Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous Part 2

[ShadySands]

I just beat the game and there's a lot to unpack there. Spoilers below.

Spoiler

I wasn't able to max out some crusade stats but I couldn't find any way to get them higher. I'm going to assume I got hit with a bug at some point here because I skipped a lot of time before finally giving up and just finishing the last quest in my log. I had every building slot full but still struggled with logistics. 

I gave both Deskari and Baphomet their final deaths and took over their realms and became a demigod and Areelu and most of my companions ascended with me. Some of the end slides referenced the fact that I didn't max out my crusade stats so that's really bugging me and is something I'm going to focus on in my next playthrough. Maybe I'll do Nenio's quest, maybe.

 

[Sarex]

4 minutes ago, ShadySands said:

I just beat the game and there's a lot to unpack there. Spoilers below.

  Hide contents

I wasn't able to max out some crusade stats but I couldn't find any way to get them higher. I'm going to assume I got hit with a bug at some point here because I skipped a lot of time before finally giving up and just finishing the last quest in my log. I had every building slot full but still struggled with logistics. 

I gave both Deskari and Baphomet their final deaths and took over their realms and became a demigod and Areelu and most of my companions ascended with me. Some of the end slides referenced the fact that I didn't max out my crusade stats so that's really bugging me and is something I'm going to focus on in my next playthrough. Maybe I'll do Nenio's quest, maybe.

 

Spoiler

You need to do Nenio's quest to get one of the crystals, so you can ascend everyone.

Did you follow a guide for the true ending or just got to it on your own?

[ShadySands]

I got there on my own, it was a no spoilers run even though I'd played all the way through chapter 4 in the beta. I did save and reload a lot to see different outcomes of stuff that wasn't in the beta so there was a little trial an error but I didn't know that was a possible outcome until I got it.

I'm kind of a completionist in games though not an achievement hunter. Skipping Nenio's quest hurt me almost as bad as trying to do it.

Edited September 20, 2021 by ShadySands

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

16 minutes ago, ShadySands said:

I just beat the game and there's a lot to unpack there. Spoilers below.

  Reveal hidden contents

I wasn't able to max out some crusade stats but I couldn't find any way to get them higher. I'm going to assume I got hit with a bug at some point here because I skipped a lot of time before finally giving up and just finishing the last quest in my log. I had every building slot full but still struggled with logistics. 

I gave both Deskari and Baphomet their final deaths and took over their realms and became a demigod and Areelu and most of my companions ascended with me. Some of the end slides referenced the fact that I didn't max out my crusade stats so that's really bugging me and is something I'm going to focus on in my next playthrough. Maybe I'll do Nenio's quest, maybe.

 

Wait

Aren't you already a demi-god at mythic tier 10? At that point you've splattered at least two Demon Lords.

[ShadySands]

I dunno how the power levels and titles go but that's what the game called it.

Spoiler

Maybe there is a huge power range in the dem-god lane or something but that's what it says. I kind of told off Pharasma at the end and she was like my groups power almost rivals her own so yeah. 

 

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

Sounds like you can probably drop the demi then. Too bad there's already a god of drinking and having a great time.

[Sarex]

1 hour ago, ShadySands said:

I got there on my own, it was a no spoilers run even though I'd played all the way through chapter 4 in the beta. I did save and reload a lot to see different outcomes of stuff that wasn't in the beta so there was a little trial an error but I didn't know that was a possible outcome until I got it.

I'm kind of a completionist in games though not an achievement hunter. Skipping Nenio's quest hurt me almost as bad as trying to do it.

Spoiler

It's too funny that the first choice you make in the game determines if you can get that ending and it's not that big of a choice either...

 

[ShadySands]

My fire kineticist just got out of the shield maze. I'm considering just kicking out or refusing all the companions I don't like or use during this run since the only companion that actually grew on me last time was Regill. 

Spoiler

Trever I never used because you get him so late and his build is wacky (to follow his RP story) and I killed Camellia because she's a crazy serial killer and the only options are kill or forgive (or allow). I never pick Wenduag over Lann except for the time I wanted to see her story and seeing confirms that Lann was the right choice. Maybe if I did an evil run but I suck at evil so maybe a Trickster run since it's needlessly cruel.

