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Bought this in the Steam sale and jesus christ combat is balanced and paced terribly. Every zone is filled with millions of mobs which should be trash mobs but are instead party level +8 monstrosities with massively inflated stats. If fights are going to be this frequent, they shouldn't have razor-thin margins of success for an unoptimized party like this. I started out playing on slightly weaker than standard difficulty (weak crits, reduced damage to the party) and still had to reset multiple times on the majority of encounters. Assaulting the Stag Lord's fort took me about 5 hours of real time and 15 minutes of in game time because every single fight was life or death where everything had to go exactly right and all my crowd control had to hit and last for several turns or I'd get wiped or someone would escape and warn the entire fort. The raging barbarians with 22+ AC were a real joy to fight. Too bad Amiri doesn't have any of that magic AC juice they have -- except it wouldn't matter anyway because those barbarians also managed to demolish Valerie with 26 AC in just a couple rounds. I downloaded a cheat mod and restarted with vastly easier settings and it's less frustrating but what idiot decided this combat was OK? Probably the same idiot who decided that the game doesn't need any video or audio settings, actually. Anyone know any mods that let you change the audio levels or just loving mute the game entirely?
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Jun 28, 2019 19:59
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Oh my god I didn't even see that there were other tabs up there, the text is so faint. Thank you. It turns out the true idiot was me all along.
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Jun 28, 2019 20:39
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Kalas posted:Kineticists laugh at spells per day problems. Considering that Kineticists are Pathfinder's answer (very, very, very delayed answer) to Warlocks, that makes sense.
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Jul 2, 2019 03:43
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There are other towns, you just have to build them. And for once it makes sense that the towns are pretty sparse because you're literally on the frontier building the towns from the ground up. There are no massive ancient capitals here, no Paris or Rome or the like. It's all We Hope The Swamp Monsters Don't Eat Us-ville.
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Jul 2, 2019 17:52
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I believe Amiri (the barbarian) and Linzi (the bard) always join you, and Kaessi (the tiefling) never joins either party, but which of the other three joins you and which two join Tartuccio changes based on your actions and dialogue choices in the prologue. There really isn't that much of a general optimal result although relying purely on Linzi for healing is going to get rough so the cleric is probably the best of them unless your main character can also heal. You'll have an opportunity to recruit the two who joined Tartuccio very early in the campaign. Kaessi isn't recruitable unless you have the DLC featuring her, and even then she won't join you until you establish your kingdom.
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Jul 2, 2019 18:50
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For reference, the video game is based on one of Paizo's (the company which made the Pathfinder tabletop ruleset) Adventure Paths (a series of 6 large adventures linked together forming an entire campaign) named Kingmaker. The AP was a sandbox hexcrawl adventure which was extremely popular; I don't think it beat out Rise of the Runelords, their first official Adventure Path, but it's still way up there. Anyway, one of the very few complaints about the tabletop Kingmaker AP is that it was a little too open-world with not a lot of strong plot threads connecting things and the final Big Bad Evil Guy (Girl in this case) essentially comes out of nowhere in the final book. I assume that the heavy-handedness of the plot leading you from point to point and the time limits on each chapter are at least partially in response to those criticisms.
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Jul 2, 2019 21:25
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Kobal2 posted:Yeah, FWIW I'm about to start DMing the PnP campaign and I think there are some really good ideas in the vidya game to keep the Big Bad in focus throughout, or at the very least the notion that something decidedly Fucky is going on beyond the mundane difficulties of establishing a stable settlement in the middle of the Far West. The Season of Bloom interlude in particular is a wonderful addition that I'm fixing to steal more or less wholesale. Yeah, I just did Season of Bloom the other night and I agree, incorporating that in some capacity is a great idea. I wouldn't do the whole paired identical looking teleporter maze dungeon thing, but the general idea of the crisis is actually really good and it does a good job of establishing the primary antagonist both in terms of power and backstory.
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Jul 2, 2019 22:21
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It's a shame because I really liked the kingdom management aspect of the original adventure path (even if it was a little too easy to break over your knee). I can't fathom why they decided to make the effects of random events permanent and so incredibly stronger than buildings in this adaptation.
