Borissimo

Nooo, actually the opposite. You still have 30 turns, and with 6 players you MUST grind locations, which means you will encounter, and thus have more chances of defeating, more monsters, of whick there are more on the scenario. Also, you get more gold when you close a location, 6 players has more locations. 6 players: Mo' problems, Mo' money Why reward people twice? I'm afraid there is a fallacy in your reasoning. Yes, you still have 30 turns, but as you yourself say, a 6-player party has to grind through way more cards than a party of 2, so the physical time needed to complete a scenario with 6 characters is much greater even though the in-game time is the same. In the time it takes me to beat one scenario with 6 characters, I can beat two scenarios with 2 characters. The extra 200 gold my 2-player party gets for finishing a legendary scenario far outweighs the extra incidental gold my 6-player party gets for killing more banes and closing more locations. By the way, I'm not necessarily arguing that 6-player parties should get bigger rewards. I wouldn't mind if they did, but my main reason for posting was to point out that one argument against it was objectively unsound.

Aha, I see the issue. Yuriy, what you're missing is the phrase "encounter or evade?" written in the bottom right hand corner of the screen when the Sinspawn first appears. If you use the caltrops then, then you'll only evade the monster. You have to encounter the monster, then use caltrops to defeat it -- which means that, for the Sinspawn, you need to make that dang wisdom 6 check.

You missed something. Caltrops will only defeat a monster whose highest difficulty to defeat is 9 or below; if the monster's check is 14 or below, caltrops will only evade the monster. Wrathful Sinspawn have a difficulty of 9. However, before you act, you have to make a wisdom 6 check or the difficulty of your checks is harder by 1 for the rest of the turn. I'm guessing you failed that check (or a similar check earlier in the turn), causing your Sinspawn's difficulty to get bumped to 10, preventing caltrops from defeating the monster.

By your own logic, LunarWolf, 6-player parties should get bigger rewards. As it stands now, the reward for completing a scenario dwarfs the incidental gold accrued during that scenario. This means that someone playing with a 2-player party gains gold much faster than someone playing with a 6-player party -- effectively, the game awards a bonus for playing with a smaller group. So your logic should compel you to say, "Please don't. Playing with only 2 characters is overly simplistic and just not very fun for some people, while I'm sure other people love it. But playing with a party that small should be a preference, not a requirement for some kind of bonus."

Thanks for letting me know, Longshot! That is definitely a source of reassurance.

I mean no disrespect, hfm, but I'm afraid I need to call out your post for having some extremely inaccurate information. For starters, keeping characters A & B in the box while you play with characters C & D is not "good practice," it's expressly prohibited by the rules. Now, it's a cooperative game and you can play however you want, do whatever is most fun for you and your group, I won't tell you how to play your game, yadda yadda, but "good practice" it just ain't. Then for the cost of the C-deck, you say: I'm afraid that this is simply a mathematically false statement. You're forgetting the opportunity cost, i.e., the best thing you could have bought with that 8k if you hadn't spent it on the C-deck. In this case, that's 16-17 chests. So the cost of the C-deck isn't just "8,000 gold" but also "not having all the treasure chest cards that 8k gold could have bought me." That's a big cost, man!

This was mentioned by Chainsawash in the role discussion thread and I just confirmed it: the preview for Ezren's Evoker role has a maximum hand size of 8, rather than 9 as in the game. I join Chainsawash in hoping that this is a bug with the preview as opposed to a nerf to what is already one of the worst role cards ever printed.

You're convinced that some solo builds will get stuck ... and so are the designers of the game. Which is why they wrote this text in the original rulebook: Not all characters should be considered equal for solo play ... Ezren doesn’t have any blessings, so when no one else can give him any, his progress might be inhibited ... We suggest you try solo play with 2 characters ... Some cards are particularly difficult in solo play. If your character can’t ever get out of the Treacherous Cave, your scenario will grind to a halt. When you encounter such a card, remove it from the game and replace it with another card of the same type that roughly matches its power level but isn’t quite so impossible to overcome. This is basically a fancy way of saying, "We know the game is broken if you play it solo, so when you get stuck because solo mode simply doesn't work, go ahead and cheat." Of course, the designers' suggestion of "cheat" can't be implemented in the digital game, so solo characters in Pathfinder Adventures are indeed just going to get stumped sometimes.

