Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, Part 3

[majestic]

Clearing Blackwater was an unpleasant experience on unfair difficulty, and that's primarily attributable to me thinking it'll be all right to bring a few shock weapons and make due with the wands until you can grab Stormlord's Resolve. That wasn't the best idea, all in all. It works fine until you run into the augmented succubi who have an annoying tendency to take zero damage from the weapons and you need to get through both their spell resistance and their reflex saves for the wands to work.

Battling mirror imaging, level draining demons with regeneration you just can't turn off properly is a tad... annoying. As per usual, the two actual boss fights were more than managable. Ember's supercharged enchanment DC and enemies not immune to mind altering conditions equals having a fairly easy time, comparatively. Picked up Agony on Ember for the first time too. Works well enough against enemies with weak (that's relative on unfair) fortitude saves and has twice the range of the other hexes. Isn't as powerful as slumber when it works, of course, but it's still a decent way to turn an enemy off with a bit of dice luck.

Also ended up picking up a whole lot of Improved Initiative feats. On unfair, you really do not want to be caught flat-footed.

Eh, and pretty big lol at the Brown-Fur Transmuter mercenary. The guy is well worth his money and then some. I'd call that a bargain, and he does a decent job at throwing Bolstered Battering Blasts at enemy lines when the buffing is said and done.

[xzar_monty]

9 hours ago, majestic said:

Clearing Blackwater was an unpleasant experience on unfair difficulty, and that's primarily attributable to me thinking it'll be all right to bring a few shock weapons and make due with the wands until you can grab Stormlord's Resolve. That wasn't the best idea, all in all. It works fine until you run into the augmented succubi who have an annoying tendency to take zero damage from the weapons and you need to get through both their spell resistance and their reflex saves for the wands to work.

Hmm, which wands?

[majestic]

3 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

Hmm, which wands?

Wand of Call Lightning, there is one right at the beginning of the dungeon, and one more further in.

[ShadySands]

[Sarex]

Oh, yeah... Forgot about that. Well if they get swept up in the sanctions, I'll slip you guys final edition of the game.

[Vaeliorin]

So I did Drezen yesterday.  It took me over 12 hours to do, but that was with breaks for lunch, dinner, and some time spent messing around with other stuff.  Still, it's the longest scenario I think I've ever encountered in an RPG.  Only rested once, though (right before the balor) and I killed the optional extra hard boss (first try, he took out Daeran in 1 round, but then I killed him in 1 round, so...kinda even.)

Now on to act 3 which is where my previous playthrough died because everything I tried was either too hard or just wasn't much to do.  Hopefully this time goes better, but if anyone has some suggestions/tips on what to do when in Chapter 3, I'd appreciate them.

[bugarup]

4 hours ago, Vaeliorin said:

 but if anyone has some suggestions/tips on what to do when in Chapter 3, I'd appreciate them.

Find a guy named SInful SInew, poses as a wounded crusader on location called Crimson Dust, bit SW from Drezen. Buff like there's no tomorrow as he's one of those "do him in the first round before he does you", reap 10K+ XP.

[ShadySands]

Game is freezing on the title screen after patching. Going to verify files/repair and see if that fixes anything.

[xzar_monty]

No freezing here, but certainly performs worse, and I think I already noticed some new bugs.

[majestic]

Looks like I will not be playing Wrath of the Righteous this weekend. Prior to 1.1.7, I had on and off problems with Steam's cloud syncing where Steam would not properly upload savegames - and only with Wrath of the Righteous. I got into a habit of manually uploading them to my Google Drive just in case. Except today, of course, because it's been working for a month now. Steam immediately started patching the game when I quit earlier today, and guess what's not synced?

Hard spoiler!

Spoiler

MUH SAEVGAEMS!

 

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

11 minutes ago, majestic said:

Looks like I will not be playing Wrath of the Righteous this weekend. Prior to 1.1.7, I had on and off problems with Steam's cloud syncing where Steam would not properly upload savegames - and only with Wrath of the Righteous. I got into a habit of manually uploading them to my Google Drive just in case. Except today, of course, because it's been working for a month now. Steam immediately started patching the game when I quit earlier today, and guess what's not synced?

Hard spoiler!

  Reveal hidden contents

MUH SAEVGAEMS!

 

I did my pre-DLC WotR playthrough already, I may come back to it for the DLC but for the most part I'm going to wait until all DLC drops and (community) patches make the game relatively stable.

