Thoughts on all characters

[da_mayor]

@269Hawkmoon - And they haven't even ported over the Kama (and other acrobatics-based weapons) yet!

[Blave]

I've tried Sajan multiple times. I've never gone beyond perils because all parties I tried him in never completed perils before I lost my patience. My first Party was Valeros, Kyra, Lem, Harsk, Seoni and Merisiel. My first try with Sajan was the "Let's try the other characters" party. Having Lini and Sajan might have been a bit too many late bloomers for the same Party. I also have yet to be really successful with Seelah, but I can easily see how her powers make up for her weak-ish Skills.

 

Thanks for the link to the blog, by the way. I read the paizo Blog often for News on the RPG but I've skipped the card game News so far because i've never had a chance to play it before. I'll take a closer look at them, starting with Sajan.

 

Edit: Hawkmoon, since I'm still pretty new to the game, could you give me some guidelines on how to use Sajan effectively early on? Stuff like cards to use or search for and maybe a good way to spend his feats would be really interesting, Just in case im doing something horribly wrong.

Edited May 10, 2016 by Blave

[ttoida]

Hey there!  OP here.  I posted this hoping to spur some dialog, which I'm happy to see has happened!  I certainly didn't expect it to get pinned, but that's great!

 

Anyway, I had originally intended on posting commentary on all 11 characters, but I ended up taking a lot of time and space on the first six that I decided to post the other five later.  And then I didn't do that.  Fortunately, Blave has posted some excellent thoughts on the characters that I ommitted.

 

Having played the game a bit more, I think the original set I posted is the best part of six (I might make another post on party composition).  Here are a few thoughts on the other five, and why I don't like them as much.

 

Sajan:

Seems a lot of people really like this character, but I just never have success with him.  Dex and Acrobatics are nice, but Merisiel is already better at these, and she also has Disable, which is critically important.  His ability to recharge blessings is nice, but that only applies to combat, and not extra exploration.  Unfortunately this means his blessings are far more valuable in combat, and using them in exploration seems a pretty big waste.  He really needs them to even be average in combat, and with the small hand size I find that he clears locations significantly slower than everyone else.  I'm also not a fan of either of his advancement paths.

 

Lini:

I really, really want to like this character.  I think maybe I need to play her more, because in theory she seems excellent, but in practice she's struggled when I've tried her.  Adding an extra d4 (and more, with upgrades) to every single check for free is pretty awesome.  The problem I have with her is that I frequently find myself stuck without a way to fight bad guys.  I don't need everyone to excel at combat, but everyone needs to be able to kill 8 or 9 value monsters pretty regularly.  With no weapons, she needs to rely on offensive spells, which can only be used once before recharging.  She can discard to activate beast form, but even then she's not great.  FYI, I haven't seen it mentioned, but the Amulet of Fists is also good for her.

 

Lem:

Another character that I really want to like.  High Charisma and excellent Diplomacy are fantastic.  I really think he should have Disable as one of his skills.  As other people have mentioned, I always choose Weapon as his favored card, and once you get the Deathbane crossbow he's pretty good at fighting bad guys.  Versatile caster, but not as good as the dedicated casters, which is ok.  He can struggle to recharge stuff early on, but with a few levelups he's fine.  He can also swap spells out of his discard, which is incredibly useful.  The biggest problem I have with him is that you have to split your party up to cover as many locations as possible, which means his assisting ability often goes to waste.

 

Valeros/Amiri:

Without getting into too much detail (this is well-covered by Blave), ultimately my problem with these two is that they don't bring anything else to the table.  Their skills (Diplomacy and Survival) just aren't good enough to be reliable.  Seelah is a much better choice for a weapon/armor user.  She's just as good at combat, and adds a lot more versatility.

[Brainwave]

Lini:

The best! That is all.

 

Ok so yeah I really like Lini, but I'll be honest, she's weak early on. One of the cool things about Pathfinder is you can play different characters different ways. You can play her as a support character with divine casting as her focus, start with inflicts and get some holy lights asap and basically ignore her Beast form for combat except in dire emergencies. Or you can use beast form and get her either strength or dex based weapons.