Whoever designed/selected this card has my commendations. Long have I bemoaned the lack of good ranged weapons in Runelords, specifically the fact that you never get any in loot. This bow fills a big hole for Merisiel and Harsk, and it's great in the upcoming adventure to boot. Well done!

I gotta be honest, when I saw the title of the post, my gut reaction was, "This'll be dumb." I eat humble pie. This suggestion is spot-on. When the change to gold farming was announced, some people complained that awarding gold only on Legendary would disproportionally benefit better players. This isn't true, though. When you use over-leveled characters, beating the game on Legendary with a 2-player party (or, depending on the scenario, a 1-player party as described in the OP) is just not that hard.

Remember, "Elite" doesn't mean "Awesome". It means "Second-least lame." Yes, but Second Lamest should still be better than Lamest! The original Acid Arrow was a little goof in the design and I'm so glad that Paizo greenlighted the change in the digital edition.

Woooooooow that was some epic digging, Hawk! Okay, I guess the matter's closed -- we have it from an offiical source that "failing a check to acquire a boon" is NOT the same as "failing to acquire a boon." This means that if the text of "night approaches" is "When you fail a check to acquire a boon, discard a blessing from the blessings deck," and if Obsidian eventually implements the option to pass on boons, then choosing not to roll for a boon should in fact NOT trigger the blessing loss. That makes the option to pass on boons a pretty huge deal (for Heroic/Legendary players, anyway) after all!

Wow! Welp, me and my predictions that we wouldn't see this till second half of June are sure looking pretty stupid right about now. You guys never cease to amaze. I don't know how you managed to do all the stuff in AD3 AND keep up with new features and bug fixes all in under a month. Could the whole game be out by the end of the summer? Could we be seeing Skull and Shackles in 2017? I didn't think it was possible, but now maybe I do!

An easy shorthand for me to decide the Ezren vs Seoni question is to simply base it off of party size. Ezren is better in large parties, where his lack of blessings is masked by the group and his free extra explorations are more relevant. Seoni is better in small parties, where time is abundant and having blessings to actually succeed at stuff is more vital.

Nice work on this guide -- thank you for putting it together! If I may offer a constructive suggestion: You highlight the Goblin Fortress as the premier weapon-grinding location, but if I were grinding weapons, I'd prefer to use the Garrison. The nice thing about the Garrison is that when you defeat the henchman, you can close the location without losing the weapons still left inside, and you get to see what those weapons are (so you know whether it's worth going through them). There are also (I believe) Garrisons in AD2, whereas Goblin Fortress only gives you weapons up to AD1. Also, if you're going to make any changes to this, I'd recommend adding the Academy as a highlight. If were grinding spells, that's the only location i'd care about. But again, thank you so much for putting this together!

Hawk is extremely prolific on all of the PACG forums and I'm not sure I've ever seen him be wrong about anything. I admit that this makes me want to agree with him. However, it does seem unambiguous that choosing not to acquire a check is the same as failing the check. The discussion linked to in Hawk's post took place in 2014, which is before the following was added to the "attempt the check" segment of the Wrath of the Righteous rulebook: If you choose not to acquire a boon, it counts as failing to acquire it. Since this text is in the "attempt the check" section, it follows logically that if you choose not to attempt the check, your decision is treated equivalently as attempting the check and failing it. The difference between "fail to acquire" and "fail a check to acquire" is pedantic; the former is just shorthand for the latter. There is literally no other meaning of "fail to acquire" other than "try a check to acquire something and fail the check."

