Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, Part VII

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

10 minutes ago, Sarex said:

I wonder if someone could mod in some flavor of the month "AI" to control the enemies in the game to make things interesting and add difficulty without inflating numbers.

These days all the "AI" would do is **** up the fingers in portraits.

[Gorth]

2 hours ago, Sarex said:

I wonder if someone could mod in some flavor of the month "AI" to control the enemies in the game to make things interesting and add difficulty without inflating numbers.

I know from programming both rules based and neural network based AI's in the dark and grim past, that the latter in particular is very resource demanding. Which is why I suspect it's not widely used to create "better AI's" in games. Rules based depends entirely on the rules as defined by the designer of course. No fun having an opponent that can out think and out smart you, if it also brings your PC to a grinding halt (despite outrageous hardware requirements)

 

[HoonDing]

It was very easy to disarm Deskari, turning the fight into a joke. CMD in the 80s. Trip otoh would be a lot harder.

Edited August 15, 2023 by HoonDing

[Gromnir]

18 hours ago, Sarex said:

 Sven put it perfectly, a midcore RPG. 

fixed

sven said their audience were midcore rpg players, purposeful avoiding softcore. not hard. not soft. mid. am honest not sure what midcore is s'posed to mean. the term is possible misleading 'cause the manner in which sven uses makes it less 'bout perceived depth or difficulty as 'posed to a recognition o' broad appeal. as such one assumes larian embraces targeting an expansive goldilocks zone.  'course am thinking hardcore is kinda a weird label which is attached to games which is having little in common save for their niche appeal. 

am personal not a fan o' aiming for broad appeal. is how we got minivans in the 1990s and new michael bay movie every couple o' years. that said, is tough to argue with success. whether or not you thinks sven is right or wrong 'bout the midcore label, larian has managed to significant expand their audience with each new release. credit where credit is due.

admission: the vehicle we got the most use outta for many years were a 1997 chrysler t&c lxi minivan. with all seats removed save driver, it were an ideal dog hauling vehicle. taupe. ugly vehicle made uglier by uglier being brown/bronze. the minivan worked for us precise 'cause it were a fugly, generalist, multitasker. no amount o' dog drool, vomit or mud were gonna make the minivan worse. am s'posing if we had to move a sofa, were a soccer mom with multiple kids, or had an airport shuttle business, the minvan woulda' worked equal well. even so, is difficult to imagine anybody genuine loving their minivan.

based on what we saw in bg3 early access, am equal surprised so many people love bg3. looked like a taupe minivan from what we played. 5e weren't our personal issue with bg3.

at the same time am recognizing the enduring appeal o' d20 d&d. heck, the reason paizo's pathfinder became so popular is 'cause wotc abandoned d20 and paizo continued to make games gamers recognized as feeling like the d&d they knew and liked... for all its flaws. d20 and old skool d&d love is a big enough niche that it continues to sell pnp and crpg games.

regardless, midcore, not soft.

HA! Good Fun!

 

[InsaneCommander]

5 hours ago, PK htiw klaw eriF said:

These days all the "AI" would do is **** up the fingers in portraits.

Not really. Imagine this in Alushinyrra:

Not sure about combat, but dialogue will be something else. 

Edited August 15, 2023 by InsaneCommander

[Gorth]

21 hours ago, Sarex said:

Sven put it perfectly, a softcore RPG.

So... R rated instead of XXX rated?

[Sarex]

@Gromnir You are right, I meant midcore. Idk why I wrote softcore.

2 hours ago, Gorth said:

So... R rated instead of XXX rated?

With all the "romance" scenes you could forgive me for the Freudian slip.

 

[uuuhhii]

a lot of jrpg are pretty softcore

usually didn't have english translation though

[HoonDing]

I finished the game, the final battle was over before I even finished looking over Areelu's stats sheet. She teleported in the midst of my party, took a beating and then died from attacks of opportunity when she tried casting a spell.

Edited August 15, 2023 by HoonDing

[bugarup]

That bug of enemies nocliping to you through the walls is much less amusing when Playful Darkness does that. Looking at his sheet got me thinking again that it's either a backer character or one of the devs let their anime loving nine year old to design a character as a birthday present.

[HoonDing]

I got lucky against that thing with a huge crit while it was drowning in spiders.

[Sarex]

So the trip on monk is broken... Idk if all enemies are this vulnerable to it, but it's like a cheat so far.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

2 minutes ago, Sarex said:

So the trip on monk is broken... Idk if all enemies are this vulnerable to it, but it's like a cheat so far.

Trip is the reason the canine animal companions are rated so highly.....aside from the fact that dogs are the best pets to have irl. Too bad WotR doesn't have an option to pet the dogs.

[bugarup]

While Aeon plays real weak compared to Lich shenanigans, tagging Playful Dorkness with edict of retaliation and watching stupid mutt off itself was very satisfying. Too bad it didn't work on Mustafa-Mutagen with his 300 bombs per round bullsh†terry, but Yozz in Greybore's quest managed to shank himself to death in one round and that was glorious. 

I still like Aeon run a lot even if I have to reload quite a bit - I'm on a custom difficulty of "Greybor and Woljif sans mounts are in party", so it's melting time when mobs focus them instead of my big ass dragon, but having less leeway than Lich has its advantages, i.e. I had to bother with testing what enhancements stack (answer: none of them. Great Magic Fang covers everything), things like that. Leaning into summoning was a bad idea - not only summons were still only useful as spider fodder, for some inexplicable reason my druid's summons were always inactive for the first round even if I pre-summoned them before fight , though Daeran's skellies or Azatas from the beer mug behaved normally. Respecced into simple thick-skinned dragon form with high initiative and selective spells, and it's much more fun now. Edict of retaliation and selective Zero States is never not fun, and there's also trololo spell of making enemies to only roll 11 which, if the party is properly buffed, basically equals to rolling ones. 

