Borissimo

If Obsidian is using the mobile platform as a dry run to work out all the kinks in their development framework to set up for a flawless release on Steam, where they'll rake in tons of money if the game is actually good and AD's don't take months to release, then I don't care what they do or how long it takes them to get things out. We'll eventually get S&S, Wrath, and even Mummy's Mask too. If they're actually trying to make the game profitable on mobile, then shame on them. That's an incredibly stupid decision. As others have noted, the game has lackluster reviews and is never going to go anywhere. If they think they can actually make a mobile empire out of treasure chests and dice skins, their brains have melted. I am cautiously optimistic that Obsidian's upper managers are not total morons and are going for the strategically correct play here. (i.e., using the mobile version of Pathfinder Adventures as a sacrifice of sorts to set up for a brilliant Steam debut.)

Yeah, this thread's a bit of a hot mess. What people are missing is the fact that there are two dimensions to a character: how easy it is to play that character well, and how powerful that character is. Being strong and being difficult to play are not mutually exclusive. If OP wanted "the other end of the spectrum," then the poll should have been titled simply "Who are the worst characters?" I don't think there are any bad characters in RotR. (In S&S, there is one guy who just totally sucks: Seltiyel.) If I had to pick the weakest, they'd be Seoni because she bleeds cards like crazy and her main ability gets worse and worse with time, and Kyra because losing an exploration in large parties is almost always unacceptable. Notice, though, that despite being weak, Seoni and Kyra are actually rather easy to play. Sajan is very powerful, but he's also quite challenging to play correctly, especially in the beginning when his deck size is small. Seelah and Amiri are two other examples of powerful characters who are difficult to play. Each has a boost ability that bleeds a card. Knowing when and when not to use these abilities can make or break a scenario. Use them too much, and you'll lose too many resources. Use them too little, and you'll fail critical rolls. The hardest character to play is Lem. That swap ability of his is really easy to forget about. It's also tricky to juggle pairing him up versus sending him alone. The game usually rewards spreading out your characters, but it's tempting to give Lem a partner to make use of his 1d4 bonus ability. Finally, Lem is one of only two characters in the whole game (the other being Kyra) who has a real choice to make as far as skill feats are concerned. It takes a lot of game knowledge to determine whether Dex, Cha, or a split of each is the best option for Lem in any given party.

There's some disagreement here, so I'll hop on the scales with my 2 cents: Ezren is unquestionably the better support. It's not even a contest. Neither Ezren nor Seoni have any abilities that are inherently support-oriented. So it all comes down to the cards. Whereas Ezren has 8 spells and 0 blessings, Seoni has 3 spells and 5 blessings. Seoni has to use most, if not all, of her spells for combat. Otherwise, you'll have to use her hero power to fight things, which has 2 problems: 1) It slowly kills her, and 2) That ability actually sucks. So she's discarding cards to her ability, discarding allies to explore, and discarding blessings to "support" the party -- she's gonna need a lot of healing to survive all that discarding. Judged in terms of support, Seoni is literally the worst supporting character in the entire game. She's like a negative support. The party has to support her! Ezren, by contrast, can actually take a decent amount of support spells, and while he doesn't auto-recharge them like Seoni does, with power feats he'll eventually get to the point where anything 9 or lower is an auto-success, and 10's and 11's are almost sure things. This is functionally almost equivalent to Seoni's auto-recharge. And unlike Seoni, Ezren doesn't suck resources away from the party since the only cards he'll ever be discarding are (possibly) his allies. Ezren's not a great support, mind you -- the support characters in this game are Valeros, Lem, Harsk, and the divine casters -- but as he's not the literal worst support in all of Rise of the Runelords, he is better than Seoni.