Thank you so much for creating this sheet! It's an amazing resource. Of course, Pathfinder Adventures wouldn't be an interesting game if we didn't all have some respectful disagreement. Here's where I strongly agree and strongly disagree with you: Lem 100% spot on. Anyone who doesn't take Virtuoso is a crazy person. The feat that lets Lem grant his 1d4 bonus to himself is one of the strongest power feats ever printed in the history of Pathfinder Adventures and certainly the strongest, most game-warping power feat in all of Runelords. Merisiel Totally agree. The Acrobat's ability to isolate the villain trumps everything else. It's mind-boggling that the developers also gave Acrobat an extra hand size. Easy win for Acrobat here. Lini You're right that the Wild Warden is the right pick, but I think you overvalue Divine Training (give +2 / +4 to your divine checks when playing spells). Wild Warden can go up to +4 on Animal Trick (Lini's base +1d4 ability) as opposed to the Shapeshifter's +3, and your comment on that is this: I doubt very many people will spend four powers to top this all the way out, so I think the static one point is marginal. Let me ask you a question: what would you rather have, +2 to your divine checks or +1 to all your checks? Would you rather have +4 to your divine checks, or +2 to every single check you ever make? Yes, normally, an extra +1 is minor. Normally. When we're talking about adding +1 to all of your checks, that's not "normal" -- that's bonkers. So I disagree that the Wild Warden's ability to go up to +4 on Animal Trick is "marginal." The strongest Lini, in my opinion, simply takes hand size up to 7 and Animal Trick up to +4 with her four power feats after the role card. Ezren You give the nod to Illusionist on account of Mind Trick (when you evade a monster with a spell, you can put the monster on the bottom of the deck). I would agree with you on this ... except that I actually played Ezren in a live 6-player game, took Illusionist and Mind Trick, and simply found it underwhelming. I can't back up this claim with any kind of logic. It seems like that ability should be nuts, but I played with it and it simply wasn't. By the end, I deeply regretted not taking Evoker for that +1 hand size. My verdict on Ezren: both his role cards suck. By the end, Ezren's likely to be holding a lot of cards in his hand (Sihedron Medallion for protection, 1 or 2 loot staves for the intelligence bonus, and conditional spells), and he doesn't have any abilities that let him profitably use cards aside from their power, so an extra hand size is crucial. I would take Evoker simply for the extra hand size and who gives a crap about anything else. Harsk I think you underestimate Reload ("recharge ranged weapons"). Harsk sucks at combat. After the fourth skill feat, when Harsk can no longer improve his dexterity, he starts to fall futher and further behind the monster curve, to the point where villains and even sometimes henchmen pose a serious risk to the grumpy dwarf. In a small (2-3) player game, where time is abundant and killing power is crucial, adding combat power is more valuable than getting rechargeable explorations. Valeros Here you fall for a logical fallacy. You give high praise to Close Quarters ("Melee instead of Ranged for ranged weapons") because it makes Valeros the best ranged character in the game. But it doesn't matter if Valeros with a ranged weapon is better than Harsk with a ranged weapon; what matters is whether Valeros with a ranged weapon is better than Valeros with a melee weapon. In this game, melee weapons are far better than ranged weapons. By swapping out all of your melee weapons for ranged weapons, you're wasting a power feat and a ton of effort to gimp your own character!! That's not to say this power feat is never useful, but it's not even remotely the blockbuster you make it out to be. Valeros's role cards are both tepid, and other than maxing out his hand size it doesn't much matter what he takes. Amiri Your comment on Thick Skin (reduce combat / all damage by 1) is "-1 to damage? That’s it?" Um ... yes? That's it? And it's frickin' incredible, dude! By the end of the game, unavoidable damage gets tossed around as if its going out of style. Blocking all incoming damage by 1 is stupendously good. I agree that the Berserker's ability to bury cards from the top of the deck is cool, but it just doesn't compare to universal damage reduction. Sajan Finally, someone who understands that Zen Archer sucks! My eyes nearly roll out of my head when I see positive comments about this role card, so thank you for pointing out how bad it is. It is interesting to note, though, that the Drunken Master's Dodge (reduce non-combat damage by 1/2/3) receives not a word of comment from you, even though it's far and away the strongest power feat on Sajan's role cards. Yes, recharging potions is cool, but when every henchman you encounter does crap like, "Attempt an Acrobatics 14 check. If you succeed, take 2 damage ..." the ability to just shrug off damage is godly. I am totally happy putting all three power feats into Dodge. Related to my comment on Amiri, above, I think you undervalue damage reduction. But other than that, I'm with you in your analyses. Great work on this project!