 

I prefer to play her as a strength based weapons character with divine support spells, but this takes a bit to get going. Initially, if you can pair her with Valeros or Harsk or someone, anyone, who can hand her a weapon, that makes a huge difference. But she can really shine if you're willing to devote feats into weapon proficiency and adding a weapon card to her deck (she can only hold one I believe).

 

I actually put points into her terrible d4 strength which I'm sure is a very iffy idea to most but I like permanent +'s to combat checks and if I give her support spells, she doesn't really need a wisdom boost, since she's mostly just using it for recharge rolls anyway (plus you can only put 2 pts into her strength, so she'll get enough skill feats to increase her wisdom anyway) and her animal ally bonus adds to recharge rolls too!

 

Strength vs dexterity is another discussion I've had about her, since her beast form can increase either stat. But while her base dex is a d6 vs her (did I mention terrible?) base d4 strength, the advantage to going strength is that since she can only carry the one weapon in her deck, she will decently often be fighting bare handed early on in scenarios before she can find her weapon and so that strength bonus will still apply. And to be honest, against any significant enemy she's going to be boosting her stat to a d10 anyway, the base stat doesn't matter as much.

 

But long story short, once she has a weapon (even if you don't go my route and it's just a borrowed mace from good ole Valeros), boosts her strength and can put a feats into her animal ally power, she can get some decent combat rolls. She's never going to be Valeros or Seoni but she can kill stuff. My preferred weapon type for her is the longspear type weapons that don't have a discard option for an extra die but have the discard to reroll option in case of a failed roll. This allows you to play a little tight with dice on checks and use that as a backup plan.

 

Now all of that said, she's a monster when it comes to making misc annoying rolls throughout the adventure. Int is the only stat that isn't either d8 or a d10 or can't be boosted to that by discarding a card (beast form isn't just for combat checks). So take like a random int 7 closing check. With one power feat she can roll d6+d4+1 at no cost. Not a great chance at success but not too shabby when you consider that's basically her worst stat. To me that's a "one blessing" roll if I've got the blessings to spare, vs someone else with a base d6 or d4 who needs a 7, if that's an important roll I really want to add 2 dice. With Merisiel for example I actively try to avoid sending her places where int might be required but with Lini you can pretty much send her anywhere, or at least anywhere regardless of closing roll (barring really extreme examples).

 

Anyway I probably should have started a secondary "Lini fan club" thread but to me she's fun to play, maybe not the strongest, but once you get her going she's a pretty solid and versatile character.

[Rhygar]

Some very thoughtful insightful posts in here !. Especially hawkmoon's post on ezren as an acquisition mode build. As the adventure pack 3 isn't even here I haven't been thinking about just what swipe can do but now that it's been mentioned I can see what a significant game changer it could be when paired with the Eldritch exuberance and supplementary boon acquisition allies. Although in a small team, going all out on codex and hence the speed factor might be a tad risky.

 

As it is I'm having fun and result with a team of 2 consisting of ezren and seelah. The team is conceived on primarily survivalability and speed . Seelah as a powerhouse need no introduction I suppose. Ezren was a revelation in terms of speed clearance of location and in certain situation he had more than given seelah a run for her money. I can't wait to see what it would be like with swipe in his deck. Swipe now that I looked at it closely it's a spell that combine the power of scorching Ray and utility of a monkey ally and then some. Unless I misinterpret it that is.

 

 

A short special mention to lil Lini. In terms of survivalability she has a similar mechanic on a par with seelah - that almost costless generation of an extra die for all kinds of checks. However , at least before her role progression to warden, she is hand tied somewhat with hand size of 5 which severely limit her when having to deal with multiple encounters in a turn or bring bereft of a spell card. In a small team there's only so much blessing you can churn out But in the long run though, she should comfortably shine in an adaptable role with her hand size increased.