I've got three characters planned with mythics (Angel, Lich, and Demon) for when that happens. I'm torn between Azata (again) and Trickster for the main. Azata was strong mechanically but it felt that most of its content was in the form of Aivu interjections, while I saw a ton of Trickster options and being a reality bending **** sounds right up my alley. Decisions, decisions.

[Sarex]

Final edition for me.

[Vaeliorin]

Yeah, I, being an idiot, opted out of the beta, got the new patch/DLC, and now my save games won't load because my mods are broken.  I was about to go dragon hunting, too.

[Vaeliorin]

Mods updated, dragon dead.  I'm getting a bit worried, because I've reached a point where most enemies just kind of explode if I look at them (the dragon died in less than 2 rounds...didn't even get to fly away, was killed by AoO) and I'm not looking forward to the inevitable sudden spike in difficulty that I'm relatively sure is on it's way.  I'm level 12 (mythic 3) and it seems like I still have a lot to do in Act 3 (still haven't started the Ivory Sanctum, trying to knock out most everything else before that...though I hear Blackwater is really hard...may bring Nenio since she has Ascendant Element Electricity.)

[kanisatha]

I have to be honest that I am very worried about the possibility of Owlcat being forced to close down on account of conditions inside Russia. I can even see many Owlcat employees deciding to get out of Russia while they still can, before leaving the country gets banned. Owlcat's games are the ones I love the most of all the RPGs being made right now, and it will suck if they're no more. I hope they can ride this out, but I am very pessimistic.

[xzar_monty]

I have also been thinking about this quite a lot. I share your pessimism, unfortunately.

[bugarup]

So I, uh, made a new friend:

Keeps following me around, isn't doing much else, but then there are no enemies on the level no more. I'm a bit wary given his notorious reputation.

 

[uuuhhii]

finished dlc

chaos and kill both ending doesn't seems to have much difference

and cannot import the dlc ending save when start a new character for some reason

[Vaeliorin]

So I'm working my way through the Midnight Fane at the end of Chapter 3, and I've found quite a few of the "you shall not pass!" doors playing turn-based.  Having to switch to real-time to get past them makes me wonder how anyone plays this game in real-time.  It's just a massive clusterf-ck where I can't tell what the heck is going on with all the spells going off, people getting tripped all over the place, tons of mirror images, etc.  Fortunately, on the one occasion when the door got jammed up by my main character and the enemies, my main character managed to solo about 8 enemies consisting of succubi, incubi and various votaries.

I also killed Grisella, which I hope doesn't screw me too hard later in the game, but...I'm playing a LG Oracle Angel who truly believes herself Iomedae's chosen (and did before the game started...that's why she came to Kenabres) so she's not about to be making deals with demons.  Also, she has an 8 Wis, so...she doesn't always make the best decisions.

[Gromnir]

11 hours ago, Vaeliorin said:

So I'm working my way through the Midnight Fane at the end of Chapter 3, and I've found quite a few of the "you shall not pass!" doors playing turn-based.  Having to switch to real-time to get past them makes me wonder how anyone plays this game in real-time.  It's just a massive clusterf-ck where I can't tell what the heck is going on with all the spells going off, people getting tripped all over the place, tons of mirror images, etc.  Fortunately, on the one occasion when the door got jammed up by my main character and the enemies, my main character managed to solo about 8 enemies consisting of succubi, incubi and various votaries.

I also killed Grisella, which I hope doesn't screw me too hard later in the game, but...I'm playing a LG Oracle Angel who truly believes herself Iomedae's chosen (and did before the game started...that's why she came to Kenabres) so she's not about to be making deals with demons.  Also, she has an 8 Wis, so...she doesn't always make the best decisions.

did you remember to opt out o' the beta? as we noted previous, your earlier identified doorway issue were beta specific. am knowing the new patch is available, but is a shocking number o' folks who forget they need to revert to base game to enjoy the benefits o' the patch. am having personal not suffered impassible doorway problems for months and have only seen official board complaints o' such as relating to the beta, unless you simple are identifying you got your party bunched in doorways as 'posed to the bug you previous identified. 

killing gresilla is our standard approach so you should suffer no noticeable ill effects. in fact is arguably necessary to dispatch gresilla if one wants to have an enchantment caster. 

have not started the inevitable excess material as we had our aeon and anticipated legend builds both paused at the conclusion o' the colyphyr mines, waiting for the patch as well as having to deal with rl responsibilities. aeon did indeed get a boost in power, which am s'posing will make it a more attractive option. there is a comical crusade power for aeon which makes any act v crusade battle v. demon armies a non factor, particular if your general has high power. is gonna take us some time to slog through all the act v material.