A fun puzzle, Pink! You have to use combinatorics to solve that one -- simple multiplication won't do. 1-player parties: 11 2-player parties: 11×10 / 2 = 55 3-player parties: 11×10×9 / 6 = 165 4-player parties: 11×10×9×8 / 24 = 330 5-player parties: 11×10×9×8×7 / 120 = 462 And 6-player parties is the same as 5-player parties, because picking 5 out of 11 is the same as rejecting 6 out of 11. That's another 462. Final answer, assuming no arithmetic errors: 11 + 55 + 165 + 330 + 462 + 462 = 1,485 Of course, you have to beat each scenario on normal, heroic, and legendary with each party, and there are 13 scenarios out. So let's go ahead and say there are 1,485 × 3 × 13 = 57,915 unique scenarios to play in the initial release. Back to work, boys!

Haha, yes, if the time between releases is "1 month," then I suppose it is also "weeks." Well, like always, I'm happy to be wrong, but I just don't see AD3 coming out before the second half of June. In addition to my "week" argument above, it also occurs to me that AD3 is the biggest and hardest of the AD's to produce. On top of the usual stuff Obsidian has to build for the AD -- scenario setups, unique scenario rules for Heroic/Legendary, movement paths for Legendary, and implementation of all the boon, barrier, monster, villain, and scenario cards -- Obsidian also has to create and test a few new things there: 1) The box-culling system 2) The fact that non-basic boons can now be chosen in deck creation 3) 22 (!) role cards Business will be back to relatively as usual for AD's 4-6, which is why I hold out hope that those will come out faster than AD3.

While some of the points in the OP have merit, most do not. Let's go through them one by one: 1) Often you just don't want some cards, neither in your hand (they are useless), nor in you discard (they get shuffled back in the deck when you are healed and you are stuck with them). This is a legitimate concern. However, it's incredibly minor. How often will this make the difference between failure and success? Almost never. 2) Sometimes there are penalties for failed checks (is some locations, and with some scenario rules), and if you have no chance to acquire anything you could just skip the check to avoid this penalty. According to the rulebook of the newest set, Wrath of the Righteous, "If you choose not to acquire a boon, it counts as failing to acquire it." So this point is totally illegitimate. Hawk and da-Mayor believe that the Glassworks is an exception to this, drawing a distinction between "failing to acquire a boon" and "failing a check to acquire a boon," but I completely (but respectfully! ) disagree. I think that "failing to acquire" is just a shortened form of "failing a check to acquire" because really, when are you ever going to fail to acquire a boon in any other way? It's possible I'm wrong, but only if the designers simply come out and say it; the rules in this intance are far from unequivocal. In any case, however matters are settled in the Glassworks, this point is wrong. 3) Beginning with adventure 3 if you don't acquire a boon with BASIC trait you could remove it from the game. Sometimes we chose to refuse a check just to remove a card from the game, so that there would be more new powerful cards in the deck, even though this boon could be useful in a particular situation. This is also completely wrong. The digital game handles box culling in a different way than the physical game does. In the digital game, whether a boon gets banished has no bearing on whether it will appear in later scenarios. This is a controversial topic: some players, like me, think Obsidian's method is superior to the physical game's, while others hotly disagree. Either way, though, the ability to pass on boons won't affect what it's in your box in the digital game. 4) Sometimes you banish certain cards on purpose - so that you can choose a card you need from the vault between scenarios. But if you later come by a card of that type in a location you are forced to pass a check to acquire it, which sucks. This is the only point in the OP that's both legitimate AND significant. At the end of the day, though, it's not game-breaking, so I don't think that on its own it confers high-priority status to the option to auto-fail boon checks.

They also said in the AMA that the time between releases would be "weeks." Unless AD3 pops up before Sunday, that's already not gonna be true. I think Obsidian really has its hands full with bugs, Quest Mode, and the dellightful little surprises they pepper this game with, so somehow fitting in a whole AD in one month's time is a tall order. If were betting money on the time of release, I'd bet June for sure, and then I'd hope that enough of the bugs are quashed by then to allow for the possibility of AD4 in July.