 

Having said all that, I think the game is easy on newcomers to the genre such as myself, and if fun is what you want to have then you could pick any selection of character you fancy and have a go at completing the contents the game has to offer. Seriously, I'd tried most of all currently available characters and each offered quite a different way to enjoy the game. The bigger the team the easier cuz seriously I doubt there is any check that a thick dollop of blessing can't get you through :D

[Wode79]

Seelah is the best character. That's just science.

Accurate. When we added Seelah at the start of deck 4 in the tabletop, she quickly made it seem like the party kept my Valeros around because they felt bad for me. I'm finding her good in the game early on, but she was recharging blessings of Iomaedae, usually recharging whatever she flipped for her extra d6. Seelah has armor as her favorite card because they had to do something to try to balance her out. Yeah, she might not always start with a weapon, but so what? She'd just start exploring, and if she had to punch out a henchman, she'd punch out a henchman. I suppose I had better dexterity checks than her, but then she'd toss in that d6.

[Hastur]

There isn't any one character one must play to succeed, but this was a thread about all the characters, which it needed to be pointed out which gameplay mechanics are strong, which crusade is. Play a lem with swords or Merisiel with spells... you'll still be able to beat the game. Have fun with whatever build you want!

Yeah, I kind of had that thought in the back of my head when I wrote that post.  after all, there's a lot of fun in figuring out the various builds, and for folks who really get into game theory the fact that you can break out of any one style and still kick ass is kind of off-putting.  I have to say, since I've been playing this app a LOT more than I've been reading or posting here, that some scenarios lend themselves better to some style more than others.  For example, I think, and this is surprising considering how much I enjoy playing casters, Val is my second favorite character, that he's my second favorite character, mostly for versatility.  why?  He's got a lot of facets.

 

Anyhow, my point wasn't to castigate the fine Obsidian erudite advancers of what is the finality of statistical assessment.  After all, I'm fairly edumacated myself and recognize the cold hard reality of how the numbers crunch.  It's that there's a lot of room on either side in the game as it's designed, which is in every way a compliment from the perspective of someone who enjoys a rather limited mental acumen, I assure you.

 

Anyhow, I tend not to frequent the forums a lot since I'd rather play the game instead, but I do enjoy hanging out here every once in a while to argue my particular persepective.  I've been somewhat busy for the past couple of months, but I've played every scenario regular, medium, and hard on my four character team and both the beginner through second pack on my six player team, which I hated.  Then I switched to my *other* six player team and played through beginner to second pack on my next team and then gone through medium and then to hard through the first x-pack deck.  Suffice it to say that I've played a lot of the gam and I'm really looking forward to the third pack.   I can hardly wait.  Also, I have something like 13 to 14k worth of points and I'm wondering if I should use them now or wait until the next pack comes out.  I'll probably check for responses for this one, and fairly soon, which is not typical. 

[zarrick13]

As long as we're sharing experiences and character thoughts, I offer the following.

 

I've played through the campaign with three parties of four characters.  One set for Normal, one set for Heroic, one set to wreck Legendary. 

 

For Normal I used Ezren, Merisiel, Kyra, and Valeros.

Heroic used Seoni, Sajan, Lini, and Seelah.

Legendary used another Lini, Lem, Amiri, and Harsk.

 

Character Thoughts:

 

Ezren - At first I really didn't like him.  Yes he had a lot of spell slots, but unless I parked him at an Academy or somewhere with spells he wasn't doing me a lot of good exploring.  It wasn't until deck 2 that he started coming into his own, getting some of those fine Treasure items and spells and bumping his Recharge skill up to help him keep his stock.  Haste was a big help.  By deck 3 he was probably the strongest character in the group, able to breeze through decks with half-blast half-utility and a couple flasks.  Nothing short of a random Satyr or Siren could really derail him and villains pretty much just melted.  Give him time and he becomes a powerhouse.  Augur and Scrying also helped make up for his general lack of exploring, with the latter allowing him to help other locations from wherever he's parked himself.