At this point, I would be legitimately shocked if Obsidian didn't release this game on Steam in Q3 or Q4 of 2017. Yes, yes, the game is a bugged mess and AD's 4-6 are grotesquely delayed. But you're not seeing the big picture. At right around this time in 2013, a huge chunk of the Blizzard fan-base was furious with how the Hearthstone closed beta was being handled. The whole process was truly a giant, festering ****-up. Fast forward 3 years later, and who cares about how badly the Hearthstone beta went down? Absolutely 0 people. And so, I think, it will be with Pathfinder Adventures. Right now, the game is in a truly egregious state (and I say this as a long-time fanboy). But 3 years from now, when you can download the $50 Pathfinder Adventures Steam bundle with Rise of the Runelords, Skull and Shackles, and Wrath of the Righteous, all gorgeous, all working flawlessly, and all fully complete, who's going to care that Obsidian's development of the initial mobile app was a flaming clusterbomb of ineptitude? Absolutely nobody. There's like 10 people really fed up with it right now, but give it a few years and a finished product and I doubt even we'll care what things were like back in 2016. Heck, we'll probably stop caring before a single calendar year goes by. To succeed on Steam, the reviews need to be good. Open a game page and see that pleasant blue "overwhelmingly positive" or even "very positive" or "mostly positive," and you might buy the game. See that nasty red "mixed?" Practically a death sentence. In its current form, Pathfinder Adventures is a "mixed." So it was smart of Obsidian to get their "mixed" product out of the way on a mobile app that pretty much nobody cares about. Yeah, it's taking them forever to get things working right, but when they do, they'll be able to release a nearly flawless version on Steam, attain that pretty blue "mostly positive" status, and rake in a billion dollars. I mean, I'm not the president of Obsidian so I obviously don't know anything for sure, but if they don't release the game on Steam after their fixing up this hunk-a-junk jalopy we've got running on our iPads, then they're lighting money on fire as far as I'm concerned.

What I want to know is, is AD4 still on track for the devs building a time machine and releasing it three months ago in June? I think this is a totally reasonable thing for me to feel completely entitled to and I will rage at the devs if they don't break the space/time continuum and do it literally yesterday.

Sure seems like it!

But Pink, the blog post IS for the 17 of us who are online, posting and caring, so calling out Obsidian for treating us like dunces is pretty fair.

I'm with Zarrick on this one. If Obsidian had come out and said, "We're removing the bonus chests when you buy chests with gold because we want more players to buy chests with money," I'd have been okay with it. That would have been honest and forthcoming. Instead, they're blatantly reducing the value of gold while acting as if it's some kind of positive change for the player. Uh, making me hit the "buy" button 40 times instead of 1 time when I buy 20k gold worth of chests and robbing me of 10 chests in the process is not a positive, guys. Hey, Obsidian. We're not idiots. You want to make more money, fine. But don't insult our intelligence in the process.

On the plus side, the devs did finally update the "coming in" window in Story Mode to say July! Maybe midway through September they'll get around to updating it to say August.

I thought this day would never come, but here it has: Wakasm and I completely agree on something! Folks, I think we need to finally slay, mutilate, burn, and put in the ground this notion that "X is optional, so if you don't like X, your game experience doesn't change and you have no right to complain." Chests were optional, yet everybody complained about them to high heaven (some even boycotted the game because of them!), and changes were made. If something is in the game, it's fair game for critique. End of story. The developer's job is to make a game that makes players feel good. Something that makes a large proportion of players feel bad is, by definition, bad game design. Even if the players are "wrong" based on some objective argument, it doesn't matter -- pleasing players is the fundamental goal of a game that overrides everything else, because if your players aren't pleased, then they'll stop being your players. So Pink, I totally respect your liking of the daily challenge timing. However, trying to shut down criticism of the system by saying "it's optional, so if you don't like it, it doesn't affect you" doesn't logically work. If the developers add something that makes a lot of players feel bad, fixing it is their job regardless of how optional it is. In the case of the daily challenges, I agree that Hearthstone's 3-slot system makes way more sense than the silly wheel Obsidian reinvented in its place. Some of these challenges take a long time, and it's an AWFUL feeling when you think you can do one, fail, run out of gaming time for that moment, and the challenge is gone the next time you're able to log on. Sure, the challenge is "optional," but if the game lures me into wasting a bunch of time by offering a reward and then taking it away at a random moment during the day, then the "it's optional" argument really crashes and burns. Developers need to avoid "feels bad" moments whenever it's reasonable to do so. The daily challenge timer is a HUGE source of "feels bad" for players and there's no earthly reason for it to be. I hope it is changed in the future.