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Jul 9, 2019 17:52
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Olesh posted:The revised version included in Ultimate Campaign (and which the later portions of the AP assume you're using) Errr, what? Kingmaker came out in 2010, Ultimate Campaign came out in 2013. Anyway, our group had fun with the SimCity aspects and we actually had some fun internal politics going. We had the capital city at the site of the Stag Lord's fortress that we made decisions about as a group, and then as the game progressed we each built our own cities which we had sole control over. There were a lot of loans and backroom deals for resources. Unfortunately this adaptation of the game makes buildings pretty much completely pointless and turns the kingdom management into whack-a-mole. EDIT: That was actually a really fun campaign in general. All of the players independently decided to make dwarf characters, so we adlibbed the opening and changed it to us being a dwarven expedition with an exiled noble as our leader. We actually made friends with most of the monsters and incorporated a lot of them into the kingdom (we had an army of centaur cavalry, for example), and when (Spoiler for the AP, not sure how the game treats this event as I'm not there yet) Pitax invited us to the contest and then backstabbed us our Royal Assassin sorcerer went apeshit and teleported around using Control Winds to create giant tornados and leveled the city. We actually did that whole book with a side party because the sorcerer went AWOL to handle it himself with his own minions. Zurai fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Jul 9, 2019 |
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Jul 9, 2019 18:32
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The Stag Lord's fort is one of the hardest areas in the game relative to your level when you get there. Note that if the alarm isn't sounded previous to the Stag Lord's appearance, the whole fort doesn't aggro, so you don't have to clear the east side of the fort unless you want the loot. It's hard as hell to keep the alarm from being sounded, though, unless you're using the turn-based mod. With turn-based you can keep charging and AoO'ing the runners as they retreat, but in real time you basically get one ranged shot or spell per person and if those miss you're hosed.
Zurai fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Jul 18, 2019 |
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Jul 18, 2019 19:04
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Spells don't tend to work well against golems because Pathfinder golems are immune to magic. Spells which do not allow spell resistance will work, but the vast majority will just do nothing whatsoever to them (this also applies to Kineticist blasts -- energy blasts like fire won't do anything to them).
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Jul 22, 2019 19:00
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corn in the bible posted:I think I tripped them probably, because I tripped everyone if possible and it often worked Tripping (especially with a patch of grease or a bunch of ball bearings, Home Alone style) is a time-honored method of clowning golems. EDIT: Lord Koth posted:Just a note here, but the golems in the Lonely Barrow are blatantly Iron Golems (possibly supposed to be slightly weakened variants due to the names), which are WAY above the CR of everything else on that main level (yes, even the Lonely Warrior). For reference, two bog standard Iron Golems would be a CR 15 encounter, which is supposed to drain 25% of the resources (spells, HP, etc) of a party of four level 15 characters. It's a fight which wouldn't be out of place in the final or penultimate dungeon of the majority of the Adventure Paths. Golems are no joke and of the standard types Iron Golems are close to the strongest. These probably are weakened a little but yeah, they're not a fight you're expected to be capable of winning when you can first run across them. Zurai fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Jul 22, 2019 |
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Jul 22, 2019 19:13
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Forever_Peace posted:Astonishingly the kingdom building here is better than in the tabletop. Disagree very strongly. Tabletop had a broken economy due to being able to sell magic items from the city's market into the kingdom's treasury, but everything else about it is way better IMO. The magic item thing is easy to fix; meanwhile, the buildings and policies you enact actually have a real impact on your Kingdom's stats and you have to be extremely careful about over-expanding until late in the campaign. In the game, buildings are a complete waste of time with a very few exceptions because you are constantly bombarded with useless non-interactive events which give vastly bigger permanent bonuses for no real cost, and there are zero penalties whatsoever to devouring new territories whole as soon as you are given the option.
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Aug 4, 2019 20:39
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Olesh posted:I ran Kingmaker recently and given the choice between running the "base" Kingdom building rules from the AP, and the "revamped" Kingdom building rules from Ultimate Campaign, our group decided on using the rebalanced Ultimate Campaign version because the AP version's economy was obviously broken. Sure, and it's way worse in the video game, where it goes vastly quicker and with much less agency on the player's part. I'm not saying that the tabletop version was perfect or anything, but the kingdom building in the video game is utter crap that serves almost entirely to waste time.
