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

[ArchAngel]

Another "fun" bug introduced in the last patch (alongside fully disabled mounted charge) - triggering an Attack of Opportunity interrupts iterative attacks. Therefore, say, you have 6 attacks, the 1st is a critical (and triggers AoO via Outflank) or causes a Greater Trip - your Full Attack ends with the 1st attack then...

OWLCATS!

I had other fun bugs in TB like when I tell my guy and mount to charge at enemy. Mount discovers a trap to the side on the way there and stops mid charge...

 

[Technomancer]

HOMM V was the pinnacle of the series. With personal Initiative alongside speed (fast units could move like 3 times per 1 move of slow units, like treants... Haste/Slow/Initiative boost/delay sheningans were present and VERY strong), robust hero skill wheels and different hero focus/mechanics depending on race - strongly connected with racial abilities on the units of that race.

Yeah it's true. Tho they probably did lift some ground work stuff from V. At least when prototyping.

 

[Yosharian]

earlvik 38 points 2 hours ago
There was a good GDC talk by Josh Sawyer on how they designed the classes in Pillars 2. Specifically on how to give player more character customization choices, but make them meaningful.

One of the points was, if you give player lots of choices but most of those choices are objectively bad and some of them are basically mandatory, that's not a choice, that's an illusion of choice, which leads to player frustration.

I personally have no issue picking the "mandatory" feats and spells, but I do believe WotR suffers from this problem quite a lot, more than Kingmaker.

 

[Jaedar]

One quick fix for army I would do is make Infirmary per day instead of per battle, it makes clearing maps way too easy and fast. Number of battle per day is limited only by your movement speed as Infirmary makes loses irrelevant.

Personally I'd toss away the infirmary all together (or at least make is your losses have to spend X days resting, and then being rerecruitable from drezen). I'd also remove the cap on how many unit types you can have (it's ridiculous in act 3 when you have 4 or 5 "full" armies of 1-10 units you got from various events).

I'd also redesign the tankyness of a lot of units. Stuff like gargoyles are utterly ridiculous, they deal 0 damage but take dozens of turns to deal with.

 

[Anthedon]

I never zoomed in while playing, but damn, some of the 3D models are pretty damn good.

Spoiler

 

[NJClaw]

One quick fix for army I would do is make Infirmary per day instead of per battle, it makes clearing maps way too easy and fast. Number of battle per day is limited only by your movement speed as Infirmary makes loses irrelevant.

Personally I'd toss away the infirmary all together (or at least make is your losses have to spend X days resting, and then being rerecruitable from drezen). I'd also remove the cap on how many unit types you can have (it's ridiculous in act 3 when you have 4 or 5 "full" armies of 1-10 units you got from various events).

I'd also redesign the tankyness of a lot of units. Stuff like gargoyles are utterly ridiculous, they deal 0 damage but take dozens of turns to deal with.

The crusade minigame is unsalvageable. Nerfing the infirmary would do nothing to improve the experience, it would only make things slower. Everything about it, from the gameplay to the UI, is so utter shit that the only thing that matters is to find a way to deal with it as fast as possible. This is why the only viable strategy is to recruit a mage general and spam Scorching Ray/Fireball/Fire Storm every single encounter. Applying all the changes you proposed wouldn't change anything: you would still be going through boring fights with no strategical depth while navigating an interfaced clearly designed to be as obnoxious as possible.

One quick fix for army I would do is make Infirmary per day instead of per battle, it makes clearing maps way too easy and fast. Number of battle per day is limited only by your movement speed as Infirmary makes loses irrelevant.

But what's the point? The minigame itself makes losses irrelevant. Your fix would only force the player to click the "skip day" button more times. It's not like anything prevents you from skipping a day after every single encounter.

 

[lametta]

Another "fun" bug introduced in the last patch (alongside fully disabled mounted charge) - triggering an Attack of Opportunity interrupts iterative attacks. Therefore, say, you have 6 attacks, the 1st is a critical (and triggers AoO via Outflank) or causes a Greater Trip - your Full Attack ends with the 1st attack then...

OWLCATS!

wanted to buy ths with the steam autumn sale but guess its too early?
Gotta wait 6 month like with kingmaker?

btw whats with the season pass and the non existing dlcs?!

 

[Sharpedge]

earlvik 38 points 2 hours ago
There was a good GDC talk by Josh Sawyer on how they designed the classes in Pillars 2. Specifically on how to give player more character customization choices, but make them meaningful.

One of the points was, if you give player lots of choices but most of those choices are objectively bad and some of them are basically mandatory, that's not a choice, that's an illusion of choice, which leads to player frustration.