I'm a bit confused by the OP -- hasn't it been the case for a while now, at least since July, that story mode scenarios award gold only once per account on Normal and Heroic difficulty? Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but if OP was getting gold for repeating story mode scenarios with new parties, then his game was bugged before the patch, not after -- he was getting tons of gold he shouldn't have been getting. Much as it pains me to say this, because I agree with his conclusion, I don't really buy Bullwinkle's argument: How does it not make any sense? In the first version of the game, you could pretty easily unlock all of the characters and available adventures in a few weeks without spending a dime. The fact that "gold was too generous" was an observable, objective fact. There's nothing to argue about as far as that's concerned. What?! With respect, this is a transparently false assertion! You can take a high-level party through Brigandoom and experience no more challenge than what a fresh all-basic party would encounter. By contrast, a high-level party in Quest Mode would be drawing from a pool of harder villains and locations. Once you have an experienced party, if the rewards for scenario completion are the same, Story Mode is WAY easier and faster to grind than quest mode because you know exactly what to expect and you can continue to target the exact same low-difficulty challenges over and over. The only advantage of Quest Mode is that, because it's different every time, it's not technically "grinding." Many players don't like feeling like they're grinding for something. But in a purely mathematical sense, if you consider only the time and difficulty involved, Quest Mode IS CLEARLY harder to extract gold from than Story Mode, on average. What's frustrating to me is that I actually agree with the OP's and Bullwinkle's conclusion, namely, that gold rewards for Story Mode should not be once-per-account. But if we argue for this conclusion by asserting things that are patently not true, like that the gold rewards system wasn't overly generous, then we won't have any credibility and Obsidian could easily justify dismissing everything we say. We, as players, need to be honest about the fact that we A) want to make gold from repeated playthroughs of Story Mode, and B) this gold factors into our decision to want to keep playing Story Mode. There is a very simple solution to all of this: if any of the characters in a Story Mode party has completed that scenario at that particular difficulty before, then the scenario awards no gold. Otherwise, the scenario awards gold as normal. In taking away repeated gold gains from Normal and Heroic, but keeping them on Legendary, Obsidian made the wrong restriction and threw the wrong bone. Gold grinders don't care about the restriction because Legendary is the only difficulty you'd want to grind gold on anyways, and casual players who just want to experiment with new parties don't care about the bone because they'd never want to play on Legendary on a first playthrough because of how difficult it is. The suggestion I made above is simple, would stop abusive story mode gold grinding once and for all, and would allow players to start over as much as they want with new parties while continuing to be rewarded for playing the game.

This update looks great! Thanks as always for your hard work, dev team. One thing that worries me is the continued lack of any word from Obsidian on the deck-building issue post-AD3. This was a big thing when AD3 came out, yet it somehow seems to have fallen under everyone's radar! Neither of my parties could choose anything but basics from the box when deckbuilding between scenarios in AD3, and if that issue is still there in AD4, it's going to be a major handicap.

I don't know what's coming in the future, but I can tell you what's happened up to this point. When the game was first released, a good chunk of the cards weren't actually seeded in the pool. It wasn't just a few cards; it was a LOT. So anyone who opened chests right away was wasting some value, as they were more likely to get duplicates than someone opening the chests later. After a while, the missing cards were added in. However, anyone who opened their chests at that point would still have been wasting some value, because Obsidian just announced that cool new dice skins will be available as chest drops. For someone like me, dice skins are the coolest things to be introduced to chests so far, since they add some cosmetic value without changing the mechanics of the game. So I'm definitely glad I haven't opened my chests up till now. At the same time, if you wait too long, then you'll be done with the game, and what'll be the point of the chest cards then? I'm personally going to wait until I'm done with AD4 and pop open all my chests once AD5 hits. If I end up losing any value because new stuff gets introduced after that, oh well.

Hannibal's right. As for the "extra cards connected to characters," I'm not actually sure what you mean. That may be the C-Deck, and if so, then there's no difference between getting it as part of the bundle and getting it separately. So at the end of the day, the only thing you lose by not getting the bundle is the promo cards. You can see a list of the promo cards here. Most of them are inconsequential. A few, however -- Fire Sneeze, Poog of Zarongel, and Horsechopper +1 -- are actually pretty strong. Depending on your level of completionistic tendencies, missing out on the promos may or may not drive you insane.