 

Merisel - Definitely a good scout.  She is THE character to have for Jail locations, where she can literally grab everything through disable checks, and anywhere else she's great because most barriers end up more like tiny speed bumps.  Sneak Attack helps greatly, giving her an Amulet of <blank> Fists to back up her small amount of weapon slots took advantage of those Sneaky stabs and her large item pool at the same time.  If she had a weapon, she could recharge the amulet for the backstab.  Her evasion was pivotal many times in tracking henchmen/villain decks without triggering them for proper ambushing.

 

Kyra - Probably the weakest member on the Normal team, though that was because I focused her on healing.  Very good heals to keep the other party decks happy, especially Ezren through the first couple decks since wizards seem to have a problem bleeding cards until they get the brainpower to recharge them properly.  Didn't like having to sacrifice her main turn to heal, but given the strength of the heal and that it allows her to take a divine item and turn it into a heal, I understand the trade-off.  I found it best to stick her with other party members, typically Valeros or Ezren, to keep their decks up and handle the occasional divine check.  Next time I play her I want to look into a more battle-focused version to compare to the paladin, but playing the healer wasn't a bad role.  I will say that because of her heal I felt fine with turning her limited spell set into more support-type cards, with a Holy Light or two to really fry the occasional undead powerhouse. 

 

Valeros - This guy is a beast, plain and simple.  From the start he's chucking weapons left and right, recharging them because DICE, and when Kyra was hanging out with him that Cooperation skill ensured she was able to hold her own in combat on her turn too.  My issue with him was with his smaller hand size and sometimes having too many weapons and not enough targets.  Discarding weapons to draw blessings was painful.  Overall though, a very solid character generally able to hold his own, but really shines when paired up with someone.  Sidenote:  I use a Valeros/Lem combo in Quest Mode.  Valeros Cooperation and Lem's bard songs, they buff each other like crazy.  It's a beautiful thing.

 

Seoni - Initially I liked her more than Ezren because of her auto-recharge.  With some experience playing Ezren I now know I like her for other reasons.  Like her auto-item-recharge.  Those flasks can be a real pain to recharge!  Seoni's limited spell set didn't feel like a disadvantage until I realized I was burning through her deck faster than a chain smoker at a family reunion.  I found myself loading her with attack spells to take advantage of her recharge so I didn't have to rely on her card-immolating ability to kill things, with a Haste spell thrown in because Haste is love.  Once she got some flasks though, she became a lot more able to keep a steady flow of cards back into her pile, with the occasional love tap from Lini to bump her blessings back into her deck.

 

Sajan - This monk.  He is deceptive in his power.  It is true, he very much has a problem doing things starting out.  Yes he doesn't have a lot of super-weak rolls, but he doesn't have a lot of super-strong ones either.  His blessing-recharge for attacks is a mixed bag, too.  Exploring was painful because every blessing burned was one less to use to punch things, and half the time he only had a couple available to do that with anyway in his hand on any given turn.  Yet he has some of the greatest potential for one-man-army damage, or for being able to provide some sweet party support.  A couple card feats in and he's able to rock out up to 6 blessings in a turn, 7 after role, and any of them that come up Erastil count for double-dice.  He was regularly loading up 4-5 dice on a combat without discards, more if needed, and a couple Staff of Minor Healing ensured that what he did discard (mostly allies) made it back into his deck without too much outside help.  I imagine when Deck 4 or 5 rolls around and has some better liquid items and fist amulets to abuse his Drunken Master role will be one of the most formidable things in the game. 

 

Lini - I think Lini is one of the best characters at the moment.  She gets the most Divine spell slots and her pet lets her get a minimum 1d4 roll on everything she does, sliding up to 1d4+2 before roles factor in.  She was my prime location closer, boon grabber, and occasional blaster with Holy Lights.  Many, many locations require Divine checks in Deck 3, so between that and throwing healing around, she was everywhere doing everything.  The only downside came when she bumped into a big monster or villain when all she had left was her pet and maybe a heal spell in her hand.  Shapeshift helps her combat, but it really only makes her into a worse version of Sajan if you don't build to use it.  I intend to build a very combat-heavy Lini sometime to see how fun it is to have both Pet and Shapeshift ripping into monsters.

