Cryomancer
Arcane
- OwlCat
- With a "balance team"
Chose one.
Anyway, go play pillars if you wanna a "balanced" experience
-
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Pathfinder Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous Pre-DLC Thread [GO TO NEW THREAD]
- Thread starter Dishonoredbr
- Start date
Chose one.
Anyway, go play pillars if you wanna a "balanced" experience
kangaxx
Arbiter
I don't mind unbalanced per se, as long as I have some kind of warning in "game language" that I'll be punished for making certain choices. Absent that you need to have some kind of balance in place or it's bad design.
As for Pillars, not my cup of tea. For the record I'm enjoying the actual "game" part of WOTR so far.
I wonder how people discovered, I don't know, distillation, sulphur, rifles...
Probably, by "game language".
Probably, by "game language".
Mauman
Learned
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2021
- Messages
- 961
So...what you're saying is that you STILL shouldn't be talking about this game like you know what the hell you're doing?
Sharpedge
Prophet
- Joined
- Sep 14, 2018
- Messages
- 1,061
So, now that I have given this game some time and finished it (more than once), I think I have settled on my overall opinion of it. For background context, I played on Hard/Unfair and I care more about gameplay than narrative. Warning, there are some minor spoilers.
1. Narrative.
I am generally not impressed here, the overall writing quality is shoddy. It does have a few good moments and some few characters which shine (see Regill), but across the board its not great. Which, considering I was not expecting any good writing from the game and I was primarily playing it as someone who wants good gameplay, is fine. Ember is such a bad character that I would actually give her a negative rating, since she actually drags down the narrative consistency of other characters, because they behave out of character with relation to her. The game tries to present itself as having many choices, but by and large they are just different shades of the same outcome. You will always be visiting the same locations, with very little exception. Across the beta and the official release I played Angel, Demon, Aeon, Lich and Azata until the end of A4. Whilst I have only finished the game with 2 of those, I have still seen "most of the content" of the others. In terms of narrative I would argue that the Angel is by far the most bland, it feels like it has barely more content than having no path at all, which is somewhat amusing considering its a crusade themed game. Lich and Azata have the most content, simply by virtue of having additional companions not available to other paths. Although they have more content than other paths however, I would not necessarily consider them well written. Demon is passable. It more or less does what it says on the tin, you are a demon. It has a decent chunk of content and what is there is more or less what you could expect from a demon, but it doesn't have any standout writing that shouts, "read me." Aeon does not have much content and it is the path that I both like and dislike the most. It has a few of the genuinely good moments in terms of writing, but it also has some of the worst moments as well. The quests where you go out and "deliver justice" feature some really stupid dialogues and is worse than its equivalent within Tyranny, which did not cover the concept of justice particularly well either. Most of the judgements you can issue feel like the kind of justice envisioned by the holy crusaders of Twitter. Overall I would say that if you are wondering whether the game is worth playing for the story, its probably best to avoid it.
2. Setting.
The game is set in the Worldwound in Galorion. In short an oppressed magic user wanted to rebel against her captors and opened a rift between the material plane (the normal world) and the abyss (land of demons). There have been multiple attempts to close the rift, you play during the 5th Crusade and the narrative is about your attempt to close it. As you can guess just from that brief description, it takes the high in high fantasy to the complete extreme, featuring gods, traveling between planes, mystical creatures and the like. Galorion also suffers from being a bit of a kitchen sink, it has lots of everything thrown into it. You will see advanced technology side by side with magic, although it will only show up in a couple of specific quests within the game. The setting shares more in common with anime than with most other RPGs, its not great and is best described as a power gaming simulator. If you don't like power gaming in high fantasy, keep as far clear as possible.
3. Encounter Design.
The encounter design ranges from great to absolutely abysmal. Some zones, for example the Siege of Drezen, are exceedingly well designed and feature multiple avenues to clear out the area. Before you even enter the zone, you can choose between taking the advice of Regill and taking a direct route to deal with the giants. You can lead the crusade with a frontal charge, or you can take the advice of Nurah with a "magical solution." Once you are inside, you then have a whole host of options as well. If you took Regill's advice for example, you can choose between going through the barracks, then over the roof and down to the route you would take with a frontal charge. You can also just open the door to this route via a lever, or you can go through the Temple to Iomadae. Listing all of the different possible ways to resolve the Siege would take me quite a while and it would be tedious to do, but suffice to say there are many of them and they reward both exploration as well as different approaches to gameplay. The Siege is in my opinion the highlight of the game as far as encounter design goes.