[Gromnir]

there is numerous online guides which offer builds which exploit aeon summoning, but am never having gone that direction for very long. we played a couple different aeons and am personal not enamored o' the summoning route even if am able to see the potential.

late game, an aeon acquires spells and abilities which makes most any aeon party functional invulnerable for boss battles, but there is a whole lotta game which ain't late game, and by late game most o' the other mythics (and legend) is sooper powerful too.

early game, which particular on higher difficulties is where the game is most challenging, is a tough(er) slog for aeon 'cause other than the nice ab, spell dc boosts or the attack o' opportunity buff, the aeon gets an ok dispel ability and not much else; compared to other mythics, the aeon lags more than a little early game.

however, with a high initiative character who gets many attacks per round, as soon as the aeon gets the greater dispel power, game challenge difficulty evaporates. most wotr foes is so tough 'cause owlcat gives 'em every conceivable buff, and then bends/break the pnp rules to give 'em a few more buffs. an aeon makes all those buffs evaporate. is possible to stack initiative through the ceiling in wotr, so your ranged or melee aeon should almost always attack first, and once you do...

on the plus side, there is few drawbacks to building a high initiative melee or ranged character for wotr. particular on higher difficulty settings, initiative becomes an all but essential concern. you aren't losing anything by conscious stacking initiative.

HA! Good Fun!

[bugarup]

Had a Mephisto fight with Aeon. Filed a bug report laden with expletives and unclean gift wishes upon Owlcat. Did win with half a party even alive after 7 or so attempts, still think story-mandatory fights should not be overtuned like that. Kinda wanted to go Devil from Azata some day, but now when I hate Mephistopheles so, so much I possibly won't.

Edited September 15, 2023 by bugarup
So angry I can't even grammar

[InsaneCommander]

23 hours ago, bugarup said:

Had a Mephisto fight with Aeon. Filed a bug report laden with expletives and unclean gift wishes upon Owlcat. Did win with half a party even alive after 7 or so attempts, still think story-mandatory fights should not be overtuned like that.

That guy could solo a battle against all the demon lords together. Plus Iomedae and half the gods. If he is supposed to be that powerful, then at least make the other bosses stronger and set a progressive spike in difficulty.

On 9/15/2023 at 4:23 PM, bugarup said:

Kinda wanted to go Devil from Azata some day, but now when I hate Mephistopheles so, so much I possibly won't.

You are mistaken, this option doesn't exist. Nobody would kill Aivu, right?

[bugarup]

On 9/16/2023 at 10:27 PM, InsaneCommander said:

That guy could solo a battle against all the demon lords together. Plus Iomedae and half the gods. If he is supposed to be that powerful, then at least make the other bosses stronger and set a progressive spike in difficulty.

You are mistaken, this option doesn't exist. Nobody would kill Aivu, right?

He was worth almost a million XP, to be fair. Though maybe it's just the endgame bloat just like it is with everything else at that point.

As for Aivu, of course, totally nobody.  Nor did I set Azata run to branch into Swarm either. 

(TBH she's not as annoying as artificial intelligences of reddit make her be, because it appears she's literally a child, and getting mad at a kid for yakking about sweets would be kinda...well. Of course that raises a question what Azata is thinking, dragging a child into the battlefield, but judging by that mythic path's development thinking isn't Azata's forte).  

[xzar_monty]

50 minutes ago, bugarup said:

He was worth almost a million XP, to be fair. Though maybe it's just the endgame bloat just like it is with everything else at that point.

But did you get the million before or after you reached level cap? Probably before, by the way you phrased it. Would be a bummer otherwise -- and you will end up with millions and millions of points above the cap anyway.

Edited September 18, 2023 by xzar_monty

[Gromnir]

when am having done azata, mephistopheles is an encounter extreme early in act v. for our couple aeon runs, the archdevil were only slight more temporal remote than azata.

from our personal experience, pre dlc there were no chance o' reaching the level cap with the archdevil fight, but it did mean that azata and aeon were the mythics which did cap out fastest o' our various wotr finished games. the xp boost from the single fight was substantial. again, for us the battle were almost shocking early act v.

however, the numerous dlc have added a fair amount o' xp bloat to the game. by exhausting all the possible dlc content before tackling the azata or aeon mephisto battle might it be possible to reach the level cap? dunno. maybe.

HA! Good Fun!

[InsaneCommander]

 

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

15 minutes ago, InsaneCommander said:

 

Huh, I almost thought that Owlcat had forgotten about their WotR DLCs. Guess maybe I'll finally play as a Lich after I get done with BG3 and Fire Emblem Engage.

[Gorth]

They are announcing... Nothing?

[HoonDing]

Is this a dig at Putin

[bugarup]

I morphed to Swarm from Azata and it appears that fully support-oriented class is really, really bad at soloing the game. 

Thing is, I don't think I ever did swarm preparation on any other character because one encounter with vescavors is one encounter with vescavors too many, so either I look for variables to change in Toybox for something OP like angel or somehow soldier on with a court poet. 

Sigh.

At least the idea of a swarm bard is amusing. Wonder how they sound? Something like this, probably: