Going to say min-maxing unless you're playing on an easier setting or are exceptionally good at these kinds of games but even then there are some serious difficulty spike encounters. I think they're mostly if not all optional but you may not know that when you encounter them. It is definitely a game where you can build yourself into a hole. 

 

Is there a casual/easy/wimpy setting for folks like me that don't want to min-max or is normal the lowest setting?

1 minute ago, Keyrock said:

Is there a casual/easy/wimpy setting for folks like me that don't want to min-max or is normal the lowest setting?

Yep

You can also customize quite a bit if you want "normal with tweaks"

3 hours ago, Keyrock said:

Is there a casual/easy/wimpy setting for folks like me that don't want to min-max or is normal the lowest setting?

play an oracle or cleric with angel as your mythic path also effective slides the difficulty in the direction o' ez. am not suggesting the combo is a you win button kinda approach, but a few o' the angel aoe and direct damage spells, which you will get relative early due to spell book merging, ignore sr and thanks to your increased caster level will result in jaw dropping kinda pain for evildoers, particular for demons. 

at some point, perhaps early, am gonna play a caster oracle, but am purposeful going azata (or something else) as 'posed to angel. one reason am going not angel is 'cause when we did so in the beta with an admitted cheesy qstaff wielding sacred fist(1)/paladin(2)/thug(2)/oracle playing core difficulty in tb mode it were ridiculous and not 'cause o' the ac and saving throw boosts. the thing that made the game so much easier a bit past drezen were the angel spells, and that were with five less oracle spell casting levels. 

HA! Good Fun!

1 minute ago, Gromnir said:

play an oracle or cleric with angel as your mythic path also effective slides the difficulty in the direction o' ez. 

That's completely missing my point, which is my bad for not making myself clear. The whole reason I was asking is that i don't want to have to play a specific optimal build, I want to be able to come up with some wacky cobbled together nonsense put together in my twisted brain and still be able to get through the game. Granted, vidya games and PnP are (sadly) not the same thing, but back in my PnP days my favorite and most memorable characters were decidedly less than optimal. In fact, my favorite character of all time was downright terrible going strictly by traditional stats for the class (thief). In a vidya game you don't have the same freedom to get creative and go "off script", largely because you don't have a GM to work with you, but I still like to play weird and unconventional builds that follow some wacky concept in my brain, rather than a spreadsheet that worked out all the math for what is most optimal.

IF you play oracle or cleric + angel, then concerns 'bout difficulty should be diminished. is not a min/max thing. as we noted, what made our earlier cheese build powerful were less the min/max stuff than it were simple going angel + oracle. is no reason to avoid playing angel + anything. angel is possible the most appropriate archetype choice given you is leading a crusader army against the forces o' the abyss. actual kinda sucks am gonna avoid because o' the difficulty reduction aspect;  Smite Heretics is having personal appeal for at least one run.

am not suggesting you should play angel and have an easier run. however, am letting you know that if you play cleric or oracle and then take angel, gameplay post drezen is gonna become relative easier. 

HA! Good Fun!

Edited August 31, 20214 yr by Gromnir

21 minutes ago, Gromnir said:

play an oracle or cleric with angel as your mythic path also effective slides the difficulty in the direction o' ez. am not suggesting the combo is a you win button kinda approach, but a few o' the angel aoe and direct damage spells, which you will get relative early due to spell book merging, ignore sr and thanks to your increased caster level will result in jaw dropping kinda pain for evildoers, particular for demons. 

Can confirm. Most encounters are going to be trivial. The hard encounters will feel like you're adequately prepared for a fair fight 😄

complete aside, the last couple days has seen frequent owlcat message board "crashes." if owlcat bandwidth cannot handle the recent increased pre launch traffic, am wondering how things go on september 2.

do not expect a smooth release in any way, shape or form. less likely to be disappointed. am recommending you wear your seatbelts.

HA! Good Fun!

 

I'm going to buy the game at launch but I'll start playing sometime next year. That seems safe at the moment.

I mean, Kingmaker still has plenty of bugs...

8 hours ago, Keyrock said:

Having not played the previous game, is this one of those games where you have to min-max the bejesus out of your character, or can you make a character however you want and still get by?