we do have a whole bunch o' mostly minor post patch bugs. for example, our crusade ui is disabled on the world map, but by accessing character or inventory and returning to world map, the ui returns. animal companion leveling has changed a bit and is... odd. didn't notice the change 'til we had to respec our aeon to take advantages o' earlier mythic level gazes being added and sudden our animal companion were missing a few anticipated levels, inspite o' the benefits o' boon companion. 

am thinking we also may have figured out the problem with azata and our inability to get use from waterfall. mythics, other than merged spell books, don't use a casting attribute to generate spell casting dc. one o' the recent patch fixes gave a serious upgrade to an azata spell which now provides a considerable attribute boost with a major duration. we noticed how in spite o' the big boost to charisma, our waterfall dc didn't change even if all the spell dcs in our sorcerer spell book did improve. azata s'posed uses charisma as its casting attribute, but whether you got a charisma o' 8 or 38, the dc for azata spells remains same. this works out great for players who dumps charisma but nevertheless wanna play azata or aeon, 'cause to cast level 7 aeon or azata spells, you do not need a 17 charisma. unfortunate, attributes being a non factor for spell dcs o' non merged spell books is an insurmountable hurdle when trying to boost mythic spell dcs.

amusing aside, we noted earlier how the dragon familiar, the one available via a quest in act v, is counting as an extra character attack-- 1d4 random elemental. procs elemental barrage, but for our aeon who has all the bane boosts, plus crusader's edge and seelah's holy sword spell, the little guy is accounting for ~21d6 per round, in addition to 9d6 damage for the barrage, which curious is also benefiting from the aforementioned aeon bane boosts, crusader's edge, holy sword and whatnot. as a practical matter, having the dragon familiar equipped results in an additional +51d6 damage per round... as well as the 1d4 elemental damage. 

HA! Good Fun!

[bugarup]

Yeah, no door problem with base game, not yet patched (waiting for new patches to fix things this patch broke, also mod updates).

Chapter 3 for me was like Icewind Dale - good fun dungeoneering, minimal rudimentary storytelling. Definitely taking different parties through it again, but I will miss Lich spells very much. Speaking of Lich things, I've gotten quite fond of Zach the undead professor. "Student, why are you traipsing about demon infested wastelands when you have so many things to learn?! Don't use queen's banishment of you as an excuse for your laziness!" Reminds me a bit of that arrogant cyclops I defeated and then gave a job in Kingmaker.

Maybe two hours into Chapter 4 and already hating its gimmick with a passion of ten thousand blue suns. Is there a thing I can toybox in to help with the bullsh†t other than a hundred of wands of dimension door, mass? 

The place itself is pretty, but basically just a Sigil rip-off with less interesting denizens. Also tanks PC performance something awful. 

 

[Gromnir]

the rooftops accessible via dimension door in act iv is annoying. nenio should be able to handle your mass dimension door needs. alternatively, you will be so rich early in act iv that creating a merc who has dimension door is an option as well. last acts o' the game you literal won't have anything to buy with all your l00t if you is even a moderate completionist, so hire a merc skald, bard or whatever is not as crazy as it sounds.

also, be aware that at the extreme end o' act iv there is an easily overlooked dimension door optional battle location. after you fight the big bad o' act iv, there will be one area where you l00t a dimension door scroll, which is a less than clear clue there is a dimension door opportunity nearby. the enemy in question is worth +90k xp and he has a stat boost book on his corpse.

if at end o' act iv you can't find the dimension door location we reference, let us know and we will be more specific with the location.

HA! Good Fun!

ps we assume most people is aware, but is ez to overlook how the herald will heal you at nexus as often as you desire, and when he heals your party, all spells and abilities is refunded. is not as if you need keep resting to have nenio rememorize dimension door. return to nexus after doing a couple rooftop jaunts and then talk to the herald. rinse and repeat.

 

Edited March 8, 2022 by Gromnir

[xzar_monty]

With 1.2 installed, the game has slowed down considerably, in two places: when my armies move on the campaign map, and when my group moves on the regular map during combat.

Anyone else suffer from this?

[uuuhhii]

9 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

With 1.2 installed, the game has slowed down considerably, in two places: when my armies move on the campaign map, and when my group moves on the regular map during combat.

Anyone else suffer from this?

1.2 run decently with new save

old save stutter worse than any problem in any version before

[xzar_monty]

Sheesh. I wonder if there's anything that can be done about this.