On the other hand, zones like The Enigma are the example of the exact opposite, with generic cultist #531 copy pasted all over the place. By the time you have cleared the zone you will likely be tired of seeing sphinxes and cultists, especially considering you are trying to solve puzzles at the same time. The game definitely feels like the developers tried to take on too much content and as a result it suffers for it, especially in the later areas. Encounters near the end feel exceedingly rushed and like they ran out of interesting enemies to throw at you. After Act 3 it is quite rare to see new enemies, instead every fight is filled with upgraded versions of enemies you have already seen. By the end of the game, some enemies have 3 or 4 prefixes to their names to emphasize just how uber they are. Seeing "Mythic Devastating Greater [...]" does not do much for verisimilitude.
4. Combat Difficulty.
Its unfortunate that it seems like good AI is not something that Owlcat considers to be a priority, because their games suffer from a lack of it. The AI falls apart in some of the most obvious ways, to the point where it is jarring. For example, when faced with a mounted character, many enemy spellcaster's AI will just completely die and it will switch targets indefinitely between the mount and its rider, never actually casting a spell. Even ignoring examples like this where the AI just completely bugs out, it is still exceedingly poor at using skills like dispels, or avoiding crowd control effects and will often make poor decisions like using harm spells on characters which are healed by negative energy. Whilst enemies do have a slightly more diverse array of skills than in Kingmaker and you do see them using skills such as dimension door strategically in some certain circumstances, it is still nowhere near adequate to make for a challenging game. As a result of this, Owlcat's primary method for increasing the game difficulty falls to stat bloat, which is disappointing. It makes for an exceedingly binary game difficulty, most encounters are not resolved during the encounter themself, they are resolved simply based off of whether or not you are aware of which buffs stack and which ones do not. If you do have the prerequisite buff stacking knowledge, you will go into almost every fight and you will faceroll them. It is a rare circumstance where you need to actually make a strategic decision during combat.
5. Character Building.
This is the game's main selling point. I haven't counted how many classes and sub classes there are, but there are more than there are in most RPGs. Whatever character type you are wanting to play, you can probably make it and likely in more ways than 1. This combined with the mythic paths gives you an abundance of choice and also provides you with a fair amount of replayability. Furthermore, if you aren't happy with just sticking with a single class, you can multiclass it in 100's of different ways that would give our recently departed forum member headaches that last for centuries. The class diversity is also supported by a broad range of items, which have varying affects and aren't just limited to generic +2 sword of awesomeness. As far as I am aware, every single item type sees some representation, from your simple Longsword to your monk weapons like Kukris, to strange exotic weapons that nobody ever used in the first place. Many of the items you will see will make you potentially consider wanting to make a character, just to take advantage of the items that exist to support it.
6. The Game's Economy.
This is one of the biggest let downs. In the early acts this is managed quite well and your character will feel starved for money. There will always be upgrades you are looking at in stores which you cannot afford and you will need to make decisions based on the gold you have available, which out of the available upgrades paths you will take and which you will sacrifice because you don't have the gold to support this. In the latter half of act 3, this completely falls away and the game turns into Zimbabwe. By act 5, you reach the stage of inflation where even Zimbabwe would be embarrassed and after cleaning a zone you will be walking away with 50+ enchanted items of each item slot type and millions of gold in items, with absolutely nowhere to spend all the gold on. Considering how well it was dealt with in the early stages, its disappointing how it is abandoned later on. Whilst this is partially a result of how diverse the array of interesting named items there are is, it is mostly just a consequence of having too many trash encounters filled with enemies using generic +x enchanted items within the latter half of the game. By stripping back a significant chunk of the trash, this could be partially, if not fully alleviated.
7 Bugs and Performance.
Wrath of the Righteous is exceedingly buggy in its current state. Whilst it is not as buggy as Kingmaker on release, that is like saying that a shoe is not as low as the floor it is resting on, it is not a high bar to clear and nor one we should consider acceptable. Aside from the combat bugs (non functioning powers or incorrectly functioning powers) which are minor in the scope of things, there are many quests which will break under specific circumstances, or events that fail to trigger. There are many plot critical bugs related to certain mythic paths as well, I have had so many issues related to the Swarm mythic path that eventually I just gave up trying to play it. The only positive I can list in this regard is I have not had any hard crashes. I would strongly recommend holding off on playing this if you are not as content starved as I am and waiting until it is in a better state.
As far as performance goes, for the most part the game handles acceptably and I do not have any noticeable frame drops. There is a single exception to this, in the Abyss, if you force buildings to rotate very quickly using dimension door across multiple rotating platforms at once, performance can come to a standstill.
Conclusion.