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Aug 4, 2019 21:20
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Olesh posted:In the end, the tabletop system relied heavily on the GM and the players to invent meaning for the players' decisions. Welcome to sandbox tabletop gaming? Kingmaker was specifically designed as a sandbox AP and intentionally wasn't tightly scripted. They may have gone a bit too loose on it, but every sandbox game requires buy-in from the players and GM. That's just the way the sub-genre works. quote:PF:K, by comparison, actively encourages the player to interact with kingdom building and rewards the player for doing so with a regular supply of free (random) magic items and persistent buffs and the ability to teleport between settlements The free items and buffs have zilch to do with your kingdom, they're the same regardless of whether you have a maximum level kingdom or just did the bare minimum to get the crafters, and have actually zero interaction with any decisions you make or events that happen in the plot. You can set up teleportation circles in tabletop too, any high level arcane caster can do it, and you can also just teleport from anywhere to anywhere you know at a lower level and with less resource investment.
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Aug 5, 2019 02:12
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The turn based combat mod makes the combat way better, but also really highlights in big neon letters just how many goddamn fights there are. What we need is a mod which is compatible with TBC which reduces the number of encounters to 25-50% of the current number and increases the experience given by enemies a bit to compensate. And while the mod author is going about it, maybe change the composition of some of the encounters (especially towards the end) to be less utter horseshit.
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Aug 20, 2019 03:10
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Oh wow someone actually implemented gestalt rules? Impressive.
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Aug 20, 2019 21:55
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chaosapiant posted:Are we playing as a new mainchar in this game, or continuing with our Kingmaker dude? I'm guessing a new character right? Assuming it follows the adventure path like Kingmaker, brand new level 1 character who will eventually get up to level 20 and some degree of Mythic Ranks. Wrath of the Righteous is the most high-powered adventure path written for Pathfinder.
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Dec 4, 2019 19:55
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ilitarist posted:Yeah, but it recommends not doing it in a middle of a fight. So it reinforces the problem with d20 battles being all about reloading, doing the obvious right thing and easily winning the fight that seemed unwinnable previously. Only now in addition to prebuff you turn on turn-based mode. I've never encountered a problem with turning the turn-based mod on or off in the middle of a fight. If there's a disclaimer about turning it on/off mid-combat, that's likely just a boilerplate warning because the one dude who did the mod didn't have a thousand hours to playtest various interactions.
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Feb 5, 2020 19:03
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FWIW, Hellknights are devil-collaborators, not demon. They despise demons. Also, again FWIW, a lot of Hellknights are LN.
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Feb 6, 2020 04:47
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Yeah, gotta say that this Mythic Path system sounds way cooler than the actual one. Sounds. If they can pull it off, great!
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Feb 7, 2020 20:01
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Skalds are pretty great in the right party. Being able to send the entire party into a barbarian rage (complete with rage powers) is pretty awesome.
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Feb 10, 2020 19:13
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It definitely sounds like they're expanding on the original content just like they did for Kingmaker. The original is a pretty clear cut Good Guys Take Out The Trash adventure, but it sounds like they're adding in options to play up the Evil Feeds Upon Itself angle. It makes a certain amount of sense; demons aren't known to play well with anyone, including each other. Chaotic Evil and all that.
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Feb 11, 2020 21:41
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That is extremely, extremely good news, both that they're doing a freeform RT/TB switchable combat interface and that they specifically started with the excellent mod (complete with giving credit to the author) and then said "how can we make this better integrated into the game and provide better info to the player?". This might actually get me to back to the game rather than waiting for an expanded edition and a sale like I did for Kingmaker.
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Feb 13, 2020 19:39
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FuzzySlippers posted:Isn't that what Jeff Vogel does? I'm not a big fan of his games, but I bet there'd be decently sustainable money for a dev or two to do something similar in another type of RPG. Like if someone made a solid little might and magic engine and just cranked out increasingly refined lofi games for years I'd buy them. Yep. He makes an engine then pumps out half a dozen games in it, then makes a new engine and pumps out half a dozen more, then makes a new engine and does remasters the first games, etc. It's a decent business model if you can sustain it, although it's probably better suited to the niche market than the high end AAA game market just because by the time you're putting out your sixth game on an engine in the AAA world it's now 15 years later and all the tech is ancient. CDW posted:If anything RTwP seems to me to be the bastardized system that was written because they couldn't get Turn based right. I don't know anything about Black Isle's thought process on BG1. I imagine they thought the game might be too slow if it was turn based. There's a LOT of combat in BG1, way more than in Fallout 1 or 2. AD&D also supports a realtime-ish system a little better than 3E based systems do because you have things like fractional attacks per turn (3 attacks per 2 turns, etc) and variable length spellcasting for casters (some spells cast in 1 time unit, some in 9, etc). 3rd edition standardized the hell out of all of that and made everything happen in fairly uniform time length chunks.