I personally have no issue picking the "mandatory" feats and spells, but I do believe WotR suffers from this problem quite a lot, more than Kingmaker.

I liked this 1 even more.

[–]Chairchucker [score hidden] 51 minutes ago
I shouldn't have to do a single one of those on normal difficulty. I shouldn't be forced to play in any specific way. That's bad game design.

"I want to be able to win combat by throwing darts at a dartboard and going with the outcome. If the game doesn't let me do that its bad game design."

 

[ArchAngel]

One quick fix for army I would do is make Infirmary per day instead of per battle, it makes clearing maps way too easy and fast. Number of battle per day is limited only by your movement speed as Infirmary makes loses irrelevant.

Personally I'd toss away the infirmary all together (or at least make is your losses have to spend X days resting, and then being rerecruitable from drezen). I'd also remove the cap on how many unit types you can have (it's ridiculous in act 3 when you have 4 or 5 "full" armies of 1-10 units you got from various events).

I'd also redesign the tankyness of a lot of units. Stuff like gargoyles are utterly ridiculous, they deal 0 damage but take dozens of turns to deal with.

The crusade minigame is unsalvageable. Nerfing the infirmary would do nothing to improve the experience, it would only make things slower. Everything about it, from the gameplay to the UI, is so utter shit that the only thing that matters is to find a way to deal with it as fast as possible. This is why the only viable strategy is to recruit a mage general and spam Scorching Ray/Fireball/Fire Storm every single encounter. Applying all the changes you proposed wouldn't change anything: you would still be going through boring fights with no strategical depth while navigating an interfaced clearly designed to be as obnoxious as possible.

One quick fix for army I would do is make Infirmary per day instead of per battle, it makes clearing maps way too easy and fast. Number of battle per day is limited only by your movement speed as Infirmary makes loses irrelevant.

But what's the point? The minigame itself makes losses irrelevant. Your fix would only force the player to click the "skip day" button more times.

They made UI nicer in latest patches, also battles seem to be more balanced.

 

[RNGsus]

Another "fun" bug introduced in the last patch (alongside fully disabled mounted charge) - triggering an Attack of Opportunity interrupts iterative attacks. Therefore, say, you have 6 attacks, the 1st is a critical (and triggers AoO via Outflank) or causes a Greater Trip - your Full Attack ends with the 1st attack then...

OWLCATS!

wanted to buy ths with the steam autumn sale but guess its too early?
Gotta wait 6 month like with kingmaker?

btw whats with the season pass and the non existing dlcs?!

You have to wait at least until they are ported to consoles for the most stable version of game. The release of kingmaker worked fine, then I got bsod and had to find a solution months later. With wotr, it just bsod day one, and now I'm waiting until then to try again.

 

[NJClaw]

They made UI nicer in latest patches, also battles seem to be more balanced.

I'm still playing the game and the crusade minigame UI is nowhere near "usable by a human being" levels. The thing I dread the most about the entire game is having to move around the map troops I just recruited to reinforce my armies.

Also what's balanced about battles? There's no reason at all to play the minigame the way Owlcat intended to, namely using various combinations of different units to tackle different encounters. As of now, you have two choices: (1) relying on your army, which means you'll have to spend 10 minutes clearing every fight while you watch your guys slowly whittling down the enemies' insane health pools, or (2) relying on your general's spells while your single unkillable stack of 600 dwarves gets tickled by demons. Why would you choose the first option? It's not even fun, since the enemy can't physically win unless you willingly decide to send a weak army to the slaughter.

I guess there's also a third option: having an absurdly overpowered army and delete all the enemies' troops in a single round with 1k archers. But again, what's fun about it?

 

[LannTheStupid]

Stuff like gargoyles are utterly ridiculous, they deal 0 damage but take dozens of turns to deal with.

This is how gargoyles were, like, since HoMM-2. It's their iconic feature, so to speak.

 

[NJClaw]

Stuff like gargoyles are utterly ridiculous, they deal 0 damage but take dozens of turns to deal with.

This is how gragoyles were, like, since HoMM-2. It's their iconic feature, so to speak.

I think I can safely say that I've spent more time killing gargoyles in a single encounter in WotR than in my entire experience with HoMM3. And I've spent tens of thousands of hours on that game.

 

[Delterius]

time to make a mod that just boots homm5 everytime you do crusading

 

[ArchAngel]

They made UI nicer in latest patches, also battles seem to be more balanced.

I'm still playing the game and the crusade minigame UI is nowhere near "usable by a human being" levels. The thing I dread the most about the entire game is having to move around the map troops I just recruited to reinforce my armies.

