Tobold

Since the 1.2.6.1 patch on iOS I can't acces half of the shop any more. Only the buttons for bundles, adventures, and gold stillwork. The buttons for characters, enhancements, dice, and treasure don't do anything any more.

The "coming June" for Fortress of the Stone Giants appears increasingly unlikely to be true.

Pssssst! Try Magic Duels!

I don't think Pathfinder Adventures targets the same audience as the hundred thousand typical Free2Play games in the App store / Google Play. The game is more complicated than typical Free2Play games, and the $25 bundle somewhat caps the amount of money you can spend on the game, so you don't get the typical "whales" spending hundreds or thousands of dollars and financing the game for the freeloaders. I believe the target audience is rather people who know the physical version. For those, $25 is very cheap compared to the $150+ cost of the equivalent box + packs. And you need less space to set up the game, less shuffling, and each game goes faster. With adventure 4 already marked as "coming June", we should have the complete Rise of the Runelords game by autumn. With some luck we'll get the next adventure path (Skulls & Shackles?) by Christmas. And I'd be happy to pay *another* $25 for a new bundle containing the next adventure path and some more added characters. I do believe that Obsidian has a good monetization strategy where fans of the game like me pay $25 at least once per year for a new adventure path. Converting Free2Play players is only marginal to that business model. That is why the collectible card game aspect of the treasure chest cards feels a bit tacked on rather than at the core of the game.

Pretty much every heroic fantasy game to some extent is about gathering shiny loot. So I am very happy now that the threshold for finding level 1 cards in quest mode apparently has been lowered from level 20 to level 10. Finding only B/C cards for 20 levels was really too long, this is a huge improvement and makes quest mode much more fun. Thank you!

Review at Pocket Tactics, 5 stars out of 5: http://www.pockettactics.com/reviews/review-pathfinder-adventures/

I'm pretty certain that it always will be option 1. I fully expect at some point to be offered to pay $25 for Skulls & Shackles, and another $25 for Wrath of the Righteous. I could also imagine the class decks to be added to the game, or other ways to add more than the existing 11 characters. Why would you pay for that? That is a trick question, because it depends very much on who is "you". If you have little money and lots of time, earning everything with gold sure might be the better option. Other people have more money and less time, so not grinding gold to buy characters and adventures is attractive to those. While the cards from the treasure chests aren't "necessary" to play, they provide more variety, which is nice. Personally I'm perfectly happy to pay $25 for each Adventure Path (hey, I paid over $150 for Rise of the Runelords in card form) and then use the gold I earn on treasure chests.

No, it has a box for every PARTY. Or said even simpler, it has exactly as many save games as you have different parties started. The party you select after hitting the story mode button determines the box of cards you have. What characters you then remove or add from that party doesn't matter at all.

It's not the same. And it is scary that lot of people seem to think that on this board. You don't get any item better than common, if you "buy" the game. How is this fair? The treasure chests full of cards with different rarities are a marketing trick for the mobile games generation. If you actually look at the cards, you'll find that those shiny rares aren't any better than the "common" cards from the paper version. Frequently treasure chest cards are actually worse than regular cards. The best cards are the loot cards you get for adventure completion, not from chests. $25 buys you the whole game with all the cards that would cost you about $150 in physical card form. But if you do that, you'll still earn gold from just playing, and there is nothing else to buy with that gold than treasure chests. You don't need those chest cards for anything, but they allow for a bit of variety. What's not to like?

My legendary cards after 60+ treasure chests: Brooch of Shielding, Flask of Magic, Slaying Axe (Deck 6) I'd say your suspicion that few legendaries are in the game might well be correct.

I respectfully disagree for the single-player part. Cards aren't tracked "by character" but by party. There is no such thing as "merging parties"; instead you have the choice of either continuing to play with the same "party" and switch out characters, or to use the Story button on the main screen to start a completely new party from scratch with no memory of the cards the previous party had. So at least for single-player, the culling system as written in the rules is totally possible.

Some minor corrections: There are 24 allies if and only if you play with a group of 6 characters. Less characters means less locations means less allies on the map, e.g. just 18 for 4 players. Also if you read the fine print in the win condition, it is sufficient to get half of the allies to win, not half+1. So 12 allies out of 24 is a win.

Your error in logic is that by me *not* publishing the information this rollback somehow needs not to happen. You are wrong. The dishonorable option is to keep an exploit secret in order to use it (and as you say that you already beat HCTF at legendary I am starting to wonder about your insistence that secrecy is better). Exploits never go unfound, and making a splash on the forums is the fastest way to get them fixed and limit the damage from the necessary rollback.

A) As I don't know who is around this weekend, I don't know who to PM. B) Trusting that "if I don't publish the exploit, nobody will know about it" is a spectacularly bad idea, as lots of people are looking for those, and the information then just travels through back channels instead under the eyes of the devs. I've experienced both, and publication is the less bad option in my experience.

I didn't see it in the patch notes, but apparently once change in patch 1.0.3 is that there are now far more different cards in the treasure chests! I like it!

