I would dislike having to settle for angel.

I don't want to get your hopes up, but I think you can follow the Azata path while being TN or NG. You can definitely follow it while being CN, so it works with the Druid.

NJClaw or anyone else are mounts still buggy as hell?

If you count lack of mounts buggy then yes.

Again with this shit. You don't buy mounts, you get them as class features. Almost every class has an archetype that gives an animal companion.

smaug mounts are still buggy, but I'm playing a mounted paladin without any major problem. In TB sometimes you can't attack, but usually taking a 5-ft step fixes it and, in any case, you can always activate alternate attack methods like Cleave and Vital Strike. The worst problem for me is that if you use Cleave or Vital Strike your mount doesn't attack, so it's a bit of a waste.

 

[volklore]

Playing with a Fey Sorcerer kindred raised half elf rn (respecced from sylvan early when I read that sylvan cannot pick the extra bloodline feat, kinda killed my plans), planning to go azata and go for as much control as possible. After losing the pet, I am already feeling the need for a bit more dps to take advantage of my control (rn using woljiff and seelah with a 2H atm). I don't think CamCam with slashing grace will cut it. Is there more big bad sword type companions coming later on? really feeling the need of a big STR guy with all those dex builds and support casters around... I am on the fence with hiring an instinctual barb or mutato warrior merc to fill that slot.
I also had to respec Seelah, I tried to level her as Court Poet Skald (Casting stats rage), but the achetype seems bugged and the song doesn't spread rage powers, doesn't even give them to herself.

Cam with Fencing Grace should be plenty.

Use Crusader's Edge.

Maybe my disdain for camelia comes from her relative weakness before slashing grace and anticipating my general dislike of the character. The thing is with mercs, it feels better to hire them early (less money and also the feeling of leveling them up rather than just hire them at lvl 10-15 or so). Also slightly worried about stat item repartition. At least in the early game, Wrath is a lot more stingy with belts and circlets. Pretty sure that by the same level in kingmaker, I had one for every character and right now I only have a +2 cha circlet.

 

[Jermu]

NJClaw or anyone else are mounts still buggy as hell?

They get stuck often when looting shit. The fix is to unmount or loot whole container with other char

Still cannot level up Arueshalae she is 3 levels behind now

 

[ArchAngel]

NJClaw or anyone else are mounts still buggy as hell?

If you count lack of mounts buggy then yes.

Again with this shit. You don't buy mounts, you get them as class features. Almost every class has an archetype that gives an animal companion.

That is not how PnP works. Everyone can ride a mount and fight on it. There is no reason to not allow us to just buy warhorses and use them with every class, there is already a feat that any class can take for it.

 

[Haplo]

NJClaw or anyone else are mounts still buggy as hell?

Mounted Charges were terrible for me. Like 50% failure rate.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Cute. Too bad that she fell for D*sna rather than Asmodeus. Stiil, if she has no issues with a LE protagonist, I don't mind having her in my party and encouraging her commitment to self-denial from her demonic ways.

 

[Thac0]

I could not make him a druid, because I want Azata. I did not make him a ranger, because my Kingmaker baron was a ranger.
I am a bit nervous because of medium BAB progression. I play on core, and I hope all the goodies that a straight hunter gets will make up for it.

Somewhat thinking about rerolling as a Primal Druid, since the dinosaur flair is perfectly for what I am building here. Also the large size bonusses go really well with longspears I think. Also full casting is nicer than half casting.
I am nervous about the alignment restriction however. Is it possible to be a neutral good Azata in this game? I would dislike having to settle for angel.

I don't want to get your hopes up, but I think you can follow the Azata path while being TN or NG. You can definitely follow it while being CN, so it works with the Druid.

Nice, I found an alignment sheet that confirms that.
I rerolled as a neutral good primal druid, those neutral nature religions are much cooler than Desna anyway.
Pouring over the character sheet it really seems like that nothing the hunter gets is more valuable than what a druid brings to the table, full casting is just so ridiculously good.
Only the stats are a bit iffy now, I hope +3 Strength +1 Dex +1 Con -1 Int +5 Wis -2 Cha is enough to hit AC. At least the tutorial is less cruel on high diff than in Kingmaker.
The default raptor artwork is just way too cute.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I would say so, yes.
There are bugs, and not few of them, but I honestly haven't seen anything game breaking so far.


After playing for 50+ hours now, I must say one thing, though:

Some of those battles & boss fights can go eat a bag of dicks.

Seriously, when my barely lvl10 party goes into Wintersun and there are lvl 26 creatures just casually roaming about, things get ridiculous. E.g. a certain spectre that just casually pops up and doesn't even give XP when killed. Wtf.
Or the boss of that same location (Marhevok) - when it's his turn he just casually kills off 1-2 of my spellcasters with his 8 or so attacks per turn and nothing you can do about it. Even my 34AC tank (at lvl10, I'm fairly proud) gets shredded in 2-3 turns by that.
Oh, and he has a little pet dragon with 43 AC....