Also what's balanced about battles? There's no reason at all to play the minigame the way Owlcat intended to, namely using various combinations of different units to tackle different encounters. As of now, you have two choices: (1) relying on your army, which means you'll have to spend 10 minutes clearing every fight while you watch your guys slowly whittling down the enemies' insane health pools, or (2) relying on your general's spells while your single unkillable stack of 600 dwarves gets tickled by demons. Why would you choose the first option? It's not even fun, since the enemy can't physically win unless you willingly decide to send a weak army to the slaughter.

I guess there's also a third option: having an absurdly overpowered army and delete all the enemies' troops in a single round with 1k archers. But again, what's fun about it?

I just use troops with most damage AND use offensive spells, at least until I decide I don't want to waste more mana. Waiting for mana to recover is slowest thing in the game.

 

[LannTheStupid]

Here is some entertaining reddit complaining.

And the first person who mentioned reading had been downvoted below the threshold.

 

[Yosharian]

earlvik 38 points 2 hours ago
There was a good GDC talk by Josh Sawyer on how they designed the classes in Pillars 2. Specifically on how to give player more character customization choices, but make them meaningful.

One of the points was, if you give player lots of choices but most of those choices are objectively bad and some of them are basically mandatory, that's not a choice, that's an illusion of choice, which leads to player frustration.

I personally have no issue picking the "mandatory" feats and spells, but I do believe WotR suffers from this problem quite a lot, more than Kingmaker.

I liked this 1 even more.

[–]Chairchucker [score hidden] 51 minutes ago
I shouldn't have to do a single one of those on normal difficulty. I shouldn't be forced to play in any specific way. That's bad game design.

"I want to be able to win combat by throwing darts at a dartboard and going with the outcome. If the game doesn't let me do that its bad game design."

I honestly find it hard to believe that guy isn't trolling.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

I want to be able to win combat by throwing darts at a dartboard and going with the outcome. If the game doesn't let me do that its bad game design.

Throwing darts is kinda fungible as far as combat is concerned though.

 

[Cryomancer]

Why throwing darts when you can use magic?

 

[ArchAngel]

Why throwing darts when you can use magic?

Yes, Arcane Strike gives us bonus damage when throwing darts. And Haste lets us throw one more dart.

 

[LannTheStupid]

Dart throwing mongrel rangers give some grief in the Shield Maze. As least on Hard. Even without magic.

 

[Supermedo]

Is Stinking cloud bugged because I can't see in the logs that human cultist saving throw against it.

 

[Delterius]

Is Stinking cloud bugged because I can't see in the logs that human cultist saving throw against it.

new pandemic regulations force all baphomet cultists to wear masks

bogus i know

 

[NJClaw]

I just use troops with most damage AND use offensive spells, at least until I decide I don't want to waste more mana. Waiting for mana to recover is slowest thing in the game.

I don't understand what the point of troops is supposed to be when you can beat the hardest crusade encounter of the entire game in the first round before any unit gets to act. And it's not like you have to somehow optimize anything, you just need a level 20 mage general with Fire Storm and any other non-fire damaging spell.

Also, regarding mana, in my experience it's basically impossible to run out of it. I haven't even checked how the recovery formula works, because from the start of chapter 3 I have never found myself in the position of not casting a spell because I didn't have enough mana. If you build an alchemist laboratory in every single settlement, you basically have an infinite pool.

I know I might sound like a whiny bitch, but I can't shake the feeling that the entire system is so poorly designed that it's basically impossible to fix. Even with a bunch of miraculous fixes to the every single core mechanic, we would still be stuck with a minigame completely unable to offer any kind of challenge whatsoever. Owlcat would need to redesign basically everything to make it even just slightly more interesting than doing your taxes.

 

[Miserable Panda]

Perhaps I will be banished after saying this, but I agree with the people on Reddit a lot. Sure, there are a lot of players that don't have any interest in learning how the game works and decide to give Core a try. But they are the minority.

This has been discussed to death but encounter design is severely lacking. 80% of the game is full of trash fights, I thought I was playing Mu Online for a second. I don't care about bloated stats, but mobs just use 1-2 different spells and auto attack at the speed of light. Very little place for tactics, and itemization was horrendous as well. No, I don't want another fucking longsword that shoots a beam when I crit with a 17.

Don't get me wrong I REALLY enjoyed the game. Character creation is top notch, and almost all mythic paths are full of reactivity and cool stuff to discover. Party members are pretty cool too (particularly Daeran). The game is ambitious, but crusade mode was not needed at all. Also I felt that the game was a little too long, considering that replaying it is really recommended. I would like to see a Pathfinder game balanced at four party members, and only focused on the role-playing aspects. I don´t need management simulators, I have other games for that.