I only played the first game, on normal settings, and it's pretty much cruise control. Some fights you will have to reload if you get unlucky, but most fight are winnable without any strategy. For reference, I missed recruiting 2 of the most powerful companions and still beat the hardest boss with the minimal required level to face him. I also don't know anything about the pathfinder ruleset.

9 hours ago, Keyrock said:

Having not played the previous game, is this one of those games where you have to min-max the bejesus out of your character, or can you make a character however you want and still get by?

I played the previous game on PnP settings, which translated into "Custom" in the game, because the "Normal" difficulty has enemies dealing less than 100% damage on criticals (may have been 50 or 75, I can't remember). I changed that to 100% so the difficulty was exactly as it says in the original manuals.

I didn't min-max, as I intensely dislike the whole idea. The game was occasionally hard, but I liked the challenge. It did get ridiculous towards the end (the last chapter, which has been roundly and deservedly criticized for its encounters), so I changed to the easisest mode simply to finish the game.

I would like to think that Owlcat has heeded the criticism it received and that there is no repeat of the last chapter in this game. Based on this, I'd say you do NOT have to min-max if you play on Normal or close-to-Normal difficulty.

1 hour ago, Sarex said:

I only played the first game, on normal settings, and it's pretty much cruise control. Some fights you will have to reload if you get unlucky, but most fight are winnable without any strategy. For reference, I missed recruiting 2 of the most powerful companions and still beat the hardest boss with the minimal required level to face him. I also don't know anything about the pathfinder ruleset.

Who are these 2 of the most powerful companions? Is there a consensus on this? It would be interesting to know. I'm pretty sure I recruited all of them, and I'd say Nok-Nok is probably up there, but as for the other one, I'm not sure. Amiri the barbarian is the only one I think is rubbish.

5 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

Who are these 2 of the most powerful companions? Is there a consensus on this? It would be interesting to know. I'm pretty sure I recruited all of them, and I'd say Nok-Nok is probably up there, but as for the other one, I'm not sure. Amiri the barbarian is the only one I think is rubbish.

The gnome (bombardier) and the ranger.

Ok, thanks for that. I only used the gnome sporadically because I found him irritating as a character, but I wholly agree the ranger is powerful.

10 hours ago, ShadySands said:

Going to say min-maxing unless you're playing on an easier setting or are exceptionally good at these kinds of games but even then there are some serious difficulty spike encounters. I think they're mostly if not all optional but you may not know that when you encounter them. It is definitely a game where you can build yourself into a hole. 

 

it is painfully ez to build a character or party wrong, just objective wrong. is painful ez to build a character or party which performs great for the first 1/2or for 2/3 o' the game only to discover the bosses in the last 1/2 or 1/3 o' the game is functionable unbeatable for you. even if you know pathfinder backwards and forwards, you may still be in for pain 'cause rules related to mind affecting spells is applied different in pnp compared to wotr.  and don't forget the bugs which will cause pain if you are unaware of them. the current worst ranger archetype you may choose is the demonslayer. doesn't look bad and sounds like a good option for a game in which you is fighting many demons, yes? unfortunate, the current state o' the demonslayer is such that you only get favoured enemy bonuses against outsiders which is not demons. 

etc.

probable most painful is looking to the owlcat boards for insights. is not that the advice you will find is bad, but very quick is gonna seem like there is a small number o' correct spell options and feat options for a given class. if you multiclass a paladin, you are doomed. if you play a nature mystery oracle and don't go mounted, you are doomed. if you don't give greyboar shield bash feats, he is doomed. think we are exaggerating? think again. part o' the pain is that only most o' the board build advice is steeped in hyperbole. it is indeed true that you may build yourself into a hole. just as bad is if you follow the board advice you may get the impression that the options for avoiding the hole is limited. 

if we hadn't spent an embarrassing number of hours with the beta, we might be more concerned 'bout the possibility for reaching late game pain... and am nevertheless anticipating pain to come our way due to hubris. will be something(s) we didn't know 'bout how owlcat implemented different from paizo or different from earlier beta builds. 

am not thinking min-max is necessary, but such a conclusion is more o' a quibble regarding nomenclature. can build a less than ideal character which will nevertheless be mighty successful in wotr. the problem is the holes and the pain which accompanies falling into the many holes. not need to be min-maxed, but need to be aware o' the holes, and hopeful one is able to recognize which holes described on the owlcat boards ain't actual holes.  very confusing.

HA! Good Fun!