You can buff yourself to hell and back, there's just no good dealing with this.
You will not be able to get to attack bonuses that can reliably hit that dragon or an AC on your mages that will prevent them from getting rekt in a single turn.

The only solution to bullshit like that is exploitative cheese:

• Marhevok cannot see invisible, so casting greater invisibility on your entire party makes the fight a walk in the park (the dragon is super hard to hit, but not particularly dangerous damage-wise).
• 1-hit-kill-spells (e.g. Phantasmal Killer) and reload a few dozen times until one of them actually goes through.

But honestly, all of these solutions I just find dumb: they turn something way too hard into something entirely trivial and require prior knowledge of the situation in order to resolve it.
That's just bad design. Any non-optional situation should be resolvable by a party that is decently specced and rested and by a player making sound decisions in combat.

So what I do instead is significantly lower the difficulty for these bullshit fights.
Which also sucks, because the difficulty is fine outside of these few singular fights.

Other side note:
The game should tell you before you create a character that more than half of the enemies you'll be facing will be practically immune to fire damage. And electricity, for some reason - honestly, why are demons immune to lightning? I don't get it.
A DnD-style game in which fireball is borderline useless... that's NOT something I expected.

One of the lessons of all the IE games & PoE/Deadfire which I had to start un-learning in Owlcat's games is that videogame player's assumption "This game is for casual retards, I'm using a couple of tricks that put me above the select all>left click crowd, and now I got this powerful gear, or figured out this spells synergy and now I can go across the world map and wave my dick around all the way". I haven't yet reached a state when I can wave my dick around, although I guess it's possible once you learn the game rules well enough.

 

[Daidre]

Pouring over the character sheet it really seems like that nothing the hunter gets is more valuable than what a druid brings to the table, full casting is just so ridiculously good.

Hunter's main feature is getting a lot of extra teamwork feat and sharing them on pet. Pet could get them naturally too, but some of them like Precise Strike or Seize the Moment are good for free (almost) but not worth of investment most of the time.
My hunter has really good start with Lead Blades spell and two-hander, with power attack and cleaving finish. He also gets Ouflank for free on lvl 2 so it was probably my strongest melee build in chapter 1.
Druid has his strengths too of course, but it is hard really compare feat-starved full caster with melee.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Is clicking this supposed to do something?

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Also,

Spicy demon trivia

 

[NJClaw]

Even my 34AC tank (at lvl10, I'm fairly proud) gets shredded in 2-3 turns by that.

At level 10 you should aim a little higher than that (I'd say around 40, probably). My horse had AC 34 at level 6.

 

[Efe]

iirc yea, as you develop your aeon powers it will enable an interaction
thesheeep
you can save wintersun for dead last and do it at about lv13.

 

[Desiderius]

Daeran gets Resto for free and has a ton of Dust at his house.

Or you could keep Death Ward up.

At lvl 7 no party member has access to 4th level spells, so scrolls are the only option, unless there is a rules-bending way to cast it of which I'm not aware. The same goes for Death Ward - also a 4th level spell.

This may be taken as a hint - don't mess with enemies who can give negative levels unless you can cast 4th level spells.

In terms of cost, Death Ward costs the same as Restoration, so it's like you are pre-paying your level drain cure when you buy Death Ward instead of Restoration. I'd still choose Restoration, because its use can be conserved, while Death Ward is expended before the combat.

All that being said, the UI complaints are still valid.

Your friendly neighborhood buck broken jogger does.

 

[smaug]

I’m so glad that

Spoiler

The only companion you lose before and after chapel is WolfJ because he was carrying that crusader artifact which gave me cold iron.. Suck a dick game

 

[Desiderius]

Daeran gets Resto for free and has a ton of Dust at his house.

Or you could keep Death Ward up.

At lvl 7 no party member has access to 4th level spells, so scrolls are the only option, unless there is a rules-bending way to cast it of which I'm not aware. The same goes for Death Ward - also a 4th level spell.

This may be taken as a hint - don't mess with enemies who can give negative levels unless you can cast 4th level spells.

In terms of cost, Death Ward costs the same as Restoration, so it's like you are pre-paying your level drain cure when you buy Death Ward instead of Restoration. I'd still choose Restoration, because its use can be conserved, while Death Ward is expended before the combat.

All that being said, the UI complaints are still valid.

That’s the wonder of spontaneous - you can put on the Ward as needed or use the slots for something else if you don’t. Witches get it too and if your friendly neighborhood Lich gives you a hand you’ll always have one on tap.