Over all I would call Wrath of the Righteous a flawed gem, which will mainly be enjoyed by people who enjoy theorycrafting and character building. It needs many bug fixes and after that it will probably require mods to improve aspects like the AI for it to truly shine, since I doubt Owlcat will be doing a combat overhaul, but if you go into it with reserved expectations, you will probably enjoy the experience. The game definitely needed more time in development, especially the later areas and hopefully (but unlikely) we will see additions to the later acts to better flesh them out. Its just a pity the game is not as good as it could have been.
What they really should have done is split the game into either 2 or 3 parts, with the first half ending at the Siege of Drezen and fleshing out the game before that. Then have a Wrath of the Righteous 2 which focuses on the latter half of the game, fleshing that out more. Overall that would have likely resulted in a better game that feels less rushed, as they would be able to concentrate more effort into polishing each part properly.
1. Narrative.
I am generally not impressed here, the overall writing quality is shoddy. It does have a few good moments and some few characters which shine (see Regill), but across the board its not great. Which, considering I was not expecting any good writing from the game and I was primarily playing it as someone who wants good gameplay, is fine. Ember is such a bad character that I would actually give her a negative rating, since she actually drags down the narrative consistency of other characters, because they behave out of character with relation to her. The game tries to present itself as having many choices, but by and large they are just different shades of the same outcome. You will always be visiting the same locations, with very little exception. Across the beta and the official release I played Angel, Demon, Aeon, Lich and Azata until the end of A4. Whilst I have only finished the game with 2 of those, I have still seen "most of the content" of the others. In terms of narrative I would argue that the Angel is by far the most bland, it feels like it has barely more content than having no path at all, which is somewhat amusing considering its a crusade themed game. Lich and Azata have the most content, simply by virtue of having additional companions not available to other paths. Although they have more content than other paths however, I would not necessarily consider them well written. Demon is passable. It more or less does what it says on the tin, you are a demon. It has a decent chunk of content and what is there is more or less what you could expect from a demon, but it doesn't have any standout writing that shouts, "read me." Aeon does not have much content and it is the path that I both like and dislike the most. It has a few of the genuinely good moments in terms of writing, but it also has some of the worst moments as well. The quests where you go out and "deliver justice" feature some really stupid dialogues and is worse than its equivalent within Tyranny, which did not cover the concept of justice particularly well either. Most of the judgements you can issue feel like the kind of justice envisioned by the holy crusaders of Twitter. Overall I would say that if you are wondering whether the game is worth playing for the story, its probably best to avoid it.
2. Setting.
The game is set in the Worldwound in Galorion. In short an oppressed magic user wanted to rebel against her captors and opened a rift between the material plane (the normal world) and the abyss (land of demons). There have been multiple attempts to close the rift, you play during the 5th Crusade and the narrative is about your attempt to close it. As you can guess just from that brief description, it takes the high in high fantasy to the complete extreme, featuring gods, traveling between planes, mystical creatures and the like. Galorion also suffers from being a bit of a kitchen sink, it has lots of everything thrown into it. You will see advanced technology side by side with magic, although it will only show up in a couple of specific quests within the game. The setting shares more in common with anime than with most other RPGs, its not great and is best described as a power gaming simulator. If you don't like power gaming in high fantasy, keep as far clear as possible.
3. Encounter Design.
The encounter design ranges from great to absolutely abysmal. Some zones, for example the Siege of Drezen, are exceedingly well designed and feature multiple avenues to clear out the area. Before you even enter the zone, you can choose between taking the advice of Regill and taking a direct route to deal with the giants. You can lead the crusade with a frontal charge, or you can take the advice of Nurah with a "magical solution." Once you are inside, you then have a whole host of options as well. If you took Regill's advice for example, you can choose between going through the barracks, then over the roof and down to the route you would take with a frontal charge. You can also just open the door to this route via a lever, or you can go through the Temple to Iomadae. Listing all of the different possible ways to resolve the Siege would take me quite a while and it would be tedious to do, but suffice to say there are many of them and they reward both exploration as well as different approaches to gameplay. The Siege is in my opinion the highlight of the game as far as encounter design goes.
On the other hand, zones like The Enigma are the example of the exact opposite, with generic cultist #531 copy pasted all over the place. By the time you have cleared the zone you will likely be tired of seeing sphinxes and cultists, especially considering you are trying to solve puzzles at the same time. The game definitely feels like the developers tried to take on too much content and as a result it suffers for it, especially in the later areas. Encounters near the end feel exceedingly rushed and like they ran out of interesting enemies to throw at you. After Act 3 it is quite rare to see new enemies, instead every fight is filled with upgraded versions of enemies you have already seen. By the end of the game, some enemies have 3 or 4 prefixes to their names to emphasize just how uber they are. Seeing "Mythic Devastating Greater [...]" does not do much for verisimilitude.