How do you use the Vicious Trident? The answer is, you don't. My expert advice is to trash this piece of garbage. I love strong cards with a drawback, and the designers of Runelords came up with a few good ones: Ilsoari Gandethus and the Charmed Red Dragon are among my most memorable cards in the set. Unfortunately, they biffed it with the Vicious Trident. If the force damage had been resistable, then maybe somebody could have used it. Instead, the card exited the design process as a "trap:" something shiny to lure new players who don't yet realize that it's garbage pure and simple. In my 6-player home game, my Ezren carried it around for many moons before finally pitching it in disgust.

Let me start by saying that I adore this game and am eternally grateful to Obsidian for making it. I also think that as far as the game itself goes, it's remarkably well done. The art, interface, dialogue, extras that they choice to add (difficulty levels, quest mode, treasure, some card changes) have all been spot on. Now, with that being said. One can say without hyperbole that, on this project, Obsidian has literally never met a single deadline. Here's the rough history, as best I can remember: - "It's coming Q1 of 2015!" - "It's DEFINITELY coming in the fall of 2015!" - "It's coming in March 29 of 2016!" - "It's coming in April 26 of 2016! For real this time!" (still missed by a few days) - "AD3 is coming in one month!" (missed by about a week, if I remember right, and unforgivably bug-ridden) - "AD4 is coming in June!" So let's take stock of the current situation. It's July 25 and AD4, which was supposed to come out in June thanks to the "faster processes" Obsidian had in place after AD3, continues to reside in a state of nonexistence. It's a safe bet that July will end without a release date for this module. Now Obsidian comes along and says, "We have faster processes now that will make AD5 and AD6 come out much faster!" Do you believe them? No logical person should. If Obsidian is right about this, it would literally be the first time they were ever right about anything pertaining to the game's release schedule. Now to be clear: that doesn't guarantee they're wrong. They could be right, in which case, bravo to them! Truly! But if we're speculating as to what will happen in the future, all we can do -- right now, as speculators -- is base our guesses on the historical facts available to us in the present, and it's pretty clear what hypothesis those facts point to: that AD's 5 and 6 will not, in fact, come out any faster than anything else up to this point. AD4 will come out in August if we're lucky, and then (if our luck holds!) AD5 in October and AD6 in December. I don't think it's reasonable to expect anything else from Obsidian. Again, I'm not villainizing them. No developer is perfect. In Obsidian's case, they're amazing at making games but awful at giving accurate release dates. They always have an excuse ("some bugs popped up at the last minute," "there's an office move," etc), but if someone's always making excuses for something, eventually you have to realize that the fault lies with them. Obsidian is clearly either bad at not putting bugs in their game, bad at finding those bugs in time, or bad at acknowledging their shortcomings in the bug department and adjusting their release expectations accordingly. If they always set their release dates too soon and then always fail to meet those deadlines due to "last-minute bugs," then they clearly aren't learning the lesson that there will always be last-minute bugs and adding an appropriate buffer to their release schedule. And having said all that, I think that Obsidian has nothing to apologize for. They're doing the best they can on a hard project, and a year from now, none of us will care about the fact that everything came out late. What we will care about is the fact that Obsidian did the job right and that the game's amazing. I think that asking Obsidian for an apology is honesty childish. I'm assuming most of us have already paid $25 and will not pay any more; thus, from our vantage, Obsidian is essentially working their asses off to make a game for us for free. When someone does that for you, you don't demand apologies no matter how late they are. And I think the "state of the game" thread is total baloney. Obsidian's working out the kinks on this tablet version. When it's finished, they'll release it on Steam and it'll be a huge hit because it will be polished right out of the gate and the releases will come much more quickly. I truly don't think Obsidian ever expected to recoup their investment in the tablet market; this is just a dry run for them to knead out all the snags so that the Steam version is flawless when it hits. That's where their money is going to come from.