 

[ArchAngel]

Is there any reason to rush to finish Act 2? There are some Demon packs that might need a bit of skipping of days to get enough reinforcements to kill and I wonder if I lose out on anything if I do that.

 

[thesheeep]

Whatever happened to "hey, this area is kicking my ass, maybe I should come back later with more levels and better gear"? It's not like ch.3 has a lack of areas to go to and grab more xp. Maybe I'm misreading you, but the way you framed the argument kinda makes me think you want elder scrolls style scaling so you can do all areas the moment you just got there.

I'd usually agree, but in this instance:

• This is basically the first quest you receive after Drezen, not some random location you just walk into
• When you go into the area, the enemies are tough, but you can win - gave off the impression of "just" being a hard area
• The game's balance is always kinda whack. An area seeming difficult doesn't really tell you to "piss off until later" like it does in other games
• Only the main boss is nonsensically strong. At that point I was too committed to come back later

Trust me, on the next playthrough I won't be doing that one first after Drezen...

One of the lessons of all the IE games & PoE/Deadfire which I had to start un-learning in Owlcat's games is that videogame player's assumption "This game is for casual retards, I'm using a couple of tricks that put me above the select all>left click crowd, and now I got this powerful gear, or figured out this spells synergy and now I can go across the world map and wave my dick around all the way". I haven't yet reached a state when I can wave my dick around, although I guess it's possible once you learn the game rules well enough.

I don't think I was ever able to just roflstomp whole maps in this game... Not so far.
Honestly, I doubt it's possible on the higher (Core+) difficulties. Maybe very late in the game when you can really stack up some crazy bonuses & items?

Definitely not with my current main char, anyway. Witch/Winter Witch.
Not terrible, it's fun to play, but I fail to see any insane potential here.

 

[Yosharian]

From what I've seen so far, I doubt the itemization here comes anywhere near Deadfire level, particularly in relation to gameplay and playstyle impact.

Lmao I knew it

 

[Nerevar]

Wait a minute. The paladin is gay (literally impossible without falling) and its husband is a tranny that took a magic potion to become a girl?

Is it too late to take my name off the credits. I don't want to be associated with retardation.

Bloody gallery of freaks and degenerates in this game.

 

[Desiderius]

Playing with a Fey Sorcerer kindred raised half elf rn (respecced from sylvan early when I read that sylvan cannot pick the extra bloodline feat, kinda killed my plans), planning to go azata and go for as much control as possible. After losing the pet, I am already feeling the need for a bit more dps to take advantage of my control (rn using woljiff and seelah with a 2H atm). I don't think CamCam with slashing grace will cut it. Is there more big bad sword type companions coming later on? really feeling the need of a big STR guy with all those dex builds and support casters around... I am on the fence with hiring an instinctual barb or mutato warrior merc to fill that slot.
I also had to respec Seelah, I tried to level her as Court Poet Skald (Casting stats rage), but the achetype seems bugged and the song doesn't spread rage powers, doesn't even give them to herself.

Cam with Fencing Grace should be plenty.

Use Crusader's Edge.

Maybe my disdain for camelia comes from her relative weakness before slashing grace and anticipating my general dislike of the character. The thing is with mercs, it feels better to hire them early (less money and also the feeling of leveling them up rather than just hire them at lvl 10-15 or so). Also slightly worried about stat item repartition. At least in the early game, Wrath is a lot more stingy with belts and circlets. Pretty sure that by the same level in kingmaker, I had one for every character and right now I only have a +2 cha circlet.

There is no merc support. If you want to play Icewind Dale III you’ll need to make your own. Looking forward to it!

Fencing Grace is the one with Cam. Don’t need the stat belts/helms as much since there’s more rest. You can always buy some too instead of scrolls if you want. You’ll eventually get them tho there are other good options for those slots.

 

[Desiderius]

From what I've seen so far, I doubt the itemization here comes anywhere near Deadfire level, particularly in relation to gameplay and playstyle impact.

Lmao I knew it

And I knew you’d be jumping to your usual inane conclusions. No one confirms his priors - especially if they’re wrong - harder than Yosharian.

Will enjoy a good laugh with Haplo at this take in a few months. Yosharian will deny heaven and earth to stick to whatever popguns he started with.

I think I’ll avoid the spoilers and let you find them for yourselves. Should be even more fun that way.

 

[AwesomeButton]

There is no merc support. If you want to play Icewind Dale III you’ll need to make your own. Looking forward to it!

Fencing Grace is the one with Cam. Don’t need the stat belts/helms as much since there’s more rest. You can always buy some too instead of scrolls if you want. You’ll eventually get them tho there are other good options for those slots.

Do you keep Camellia fighting with Rapier + Buckler? What armor type do you use for her? Light or Medium?