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Feb 14, 2020 19:46
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v1ld posted:I thought they made an engine for an RTS game before deciding to use it for Baldur's Gate. Not to say that RTwP wasn't their goal but the engine came before the game from what I remember reading. That could well be it, I was just speculating.
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Feb 14, 2020 20:03
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CottonWolf posted:I was hoping for Beast-bonded, but I guess I'll just use base witch for my definitely not-Skaven. That's only three of the five, and it looks like the next stretch goal (which will certainly get met unless it's priced way higher than their general increment so far) is +1 archetype per class, so really it's only half of the archetypes for the Witch.
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Feb 15, 2020 18:57
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Lord Koth posted:Nah, unless they've radically changed requirements for something, we actually know 4 of the 5/6 Witch archetypes because Winter Witch is in as a prestige class (and requires the archetype of the same name to access). So take your best guess for what the final one or two will be. It would be very strange to have a prestige class which can ONLY be entered by having a single specific archetype. I know that's the way it is in tabletop but I expect that to be changed for the video game.
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Feb 15, 2020 19:53
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Ryuujin posted:Hmm have they revealed anything that would allow one to build a life leech on hit kind of build? Like Dhampir, maybe Lich?, melee class that steals life based off the damage they deal? That isn't really a thing in Pathfinder.
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Feb 19, 2020 23:15
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Ryuujin posted:Now if only there was a build in PF: WotR that could do that passively, instead of casting a spell. This is what I was talking about Pathfinder not really doing. There are spells and abilities which both deal damage and restore HP simultaneously, but they are all limited uses per day. There are even weapons with life-stealing properties, but again, limited uses. Pathfinder isn't intended as a solo gaming experience so Diablo-style life leech isn't something which is desired. They don't want characters to be completely independent. The closest you'll get is a high end magic item which gives fast healing, and those are generally like fast healing 2 (ie 2 hp per round when you have 100+ hp and are taking 20+ damage hits). EDIT: Unlikely to see anything like that on the Lich ascension path, either. Liches have a paralyzing touch, not a life draining one, and aren't the "smack things around" kind of critter. They did say that APs aren't limited by class so you can be a Lich Barbarian or whatever, but from what they've said that just means that the paths give bonus abilities that don't depend on class features -- ie the super-necromancy spells are just a feature of the Lich. I don't think that means that they support all possible classes directly ie making your Barbarian hit stuff harder. Zurai fucked around with this message at 03:17 on Feb 20, 2020 |
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Feb 20, 2020 03:13
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Taear posted:Playing this has definitely made me question backing the new game. I'd forgotten how hard it is to get all your casters doing stuff and how your class AI is absolutely atrocious. Download the Turn Based Combat mod. Seriously, just do it. And it's going to be integrated into Wrath of the Righteous from the start, so there's not even that fig leaf.
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Feb 21, 2020 02:58
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JamMasterJim posted:instead of having Lich making spellcasters bonkers and offering nothing to martials. They actually specifically mentioned this case. Lich gets extra Lich-specific spells and abilities which do not depend on your class, including powerful spells and the ability to turn your companions into undead.
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Feb 24, 2020 19:02
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Sandwich Anarchist posted:Playing for the first time, very familiar with crpgs in general, and have extensive experience with d20 system stuff, just not Pathfinder. I'm reading that the game expects you to optimize quite a bit, so what's a good suggested character build for the MC? The general recommendation is to go with a tank build since the game only has one character who defaults to a tank-like build and she sucks early on. As far as tankiness is concerned, enemies in the late game have lots of touch attacks, so you want to prioritize stuff other than just armor and shield. I'm sure someone else will be happy to point you to a more detailed guide, but in general I believe Monks and Magi are the preferred classes.