4. Combat Difficulty.
Its unfortunate that it seems like good AI is not something that Owlcat considers to be a priority, because their games suffer from a lack of it. The AI falls apart in some of the most obvious ways, to the point where it is jarring. For example, when faced with a mounted character, many enemy spellcaster's AI will just completely die and it will switch targets indefinitely between the mount and its rider, never actually casting a spell. Even ignoring examples like this where the AI just completely bugs out, it is still exceedingly poor at using skills like dispels, or avoiding crowd control effects and will often make poor decisions like using harm spells on characters which are healed by negative energy. Whilst enemies do have a slightly more diverse array of skills than in Kingmaker and you do see them using skills such as dimension door strategically in some certain circumstances, it is still nowhere near adequate to make for a challenging game. As a result of this, Owlcat's primary method for increasing the game difficulty falls to stat bloat, which is disappointing. It makes for an exceedingly binary game difficulty, most encounters are not resolved during the encounter themself, they are resolved simply based off of whether or not you are aware of which buffs stack and which ones do not. If you do have the prerequisite buff stacking knowledge, you will go into almost every fight and you will faceroll them. It is a rare circumstance where you need to actually make a strategic decision during combat.
5. Character Building.
This is the game's main selling point. I haven't counted how many classes and sub classes there are, but there are more than there are in most RPGs. Whatever character type you are wanting to play, you can probably make it and likely in more ways than 1. This combined with the mythic paths gives you an abundance of choice and also provides you with a fair amount of replayability. Furthermore, if you aren't happy with just sticking with a single class, you can multiclass it in 100's of different ways that would give our recently departed forum member headaches that last for centuries. The class diversity is also supported by a broad range of items, which have varying affects and aren't just limited to generic +2 sword of awesomeness. As far as I am aware, every single item type sees some representation, from your simple Longsword to your monk weapons like Kukris, to strange exotic weapons that nobody ever used in the first place. Many of the items you will see will make you potentially consider wanting to make a character, just to take advantage of the items that exist to support it.
6. The Game's Economy.
This is one of the biggest let downs. In the early acts this is managed quite well and your character will feel starved for money. There will always be upgrades you are looking at in stores which you cannot afford and you will need to make decisions based on the gold you have available, which out of the available upgrades paths you will take and which you will sacrifice because you don't have the gold to support this. In the latter half of act 3, this completely falls away and the game turns into Zimbabwe. By act 5, you reach the stage of inflation where even Zimbabwe would be embarrassed and after cleaning a zone you will be walking away with 50+ enchanted items of each item slot type and millions of gold in items, with absolutely nowhere to spend all the gold on. Considering how well it was dealt with in the early stages, its disappointing how it is abandoned later on. Whilst this is partially a result of how diverse the array of interesting named items there are is, it is mostly just a consequence of having too many trash encounters filled with enemies using generic +x enchanted items within the latter half of the game. By stripping back a significant chunk of the trash, this could be partially, if not fully alleviated.
7 Bugs and Performance.
Wrath of the Righteous is exceedingly buggy in its current state. Whilst it is not as buggy as Kingmaker on release, that is like saying that a shoe is not as low as the floor it is resting on, it is not a high bar to clear and nor one we should consider acceptable. Aside from the combat bugs (non functioning powers or incorrectly functioning powers) which are minor in the scope of things, there are many quests which will break under specific circumstances, or events that fail to trigger. There are many plot critical bugs related to certain mythic paths as well, I have had so many issues related to the Swarm mythic path that eventually I just gave up trying to play it. The only positive I can list in this regard is I have not had any hard crashes. I would strongly recommend holding off on playing this if you are not as content starved as I am and waiting until it is in a better state.
As far as performance goes, for the most part the game handles acceptably and I do not have any noticeable frame drops. There is a single exception to this, in the Abyss, if you force buildings to rotate very quickly using dimension door across multiple rotating platforms at once, performance can come to a standstill.
Conclusion.
Over all I would call Wrath of the Righteous a flawed gem, which will mainly be enjoyed by people who enjoy theorycrafting and character building. It needs many bug fixes and after that it will probably require mods to improve aspects like the AI for it to truly shine, since I doubt Owlcat will be doing a combat overhaul, but if you go into it with reserved expectations, you will probably enjoy the experience. The game definitely needed more time in development, especially the later areas and hopefully (but unlikely) we will see additions to the later acts to better flesh them out. Its just a pity the game is not as good as it could have been.