My main squad was Seelah, Lann, Woljif, Ember, and Arueshalae

 

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

3 minutes ago, ShadySands said:

My fire kineticist just got out of the shield maze. I'm considering just kicking out or refusing all the companions I don't like or use during this run since the only companion that actually grew on me last time was Regill. 

  Hide contents

Trever I never used because you get him so late and his build is wacky (to follow his RP story) and I killed Camellia because she's a crazy serial killer and the only options are kill or forgive (or allow). I never pick Wenduag over Lann except for the time I wanted to see her story and seeing confirms that Lann was the right choice. Maybe if I did an evil run but I suck at evil so maybe a Trickster run since it's needlessly cruel.

My main squad was Seelah, Lann, Woljif, Ember, and Arueshalae

 

I knew Camellia was a yandere lmao.

So Trickster makes you act like the Lantern King?

[Gromnir]

got a couple crusade bugs, one o' which may impede further logistics progress, so following completion o' midnight fane, am taking a bit o' a break in the hope a few issues get fixed.  am thinking if we want relative unencumbered crusade and story progression, it is likely we need replay a significant portion o' chapter three 'cause o' our angel mythic path quirk and 'cause o' crusade bugs, so am reluctant to keep plunging ahead. 

Spoiler

on our second attempt we did manage to beat playful darkness in spite o' three consecutive crap sr rolls by sosiel which effective wasted scrolls o' mass heal. almost replayed, but decided we were being greedy. next time we will embrace cheese and stack eight or so pillars of life. if owlcat wants to put a crazy overpowered opponent in our path, am not gonna feel guilty 'bout resorting to silly.

HA! Good Fun!

[uuuhhii]

9 hours ago, ShadySands said:

I got there on my own, it was a no spoilers run even though I'd played all the way through chapter 4 in the beta. I did save and reload a lot to see different outcomes of stuff that wasn't in the beta so there was a little trial an error but I didn't know that was a possible outcome until I got it.

I'm kind of a completionist in games though not an achievement hunter. Skipping Nenio's quest hurt me almost as bad as trying to do it.

puzzle are extremely annoying

but all that +4 cloak are just too tempting

[uuuhhii]

9 hours ago, Sarex said:

Josh Sawyer was a big advocate of this, and with his anti meta gaming push made it so that PoE had no memorable fighting encounter of note.

getting constantly dominated by those spore in poe are somewhat memorable

always remember to bring a paladin after that

[bugarup]

13 hours ago, ShadySands said:

I just beat the game and there's a lot to unpack there. Spoilers below.

Spoiler

Sigh. Of course you can become a god. As if the game wasn't cheesy enough. 

I'm still in  Chapter 1. Took a few more characters through the tutorial dungeon so that I'll never have to deal with it again, tossed a couple of them into that broken square of annoying pathfinding to see how's the fighting, but I'm not particularly motivated to find out what happens next. All that angel-devil yadda yadda Christian mythology associates not with adventures, but churches, sermons and tiny but combative old ladies, being a crusader has negative connotations (though not as bad as being in the  Inquisition - thanks, Dragon Age ) and I already know I'll win in the end, being a Chosen One and all. Someone in the thread mentioned it's more like Icewind Dale than Baldur's Gate and I agree (IWD1 that is. IWD2, while being combat-oriented game, still managed to have much better writing). 

 

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I liked Kingmaker better.  

[Gromnir]

4 hours ago, uuuhhii said:

getting constantly dominated by those spore in poe are somewhat memorable

always remember to bring a paladin after that

is why the second battle with raedric and his undead minions were similar memorable. vithrack and the radiant spore also posed similar issues. 

'course the adra dragon were memorable, and a few o' the fights with ogre druids were requiring Gromnir to come up with tactics different from that which had been effective earlier in the game. lagufaeth broodmothers were memorable, particular given how the attendant mobs went direct for our backline squishies. concelhaut weren't too bad for us, and the alpine dragon were less troublesome than were the adra dragon encounter, but the darn monks at the abbey of the fallen moon initial gave us a fair bit of trouble, and the llengrath encounter were requiring a few reloads to get right. etc.

...

what were we talking 'bout? how not memorable were the poe fights?

now for poe2...