To me this is an open and shut case: no, the c-deck is absolutely not worth buying if you've already bought 3 of the characters separately. That 8k gold would be vastly better off spent buying the other characters and then saving up for the future adventure decks. Personally, I wouldn't blow all my money on chests; I'd rather be able to buy the next adventure decks the moment they come out. But if you've already unlocked the other characters and have tons of gold left over (or hey, if you just feel like buyin' you some chests -- I won't tell you how to play your game!), then buying chests is without question better than buying the c-deck. The other replies so far have been reserved, but personally, I don't see a shred of ambiguity here at all! The c-deck adds a lot of boons to the box, but the only significant ones are these: (by "significant," I mean "very strong and likely to stay in some decks beyond AD3:") Deathbane Light Crossbow +1 Greatsword Icy Longspear +1 Crown of Charisma Masterwork Tools Spyglass Saber-toothed Tiger Augury These are some great boons, but are they really worth 8k gold? On top of that, by buying the c-deck, you also add a bunch of really annoying monsters to the box. Here's the list from Feywood's post, with the mega-bitchy monsters highlighted yellow: Bugbear Cultist x2 Enchanter Ogre Plague Zombie x2 Satyr Shadow Siren Sneak Spectre Traitor Werewolf Zombie Giant Every time you get wrecked by a $#%!-ing Satyr and its $#%!-ing "damage can't be reduced" Acrobatics check, it's like, "I paid 8k gold for this!" Chests have a much higher concentration of quality boons. They also include boons from all decks, from 1-6, so they don't go obsolete the way the c-deck boons do. The salvage feature currently doesn't work, but once its fixed, you'll be able to salvage the chest cards that don't interest you to get some gold back and to shape your vault the way you want it to. And chests don't add bitchy monsters to your game. Like I said, I personally wouldn't blow all my gold on chests, but if I had to choose between spending 8k on chests or 8k on the c-deck vault cards, I'd get the chests -- easiest decision in the world.

Nope! I wanted to see if Legendary was doable with a fresh pair. I actually hadn't played Legendary at all yet.

Honestly, it's really wacky right now. I beat everything on normal with one party, then beat everything on Heroic with another. When I started a third, I saw I could get gold for beating the game on normal or Legendary, but NOT on Heroic. I'd be very curious to hear from the devs what the intention is surrounding the gold rewards. I've read contradictory claims here on the forums, possibly because the mechanics are inconsistent for different players.

If I were designing the game, I definitely wouldn't allow characters from Base Set X to be used in Base Set Y for one simple reason: money. Say you unlocked everything in RotR and S&S comes out. Now you can just use your Runelords characters in Shackles and the only gold you need to spend is to unlock the adventure decks. When players don't need to split their gold between unlocking characters and unlocking AD's, it's incredibly easy to not pay a dime -- there's plenty of time between releases to accumulate the gold needed to unlock a single AD. Here's another consideration: If each base set is separate, then I bet a lot of players who didn't buy the bundle for Runelords will buy it right away for Shackles. These players didn't know what to expect when they first downloaded Pathfinder Adventures, so they were hesitant to pay $25 and unlocked enough of the game for free that the bundle lost its value. When Shackles comes out, they'll already know it's a quality product, so they'll go ahead and buy the bundle to support the game and to save themselves time. On one extreme are the players who won't pay a cent no matter what; on the other are the players who will always buy the bundle no matter what. I bet that these extremes are small and that the vast majority of players are somewhere in the middle. Allowing the use of old characters in new sets will cost Obsidian a ton of potential income from this key middle group. There are other factors, too. Say Gary rolls up Lirianne, the Gunslinger, in Runelords, where there are no guns. He plays for a few hours before he realizes that he has chosen poorly. What do you think Gary's going to do? Chide himself for not doing his research? Ha. No, he's going to blame the game. It's a sad truth, but it's a truth nonetheless that when a game lets players do stupid things, they always blame the game, not themselves. Finally, consider the characters that were "repeats" from Runelords to Shackles -- Lem, Merisiel, Valeros, and Lini. Suppose I'm one of those "middle" players I mentioned earlier -- I play mostly f2p, but I'll pay as I go for specific things that interest me. Am I going to buy any of these repeat characters? In my opinion, Lem is the only one of the four that's "different but equal" and thus worth buying. Merisiel and Valeros are largely unchanged, and Lini got hardcore nerfed. Perhaps I'm wrong, but the point here isn't to debate the quality of my analysis -- the point is that whenever a "middle" player thinks a new version of a character is equivalent to or worse than the old one, right or wrong, Obsidian loses income from that player.