Edited August 31, 20214 yr by Gromnir

5 minutes ago, Gromnir said:

it is painfully ez to build a character or party wrong, just objective wrong. is painful ez to build a character or party which performs great for the first 1/2or for 2/3 o' the game only to discover the bosses in the last 1/2 or 1/3 o' the game is functionable unbeatable for you.

In PoE, one of the most annoying enemies and one that you constantly had to face was called In-Combat Pathfinding. There was no way to beat it, the best you could do was to circumvent it.

It appears that Owlcat has taken these kind of problems to a completely new dimension.

Its' somewhat painful at the moment. It's been so long since I logged into the owlcat site I've forgotten the password to it. And of course, with their overloaded system it's not sending the reset password link email.

Ah well. Guess I'll have to wait for the masses to thin before I get my digital download access.

well, usually Steam or GoG will be handling load after launch as its on their servers to handle it. Owlcat will probably have nothing to do with it

15 hours ago, Keyrock said:

Is there a casual/easy/wimpy setting for folks like me that don't want to min-max or is normal the lowest setting?

There are at least two lower settings that I recall, easy and story. And you can then customize any standard difficulty setting to a pretty good extent.

When playing Kingmaker I never ever min-maxed, neither my PC or the companions. I always did things based on my personal preference and/or for roleplaying reasons. And to offset this, I play on customized normal or one level lower (you can even lower the difficulty in-game at any time). For me, the greatest fun of playing Kingmaker is in the huge range of options I have for setting up and playing my character. And this even extends to the companions, because they also come with a reasonable amount of freedom to develop as you wish. So it's like having a dozen different PCs to play around with, but where your companions are not IwD-like empty shells. Restartitis is a big problem for me.

9 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

I mean, Kingmaker still has plenty of bugs...

I replay Kingmaker quite a bit, and don't ever encounter any bug that I even notice. Am able to play through every quest and every area and every encounter without any problem.

4 hours ago, Raithe said:

Its' somewhat painful at the moment. It's been so long since I logged into the owlcat site I've forgotten the password to it. And of course, with their overloaded system it's not sending the reset password link email.

Ah well. Guess I'll have to wait for the masses to thin before I get my digital download access.

Interesting. Wonder if it has to do with one's location. As soon as I received their KS update about preloading I clicked on the link in the update to take me to their site, got my Steam key, then immediately downloaded the game at 60 Mb/s. Had no problems.

1 hour ago, kanisatha said:

I replay Kingmaker quite a bit, and don't ever encounter any bug that I even notice. Am able to play through every quest and every area and every encounter without any problem.

To give you an example: in my current playthrough (while I was still playing it, which I'm not anymore) I had one of those "Research into the nature of curses" cards appear twice during an encounter that was supposed to give it to you. So, after researching one of them, the other is still on my kingdom screen under "Curses". I have no idea whether the one I did research counts as done and dusted. I suppose it's impossible to tell.

Also, mathematically speaking, I'm almost 100% certain that the "50% failure chance" you get for your spells in some areas of the First World is nothing like 50%. It's exceedingly unlikely that you could fail over 20 times in a row if your odds are 1/2. It's not impossible, mind you, but realistically it doesn't happen.

 

They have a turn-based mode? My interest level for this game just went up considerably. 

52 minutes ago, Vaeliorin said:

video

we watched five minutes o' one o' his wotr videos and he pronounced rapier as ra (like the egyptian god) + peer multiple times. inexplicable drove us to distraction. 

am more than a little disappointed to hear the crusade stuff is still bugged. dead end quest bugs are always frustrating but am expecting a few o' those, particular in the final two chapters.  am also suspecting the reviewer is unaware o' many o' the feature implementation bugs, 'cause unless you play a skald or demonslayer ranger, how are you gonna know if those two classes is busted? divine hunter, for example, worked in the beta ok for the first couple levels, but at level three, when your animal companion becomes otherworldly, advancement would lockup... but only if you chose celestial. choose fiendish for your critter and you wouldn't even notice there was a problem with divine hunter progression. is literal hundreds o' bugs like that and a surprising number is effective terminating any kinda character progression in a chosen class/archetype. 

...

am gonna be curious to see if there is crusade workarounds, 'cause the most recent beta crusade problems woulda' ended our attempt to play the game under any normal circumstances. 

HA! Good Fun!