*chuckle*

biggest difference 'tween the memorable fights in poe and wotr thus far is not challenge but rather the ludicrous pre buffing ritual we need endure for wotr battles of note. 

HA! Good Fun!

[bugarup]

19 hours ago, Sarex said:

Josh Sawyer was a big advocate of this, and with his anti meta gaming push made it so that PoE had no memorable fighting encounter of note.

Yeaaaah...I remember quite vividly this memorable fighting encounter when Val, Amiri and giant lizard kept missing each other for more than half a hour of real time. Or when some bullsh†t nereid kept spamming endless charm while Val was slowly chipping away her health and party dudes uselessly stood there drooling at blue scaly boobs. Or Wild Hunt copypasta fights through the House at the end of fun...though nope, those weren't that memorable because I hazed my memory with ample amounts of beer to help me through that cowpie of a dungeon.

I also remember that time I blew all my camping supplies in the kraken cave in WM so I couldn't rest, but couldn't slink back to town either as I sneaked past by a big nasty group on my way there that I couldn't avoid on the way back,  so I had to make do with whatever I could scramble from assorted trash ingredients I had and what do you think, I did beat the big guy. Guess what kind of memories I prefer, eh. 

Sawyer was right. 

[Sarex]

I mean, I won't go in to how you built your characters and the difficulties you had with kingmaker, but I will say that I had no such issues. The hardest boss in the game I beat relatively quickly, once I figured out to space my characters to avoid them killing each other when confused. The only thing I will fault Owlcat for doing is that atrocious kingdom management they did.

What I remember from PoE is leaving the game once I level capped my characters as I was not interested in finishing it.

1 hour ago, bugarup said:

Sawyer was right. 

Tell that to their sales numbers and the fact that their next Pillars game is not even an iso-RPG. It's a crying shame, PoE had everything nailed down, except the gameplay. They could have copy/pasted the IE game's gameplay and it would have been a great game.

 

The fact remains that with all the hype of PoE being the spiritual successor of the IE games and the old crew working on it, they still failed to reach 1 million copies (not even going to mention PoE2) and Kingmaker with it's disaster of a launch and no name behind them still did much better. WoR is most likely going to do even better then Kingmaker from what I see right now.

Edited September 21, 2021 by Sarex

[kanisatha]

37 minutes ago, Sarex said:

PoE had everything nailed down, except the gameplay.

What exactly is covered under that word "gameplay"? I see people using this word in a very wide range of contexts so I am curious about people's thoughts.

[xzar_monty]

37 minutes ago, Sarex said:

What I remember from PoE is leaving the game once I level capped my characters as I was not interested in finishing it.

This is a good point, by the way. I wonder how many left the game at that point and didn't come back for Deadfire. I was in Twin Elms when I reached the level cap (this was before the DLCs came out), and I remember totally losing all interest in the game. I did finish it, with White March 1&2 installed, but I remember feeling exactly like you did.

[xzar_monty]

Just now, kanisatha said:

What exactly is covered under that word "gameplay"? I see people using this word in a very wide range of contexts so I am curious about people's thoughts.

I was thinking the same. Such a broad and not very well defined statement, I didn't know what to make of it.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

My first playthrough of PoE ended with me hating the game after spending hours grazing through attrition. It did improve significantly with the releases of the WM 1 and 2, but at launch it was really bad.

Deadfire was worse, because they threw out an armor system that was ok (though still prone to naked or full plate with no in-between) and implemented one where there was often no benefit to wearing full plate over padded armor. On top of that they did some wacky inversion mechanics (because making -35% mean -35% is for rubes) that their own designers didn't understand. Oh yeah, and detecting traps is now tied solely to perception, so if you don't haul the gun lady along with you there's a very good chance you'll stumble into a tpk trap cluster.

The Pathfinder games use a dumbass system with equally dumb things like natural attacks being completely different than unarmed attacks or bonuses not stacking except if they're dodge bonuses. To top it off Owlcat can completely butcher it where if you were to import a PnP CR 30 enemy, like ****ing Cthullu, it could get stomped by a mid game encounter in WotR because apparently they balanced it around insane min-maxers dipping to ramp up their bonuses into the stratosphere.

Point is, all these games have ****ty mechanics and I don't think those are the reason they're good or bad. There's a charm to Kingmaker that PoE just didn't have for me. I can't really quantify it but there's a reason I have so many more hours into a game I've only beaten once compared to one I've gone through three times.