While "just don't play blessings then" and "if you want a challenge, just play legendary" are technically valid responses to the OP, I suspect the OP was already aware of these ingenious possibilities. OP, I feel ya. Here's my attempt to be a little more constructive (while, I'm afraid, delivering some bad news). Your suggestion isn't likely to appear in Pathfinder Adventures. This isn't because it's a bad suggestion, but because of a couple of non-obvious reasons. The first is that the developers seem to shy away from anything that would create more options in the interface. You'll notice that the app has almost no options whatsoever other than Permadeath. In the closed beta, when the testers were offering suggestions, any suggestion that would have required an option to appear somewhere in the menu was rejected, no matter how good it was. We can speculate as to why this is a design goal, and I'd guess there are two main causes: 1) Development of anything, no matter how simple it appears, takes time, and this game is already way behind schedule. 2) The game can be overwhelmingly difficult for new players, and a firing squad of options (even if each option is perfectly reasonable) would add to what for some is already too much cognitive load. The other factor is that, as others have so sagely noted, this variant can be self-implemented. Were the designers to bend on their "no toggles" philosophy and start implementing options, an option that doesn't strictly require enforcement by the app itself would likely be on the bottom of the priority list (or fail to make the priority list at all).

And to add to SonMoekel's list: - When adding boons from the box between scenarios in AD3, some players can only choose from basics even though all cards from AD1 and down should be available. This bug is my #1 concern right now because it seems to happen for some but not all players and I haven't heard anything from Obsidian about it, so I'm worried that it's going to slip through the cracks and screw up my party even more in AD4. Thanks for your time and attention getting all these bugs fixed!

I think it's great that we got an extra bug-fixing patch before the release of AD4, but I'm growing increasingly concerned by the marked lack of commentary from Obsidian about two of the biggest and most glaring bugs that were released with AD3: 1) If the party doesn't encounter the last card in Here Comes the Flood, the next scenario doesn't unlock. 2) When selecting boons from the box in AD3, only basics can be chosen. Some players reported that this works fine for them, but for me, none of weapons, spells, items, or blessings allowed me to pick anything other than basics. There's not a whisper about these bugs in the patch notes from what I could see (please point it out if I'm just dumb and missed it!), and I'd be really curious to hear when these bugs will be addressed. I suppose that #1 isn't too big of a deal going forward since, presumably, many if not most players are moving on from AD3 by now, but #2 has already messed up my 5- and 6-player campaigns in a major way and the impact is only going to become worse the further we progress in the adventure.

Kgk nails it. To add to his excellent advice: If you want to find holy light and just absolutely do not care about anything else, try the following: 1. Create a 6-player party with Ezren, Lini, Lem, Seoni, Kyra, and Seelah. The idea here is to play a party with as many spell slots as possible. The more spells are in your characters' decks, the fewer spells there are in the box. 2. Play Brigandoom! 3. Piledrive the Academy until it's out of spells (do NOT close it after defeating the henchman!). 4. When the Academy is empty of spells, forfeit the scenario and start over. This way, you're not wasting time fighting monsters and crap and can just focus on rolling 5 spells until you get holy light. Your odds on any given run are 5/X, where X is the number of spells in the box, so they're not amazing, but you should get lucky eventually. Good luck!