What they really should have done is split the game into either 2 or 3 parts, with the first half ending at the Siege of Drezen and fleshing out the game before that. Then have a Wrath of the Righteous 2 which focuses on the latter half of the game, fleshing that out more. Overall that would have likely resulted in a better game that feels less rushed, as they would be able to concentrate more effort into polishing each part properly.
Last edited:
ArchAngel
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 16, 2015
- Messages
- 20,180
OK Lich path is too fun so far, I think I am going to be very disappointed when I do my next run on other Mythic path. Lich spells are fun, roleplay options are cool. Now I am doing end of Act 3 and I raised a crazy lvl 19 demon with 300 life and huge Falchion as my undead servant :D
I doubt any other path has anything similar.
I doubt any other path has anything similar.
After picking the Improved Critical feat, what mythic level do you need in order to be offered the Improved Critical (Mythic) feat?
Jackpot
Learned
- Joined
- Dec 15, 2019
- Messages
- 224
I don't mind the crusade mode being significantly unbalanced - as a kind of minigame side mode its more fun if it isn't.
But the balancing right now is really bad.
Units like dragons are hilariously weak, and some units (marksmen) are so incredibly overpowered they carry the game themselves.
And yeah, some generals are completely useless while others make the early game a cakewalk.
But the balancing right now is really bad.
Units like dragons are hilariously weak, and some units (marksmen) are so incredibly overpowered they carry the game themselves.
And yeah, some generals are completely useless while others make the early game a cakewalk.
BarbequeMasta
Learned
- Joined
- Mar 6, 2020
- Messages
- 511
I just wish there more ear to buy in Act 5. I think some of the traders do get some updates to their store here and there but Imo there should have been more. The crusade relics being buged in act5 didn't help that either lol.
Zeriel
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 17, 2012
- Messages
- 13,490
Companion raising seems to be unique to Lich. Other paths do get some pretty cool stuff in the story though, it's just different. My main gripe with Demon is the earlier chapters feel really bad, but you do get to do cool stuff like make story bosses in the last chapter's heads explode in dialogues, or literally smiting all the do-gooder retards in your army with unholy lightning bolts from the sky.
Yeah the town seems very barebones in updates compared to Kingmaker. You get milestone aesthetic changes in Chapter 5, but the shops basically never update at all beyond the start.
Cryomancer
Arcane
Azata has a dragon pet and yes, you can mount Aivu in late game.
- Joined
- Oct 28, 2020
- Messages
- 4,488
Don't worry, even the melee general can get spells. Expect some at level 8.
all demon lords are easy cucks
Mortmal
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2009
- Messages
- 9,189
Melee build ?
Sheepherder
Augur
- Joined
- Feb 4, 2014
- Messages
- 657
Looks like it's possible to use DEX modifier for damage with bows, instead of STR+composite. Needs Mythic Weapon Finesse and the bow must not be composite. Works with xbows too, but not with the throwing weapons because afaik all of them have Strong built in.
well that's disappointing
meme monk that i pretty much improvised,
student of stone 20 but i got a feeling that the Aeon stuff pulled a lot of weight in that fight
Cryomancer
Arcane
Everyone says that wizards are OP, but this game seems way easier in melee. In fact, most CRPG's are.
Mortmal
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2009
- Messages
- 9,189
Seems so, i did it with a full crusader build, no brainer just buff up for 24H and melee. Caster you can still put spells on auto but limited choices, the lich specific spells are good but cant see any reason to use anything else.
Zero Credibility
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 11, 2007
- Messages
- 2,951
Well, the good news is that respecing does indeed work in fixing this, at least for Seelah. I tested it and she got her spells. So it will probably work on other affected classes as well.
Mauman
Learned
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2021
- Messages
- 961
That's....interesting.
Course, you have to waste a feat on finesse.
Also, I wonder how that works with Zen Monk.
volklore
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 19, 2018
- Messages
- 1,668
So what do you build aeon with ?
Inquisitor monster tactician seems like the obvious pick with stacking bane and buffing summons with gaze. It seems a bit more pigeonholed with synergies than other path but maybe there is something I am not seeing.
Inquisitor monster tactician seems like the obvious pick with stacking bane and buffing summons with gaze. It seems a bit more pigeonholed with synergies than other path but maybe there is something I am not seeing.
oldmanpaco
Master of Siestas
So after the Inn attack that Nabasu shows up in the marketplace. Does anything else change in the other areas?
Cryomancer
Arcane
Seems so, i did it with a full crusader build, no brainer just buff up for 24H and melee. Caster you can still put spells on auto but limited choices, the lich specific spells are good but cant see any reason to use anything else.
Greater spell penetration + mythic spell penetration is a must have for this game.
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