[ShadySands]

I've enjoyed the PF games more than the PoE games while hating the D:OS games. I'd rank them like this and this is purely in order of enjoyment that I got out of them

1. WOTR
2. KM
3. Yoga Fire
4. PoE
5. D:OS
6. D:OS2

Though I guess my favorite games of the KS era are the Shadowrun ones

[uuuhhii]

28 minutes ago, KP the meanie zucchini said:

My first playthrough of PoE ended with me hating the game after spending hours grazing through attrition. It did improve significantly with the releases of the WM 1 and 2, but at launch it was really bad.

Deadfire was worse, because they threw out an armor system that was ok (though still prone to naked or full plate with no in-between) and implemented one where there was often no benefit to wearing full plate over padded armor. On top of that they did some wacky inversion mechanics (because making -35% mean -35% is for rubes) that their own designers didn't understand. Oh yeah, and detecting traps is now tied solely to perception, so if you don't haul the gun lady along with you there's a very good chance you'll stumble into a tpk trap cluster.

The Pathfinder games use a dumbass system with equally dumb things like natural attacks being completely different than unarmed attacks or bonuses not stacking except if they're dodge bonuses. To top it off Owlcat can completely butcher it where if you were to import a PnP CR 30 enemy, like ****ing Cthullu, it could get stomped by a mid game encounter in WotR because apparently they balanced it around insane min-maxers dipping to ramp up their bonuses into the stratosphere.

Point is, all these games have ****ty mechanics and I don't think those are the reason they're good or bad. There's a charm to Kingmaker that PoE just didn't have for me. I can't really quantify it but there's a reason I have so many more hours into a game I've only beaten once compared to one I've gone through three times.

the game seems to build mainly base on angel path

and merge spell angel are overpower enough to handle most of the nonsense game throw at the player

[Sarex]

I really am really loath to go in to details as I was frequently posting on those topics while PoE was still in development. But to give you guys the highlights...

Josh's need to control how the player will play the game at all cost... God forbid something was unbalanced it would ruin the game. This made all the classes "equal" and so made none of them feel special.

Josh's need to stop players from meta gaming. God forbid you reload the game and because you were wiped by an unfare encounter, that was not even in the main story, that you had to go out of your way to find. This made none of the encounters memorable.

How he had issues with resting (this is an issue with Owlcat too) and dedicated not a small amount of time to fix it and in the end accomplished to only make it annoying.

How PoE weapon, armors and other items never felt special, it was like playing through a low tier adventure.

The biggest issue with PoE was that Josh disliked the IE games.

@ShadySands I tried playing D:OS and the atrocity of the turnbased combat they managed to invent instantly turned me off. It didn't help that the quest felt like an mmo game.

 

Edited September 21, 2021 by Sarex

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

25 minutes ago, uuuhhii said:

the game seems to build mainly base on angel path

and merge spell angel are overpower enough to handle most of the nonsense game throw at the player

I can believe that. Given how few options can merge spellbooks, that seems a real bad reference point to balance around.

19 minutes ago, Sarex said:

The biggest issue with PoE was that Josh disliked the IE games.

I don't think that's a big deal. He was able to make Icewind Dale 1 and 2 after all. Really I think it suffered from bad implementation of some good ideas, some bad ideas, and stretch goal stuff.

Like the whole build up of Defiance Bay and the big factions there just disappears after the big trial. And then we visit a half-baked city with some factions we barely get to know before getting thrown through the endgame meat grinder. Really disappointing and I stopped giving a **** around then.

PoE classes are wildly unbalanced lmao. Like Rogues get shown up by everyone, Barbarians and Monks are martial gods, and the slot casters predictably start ****ing up everyone after the mid point.

There is a pretty big difference between the base game and TWM. But I guess that just like NWN (another game Josh worked on) the expansions end up making the base game look lame.

And DOS games are great. Fite me irl. 

Edited September 21, 2021 by KP the meanie zucchini

[ShadySands]

3 minutes ago, KP the meanie zucchini said:

And DOS games are great. Fite me irl. 

Did you play them in Co-op?

Most people I know that generally have otherwise good taste and like those games played them in co-op