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Feb 24, 2020 21:12
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Hryme posted:I don't really like the multiclassing in the pathfinder system as implemented in Kingmaker. It seems ridiculous that the optimal way of building almost all characters includes a level of alchemist (usually vivisecionist to get sneak attack) and monk dips. Actually I don't like the idea of dips at all. I think it was in 3rd ed D&D that where you had to keep the primary classes within one level of each other to avoid penalties. Meaning you could make a Fighter/Thief, but you had to level them up together. I think this mess of a system would get better with that rule. No, the 3.0 system sucked rear end. You had to keep your class levels within one of each other, except for your favored class which could be any level. That just meant that only certain races could multiclass effectively, and it absolutely murdered spellcasting multiclassing in its infancy. You don't need to level dip at all in Pathfinder unless you're being a super omega optimizer. In fact, the system is designed to discourage it for the most part, both by providing dozens of archetypes and hybrid classes (with their own archetypes) so that you have an actual class to cover any conceptual combination of roles, by giving you reasons to stay in your existing class even for martial characters, and by mostly eliminating huge level 1 and level 2 bonuses.
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Feb 24, 2020 22:25
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I can sympathize, since I have a similar compulsion in games with job systems (FF5, FFTactics, etc etc). I have to grind job levels. The first time I played Final Fantasy Tactics, I had Samurais before Dorter Trade City. That said, I don't insist that it's a problem with the game rather than with the way I play it. It's an option, even if it's an option you personally feel compelled to take. Options existing don't mean the system is badly designed. Pathfinder is badly designed, but not really in that way (linear fighter/quadratic mage, on the other hand...).
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Feb 24, 2020 22:39
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ilitarist posted:That's exactly what happened and that's why it's sad that BG and Planescape and NWN are nostalgia factories and not, say, Wizardry 8. We constantly get spiritual successors to those experimental games that have been conceived as multiplayer platforms and repurposed into story-focused games during development. Also they have appeared during Starvraft and Age of Empires and C&C dominating the genre. It's as if is nowadays someone would make a really popular Pathfinder game that copypastes Fortnite and we'd be stuck with Battle Royal mechanics in all Pathfinder games for 20 years. I still break out Wizardry 8 every couple of years. It's a great game. I keep looking for another game that scratches that same itch and the only thing that really comes close is the Etrian Odyssey series (which is more like a branch of Wizardry that split off after Wiz 5 or so rather than being too much like Wiz 8).
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Mar 2, 2020 18:10
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Agent355 posted:Overmap travel and random encounters are boring and slow, are there mods/options for that? You can just immediately walk back out of the encounter for like 95% of the random encounters. As for the map travel, that's the entire point of the original adventure, it's a hexcrawl.
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Mar 4, 2020 22:23
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Agent355 posted:Which is fine when you're exploring a new area but takes entirely too long when I'm traversing back and forth across space chasing sidequests. I just want my little token to move faster. Oh, that's totally fair. Sorry. I don't know of any mod that does that specifically but have you checked Bag of Tricks? It seems like the sort of thing that would include.
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Mar 4, 2020 22:30
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Griffen posted:Game question for PFK: I keep thinking that both options for clerics are pretty substandard. Tristain is squishy as hell and provides little contribution to damage, and while Harrim is a sub-adequate front liner he also contributes little to damage and is a wet blanket most of the time. I'm considering sinking the 32K gold and buying a cleric mercenary so I can spec him to fit my needs. Is there any reason to hang onto (by that I mean use them extensively) either of the two companion clerics? I still plan on doing their character quests, but if I'm not actively doing so, I figure I can get more mileage out of a custom cleric. Clerics aren't really amazing at damage no matter what you do, except against undead. Their spellbook is intentionally weighted that way; their Flame Strike is a worse version of Fireball at a 1 level penalty compared to Wizards, etc. Pathfinder as a system also intentionally nerfed their front-line capability by removing heavy armor proficiency. They're support casters and off-tanks rather than damage dealers. The best way to get damage out of a cleric is to either use them as a summoner (I think Tristan actually works well for this IIRC) or just keep track of the impact of the buffs they're giving the party.
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Mar 5, 2020 21:10
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Agent355 posted:Speaking of the kingdom stuff I'm still not really sure what I'm doing with it. I've had a quest to get addittional advisors since I started but I'm still not really sure how I do that, maybe I just have to raise the secondary stats enough? Dealing with problems and opportunities and building buildings raises all the stats which ultimately give me BP which I can use to do more kingdom stuff. The kingdom building stuff is unfortunately not a strong point of the game, which is a shame because that's one of the big selling points behind the tabletop adventure path. Honestly you can probably just crank the difficulty on it down to effortless and more or less ignore the system and not lose anything of value.
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Mar 6, 2020 19:29
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