 

Seelah - Among the main melee types, I found Seelah to be the most technical.  Where Valeros throws his weapons all over the place and Amiri hulks out, Seelah burns into her deck for dice boosts just to match the other two's normal strength scores.  On the other hand Inspired Grace gives that 1d6 bonus to anything she does, so it comes in handy a lot more often than Val's weapon recharge or Amiri's rage.  The only downside to Inspired Grace was when it ate a spell (pre-power upgrade) or one of her few weapons/armors you may have needed at an important moment.  Having no items at all also hurt given how many pretty nice items there are to use.  Very self-sufficient, but not the beefiest of fighters at a mere d8 for strength, you were pretty much guaranteed to lean on her Inspired Grace to kill anything important.  Her Crusade skill was very nice when it came to digging through decks to find the monsters though! 

 

Lem - Talk about a fun character!  This mini-me is great for setting him to follow anyone around, giving them buffs and slinging some spells around like nobody's business.  I didn't realize how powerful he would become simply due to his versatility.  I loaded mine up with spells from both divine and arcane schools, just one of each, because the start of any given turn anything he failed to recharge could be dug back up to use again.  The only character where flubbing a heal-spell recharge makes you smile.  For that matter, the only character where not recharging a spell is a totally valid tactic!  Then his buddy-buff skill pretty much acts like Lini's pet, just for anybody who's in the same room with him.  Cap all of that off with a great charisma score to bring all the allies under his flag and you've got a very interesting character to play with. 

 

Amiri - She is definitely a barbarian.  I often teamed her up with Lem, so she could wreck the monsters and he could grab the boons, or help her grab them.  That natural d12 strength made many fights possible just with her bare hands, but with a nice 2-handed weapon involved there were few monsters or villains that could stand in her way.  Rarely used the Rage power due to its nasty case of deck bury, but it sure made villain showdowns easier to manage.  She particularly shone in Legendary mode because of Move Fast.  When locations are linked, you could set her (and Lem) somewhere out of the way, and every time she cleared a deck she could just hop somewhere else at the end of her turn.  Once I got Move Another too, she happily dragged Lem along for the ride like some weird midget version of Thelma and Louise.  Very handy for getting around the movement limits! 

 

Harsk - This guy was the other key to my Legendary runs simply because I could start him anywhere and he could still provide turret-like support to the rest of the party through his sniper skills.  Between him and Lem, most rolls had at least one bonus die + some helping out with very little card loss needed.  A couple Staff of Minor Healing to make sure he doesn't need a lot of outside curing and you've got one fun ranger.  His self-scout helped to make sure he would rarely get in over his head, and his deck bursting with items, ranged weapons, and blessings allowed him to provide up to three cards worth of support to any important combat roll! 

 

Of course your mileage will very with any of these characters.  I will say that after pushing all of them through Hook Mountain that I have a strong appreciation for all of them now, even the ones I wasn't so fond of at first, and that all it takes is a couple power/skill/card feats to make anyone feel worth having in a party.  Some fare better in certain scenarios than others.  I had the roughest time with Here Comes the Flood with my Normal party simply because they had crap luck and not the best Charisma.  My Heroic and Legendary parties didn't stumble nearly as much.  On the other hand Legendary Into the Mountains was rough simply because two Wildcard powers and a bug made it nearly impossible not to take constant damage, and that will wreck almost any party no matter how good it is. 

 

I will also say don't underestimate the power of items!  When Deck 3 came around I found myself wishing I'd given a couple Card powers to item slots simply because of how many helpful tools popped up.  Orbs and Flasks came in most useful for helping chain-monster battles, particularly when they ended in a henchman/villain fight, and a lot of the Loot rewards end up taking Item slots, too.  Not to mention this upcoming update will add a whole slew of curious-sounding items to Decks B and 1...