The first reply to the OP severely understates the value of the cards in the C-deck. Here are the significant ones: Weapons Deathbane Light Crossbow +1 - Fan favorite, d8+1, +d8 if monster is undead Glaive - d10, discard to reroll if you fail Greatsword - 2d6 (!!!), discard to add strength die Icy Longspear +1 - d8 + 1, doesn't need proficiency None of these weapons will last through AD6, but they will stay in your characters' decks for a good long while. Spells Augury - An addiitonal copy of this powerful spell is massively significant if your party has enough spell slots to hold onto it Inflict - An additional copy of this spell is important if you're going to play with Lini Items Crown of Charisma - Auto-succeeding at diplomacy checks is very strong. Diplomacy picks up a lot of allies, closes quite a few locations, and even comes up sometimes on villains/henchmen. Also significant is that this card doesn't exist in the base set. It will stay in your party through the end of AD6 and its absence is keenly felt. Amulet of Mighty Fists -- Adds 1d4 and the magic trait if you don't use a weapon or an attack spell on a combat check. As a basic, it's a nice starting card for Sajan, Lini, and Merisiel. Masterwork Tools, Spyglass -- These are practically the only really good items in the entire base set, so an extra copy of each is welcome. Will likely stay with your party all the way through the adventure. So let's get back to the original question at the crux of the OP: "Is there anything really amazing in there?" Yes. The good new boons, as well as the extra copies of existing powerhouse boons, are totally worth 2,000 gold eventually. Whether they're worth it to you in the short run, at the expense of unlocking more new characters faster, is a tough subjective call you'll have to make. Also, though OP didn't ask about this, Doppelschwert is right in pointing out that the C-deck is "kind of a mixed thing." It adds the following monsters, which are all really annoying in different ways: Enchanter Ogre Plague Zombie x 2 Satyr Shadow Siren Sneak Spectre Traitor Werewolf Zombie Giant The Enchanter and Siren are particularly bitchy, and I'd be lying if I said that I don't sometimes feel as though I'd happily give up all the Auguries and Deathbane Light Crossbows in the world to never see a #$&%ing Satyr again. Seriously, #$&% Satyrs. Of the 6 barrier cards added, 4 are "friendly," 1 is very challenging (Explosive Runes), and 1 is at minimum a hideous annoyance every time it appears (Skeletal Horde), so while they're not as bad as the monsters, the C-deck barriers also add some annoyance to the game. So if you're on the fence about the C-deck, trying to decide whether it's "worth" it, you need to consider that the cost of its boons isn't just 2,000 gold -- it's also the pain of putting obnoxious banes into your game box that (in the digital version, anyway) you'll never be able to remove again. Merry gaming!

I think I predicted "1-3" extra weeks, Pink, so when it came time to pony up the dough, I figured I might as well buy the higher end of the scale to look more impressive. In the end, it cost 20,000 gold plus a private tutoring session with Nathan (to explain how to play the game properly) to delay the patch until the fourth week of July and push the release of AD4 all the way back to August.

There isn't an exact release date set, but this thread may be of interest to you.

Let me start by saying that, personally, I'm not too excited about the prospect of extra blessings in the treasure chests. When I open a chest, I'd much rather find an exotic weapon, item, or spell that significantly increases my characters' capabilities than a fancy blessing that's only marginally better than a plain old Blessing of the Gods. The blessings are fun and nice, so I'm somewhat excited to see all these, just not too excited. That being said, there's a key piece of these blessings that is being overlooked. The bounties are not strictly inferior to the Blessing of Norgorber. They recharge if the top card "has the XYZ trait," whereas the original Blessing of Norgorber only recharges if the top card is exactly another Blessing of Norgorber. This means that, for example, the Bounty of Torag will recharge if the top card is a Bounty of Torag, a Favor of Torag, or the original Blessing of Torag. That's a substantial upgrade to these blessings' rechargeability. By using one of these blessings, you're essentially sacrificing a bit of power in exchange for a much greater (double or triple) chance that the blessing will be recharged. Now one could reasonably argue that this advantage isn't significant enough to outweigh the cost, but it's a far cry from strict inferiority.

To be perfectly honest (and a little cynical) ... I'm not the slightest bit shocked that the role cards are jacked. For starters, you can only put one power feat into a role card before AD4 is out, so I bet a lot of the feats beyond the first aren't even implemented yet. As for the feats that are implemented, the only players who will find out there's a bug are the ones who'll A) pick them, and B) actually go back and replay old scenarios for some reason. When my campaigns finished AD3, I simply stopped playing, and I'm sure I'm not alone. For the players who kept at it, I bet many simply picked the +hand size or other straightforward feats, not the more complex ones that require planning (such as needing a lot of a particular blessing). Given how huge and rushed the AD3 update was, I'm not surprised Obsidian let slip a few egregious role card bugs, knowing most players wouldn't know or care about them till they got fixed with the release of AD4. So yeah, even if it takes till the end of July for Obsidian to finally fix these obvious bugs and actually make the role cards and scenarios work, I won't mind!