The display of "Victory" even if you have less allies than Black Magga is a bug. You need to actually get more allies than Magga to advance to the next scenario. The display shows how many cards Magga ate, not how many allies she got. If you click on that field, you'll see an information like "3/18" telling you that you found 3 out of 18 allies in the scenario (18 is for 4 characters, numbers vary with number of locations). So you win if you get at least half of the total number of allies, e.g. 9/18. For strategy: Speed is of the essence, so discard blessings and allies that allow you additional exploration. The Village House is always one of the locations. As this location allows you to acquire allies by recharging any card, go there first. If you empty a location of cards, don't close it. That way Black Magga sometimes tries to draw cards from a location that doesn't have any.

My excuses for publishing this information, but I have not other means of contacting the devs and find it is better to inform them of an exploit rather than keeping it secret until everybody has found it and it causes a big crisis. Devs, feel free to delete this post once you got the information. Hope you can fix this soon.

There is definitively a bug in that you *always* get a screen saying "Victory", even if you lose or forfeit. That false victory also always rewards you 100 gold. But you don't get the allies collected. Winning on a second try I didn't get the allies either, but I did get to advance. About strategy: Somewhat counter-intuitively the key to strategy in this scenario is to *not* close locations. That way Black Magga ends up going to open locations with no cards left; also with 4 characters there are 3 locations which need you to banish a card to close, and as you don't need closed locations to win, you can save those cards. If you have the Village House location, try to do that one early, because the "recharge to gain ally" ability is a winner.

I noticed that in Pathfinder Adventures the spell Acid Arrow deal +1d10+1 damage, while in the print version it deals +2d4 damage. Is that a bug or a feature? Are there more cards that differ from the print version? Is there a list somewhere?

I'm somewhat conflicted what arcane caster to take. I do like Seoni's ability to turn any card into an arcane spell, even if that means discarding. However Ezran has so many spells that he'll always have one on hand, and once he gets bonuses to recharge rolls he recharges spells nearly as certainly as Seoni. What I don't like about Seoni is that she is Charisma-based and only has d6 for intelligence, with no bonus for knowledge checks. That leaves several locations for which I don't have a good character to close it. And I don't really need the Charisma, as I already have Seelah in the party, who I prefer to the other "tanks" due to his ability to go through a location deck faster. I'm currently playing with Ezran in my quest mode group, which solves my problem with Intelligence-based locations. But there is the drawback of him not having any blessings in his deck.

Note that the same is true for the character add-on deck: If you already spent gold on buying Amiri, Lini, Seelah, or Sajan, you don't get a refund when you buy the pack for 10,000 gold.

As I have two tablets with different operating systems, I was able to test quest mode both as a "free" player, and as a player who had bought the $25 bundle. I've been playing quest mode for a while as both of these, and I must say that neither is much fun below level 20. The basic problem is that you can choose the best cards from the basic card set when you create a group of new characters, and from then on you basically play with those same cards forever. That is most extreme for the free players who haven't grinded 10,000 gold to buy the C pack, because apart from very few exceptions where cards from story mode have been retrograded, they will never see anything other than basic cards until level 20. If you bought the bundle or spent 10,000 gold on the C pack, you'll get at least those. If you bought the bundle and played story mode a lot, you will probably have spent the gold you made there on treasure chests, so there are a few more different basic cards you can find that aren't available from the get go. But in general the fun of loot acquisition is very much missing for the first 20 levels of quest mode. That is especially true for the level rewards at levels 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18 and 19: For all of these levels your reward is one card per character, but the randomly rewarded card is always from the basic set. So for 65% of the level up to 20 your level reward is a piece of useless junk that you'll immediately discard. That doesn't feel like much of a reward at all. I would very much suggest level card rewards to be always of one tier higher than the cards you'll find in the scenarios. I would also recommend to lower the threshold at which you find cards from tier 1 to 10 instead of 20. What do you think?

Same here. As Lem only has one weapon in his deck, getting that weapon guaranteed at the start is great.

First of all, kudos to the devs to get out the patch so quickly, I hadn't expected it so soon. So now I finally had the opportunity to test quest mode, here is what I think about it: Overall I like the idea of playing random scenarios for xp and leveling up my characters over time.Right now a character that dies gets experience, but not the rewards from leveling. That can potentially permanently gimp him, and so I'm currently pressing Forfeit as soon as a character dies. I think that is a bug, and hope that it gets fixed. A dead character simply not getting any experience would be okay.I consider Pathfinder Adventures to be a game that has a relatively high degree of randomness. Yes, there is some skill involved, but if all the henchmen are at the bottom of their location decks or you keep rolling 1s your skill doesn't help you much. In story mode I don't mind that so much, because the rewards for winning a scenario aren't so great. In quest mode winning or losing makes a huge difference, as you don't get any experience points if you lose. That seems rather unfair to me, especially when I lose games to random bad luck. And I don't see the logic of characters not gaining any experience if they adventure without killing the final boss. Something like "you get only half the experience if you don't win" would be a lot better, I think.Somewhat related to the above, as winning is too important in quest mode, it has to be remarked that your statistical probability of winning depends on your group size. 4 is about optimum, and a group of 2 or a group of 6 has significantly reduced chance of winning the game. Again, that is fine for experimentation in story mode, but not ideal in quest mode.

The story mode works like the board game. Once you played through the story mode you are supposed, just like in the board game, to start over with a new group, to try out different stuff for fun. Most video games don't work like that, but rather offer constant progression. The point of quest mode is to make Pathfinder Adventures work more like a video game.