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Also Zen Archer monk has ridiculous ranged damage output.
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Jul 15, 2022 03:50
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Not that Lann is bad as an archer, but his subclass doesn't actually give him much in the way of damage. Early on the flurry shot is big, for sure, and getting free weapon specialization is definitely nice. But Wenduag as a fighter, through weapon training and greater weapon specialization, can get up to an additional +8 damage per arrow that Lann can't, which adds up. And even if he goes deep into the class for the greater flurry of blows, Wenduag can easily pick up more attacks by using throwing axes, capping out at 9 vs his 8 with rapid shot and flurry. Lann brings more utility from monk powers and has the ability to branch into divince casters very easily, whereas Wenduag offers a ton of extra damage over him, either on her intended route or any of the other popular classes for her. I think Owlcat actually did a really good job at making it mechanically a very even choice between the pair!
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Jul 15, 2022 08:29
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In the original module on which this part of the game is based, Lann and Wendaug are both named mongrel rangers with similar stats. Lann is introduced as one of a pair aiding an injured comrade on the outskirts of the village (the comrade is the merchant, I think). Wendaug's part is different, I'll get into it more later. Lann has the potential to guide the party, though any expansions beyond that are left up to the GameMaster.
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Jul 15, 2022 12:00
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DoubleNegative posted:
Oh Jesus, please don't tell me Wendy is going all tsundere on Lisbeth.
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Jul 15, 2022 13:26
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inscrutable horse posted:Oh Jesus, please don't tell me Wendy is going all tsundere on Lisbeth. That is exactly what she's doing.
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Jul 15, 2022 14:42
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 Loading screens give gameplay hints and tips. Sometimes they're really badly timed. This particular hint won't even come into play until act 3. We're not even into act 1 yet. Anyway, hello everyone and welcome back. Today we're going into the Shield Maze.   Let's set up the formation first. Seelah can't ride Cookie yet, so they'll take the lead while the rest of the party fans out behind them. Wendy is in the back because she's ranged support.  If we'd picked Lann, all the various Neather tribes would be assembled here, and they'd be waiting for the right time to move in. Lann would suggest we scout ahead to mark the way for them. But because we picked Wendy, it's just us by ourselves.  The door is wide open for Lann, but with Wendy we have to "squeeze through." I guess it's the difference between an outright assault and sneaking in. Enough about could-have-beens, however. I'm not as well versed in what they look like past this point, but I've done the Shield Maze some half dozen times or more.  The inside is pretty well furnished.  A well-carved bas-relief of Baphomet. Hmm...  I mentioned it before, but this isn't a maze. It's a temple. The way through isn't difficult, it's basically straightforward - there's only two major divergences from the otherwise linear path through the temple. And while it's true that those divergences are actually fairly lengthy, it's not exactly a complicated layout regardless. And we're forced down both divergences during exploration anyway.  The primary enemies in the maze are Baphomet cultists and their various buddies. I'm not gonna call out most encounters unless they're particularly noteworthy. So this should be a pretty brisk jog through the "maze." Also didn't Wendy say that she had been in the maze multiple times? These cultists look pretty well established here. We'll see a little later on that they have a fully furnished kitchen, dining room, and barracks. So it's not like they're recent arrivals. Curious...  Let's take a closer look at that thing in the floor.  This little set piece is a really good tutorial without any words. Allow me to explain.  The orange-red thing on the floor is a trap, of course. By turning the camera into the wall, we can see exactly where the trap originates from (the little indentation in the wall), we can see its area of effect (the trapezoid), and we can see the disarming trigger (the switch on the wall.) I'm sure the game has a tutorial pop-up explaining it here, but I've turned those off and also forced off all tutorials in Toybox. But even without the pop ups, once you realize you're looking at a trap, you can basically intuit everything important about it from this shot. It's quite clever in that regard! Disarming traps uses the trickery skill. Camellia technically has a higher score than Lisbeth (13 vs 12) but both are more than enough to cover the entirety of the Shield Maze.  Moving on, we can see just why I love wolf/dog bully companions so much. Those attacks of opportunity are Seelah, Camellia, and Lisbeth all stabbing the poo poo out of this poor guy when he stands back up. Rare is the combat where you won't see an explosion of "Attack of Opportunity" appear out of the melee pile at some point! It's free damage and it happens a lot.  More evidence these cultists are well-established down here. Wendy got some 'splainin' to do.  Ahhh. This is something Toybox does that I really like. There's a million books you can read in the game, and most of them are just flavor text. But some special books will give you a small stat boost when you read them. Toybox will (or should) automatically flag those with a yellow background. It does the same thing for scrolls that your non-spontaneous casters haven't yet learned.  Free Weapon Training (Glaive)! Not entirely useful for Lisbeth, but I'm not gonna cry about a free feat.  This is either a dining room or a meeting room. And on the far side...  We find some Corrupted Mongrels. Very, very curious...  After we kill them, we talk to Wendy about it.  Wenduag looks at the mongrel's corpse, her lip curling, and then turns away. "Well? Are we going or what?" "You never told me this maze was crawling with cultists." "I didn't because there weren't any. Looks like they got here the same way you did — they fell from the surface." [Perception check passed] "The Maze doesn't look like the mysterious place you've made it out to be. Looks more like a cultists' den to me, and a well-established one at that." "The Maze has always been full of traps and subterranean monsters. And now it's got cultists as well. What does it matter to you?" Wenduag studies you with narrowed eyes. "I promised to lead you to the surface and that's what I'm doing. You do not belong here. Let's go." She turns away."Gained 4 experience Wendy is very obviously lying to us here. And Lisbeth saw right through it.  It's a very lovely place.  Anyway, this room has three exits. One of the major divergences I mentioned happens here. We need to go that way first anyway, so let's set out.  But first, another side room. This one is special because it has something of a mini-boss inside. Cultist Champions have a lot of AC, which makes them particular bastards to hit at level 2 like we are.  I put it on turn based to demonstrate, actually. Cookie rolled high on his initiative, so he went first. His first attack knocked the champion right over. Remember what I said about being prone?  All the AC in the world don't mean poo poo when you're lying on the ground getting the poo poo kicked out of you.  Seelah, who is currently under the effects of Enlarge Person and the Light spell, is still in melee range thanks to her increased reach.  It never gets old. Also note that while the enemy does have maluses to AC while prone, you aren't guaranteed hits against them. Sometimes you just roll low.  While we're in this room, I mouse over a trap disarm switch on the wall. It controls the trap in the next hallway, so we'll just turn that off before we even see it.  Moving on, we descend some stairs into a flooded basement.  And a little further past that, we can see why. One of the walls has collapsed and water is flooding in through it.  Also there's this mysterious box. I had originally written up that I'd never been able to force my characters to spot it. But in the spirit of S C I E N C E, I have loaded up a prior save file and used Toybox to set everyone's perception to 250 base. Even with 5 characters with enough perception to spot anything else in the game from clear across the map, the hidden spot still won't trigger. So it's probably legitimately just a bugged interaction. There's a similar spot much later in the game. I'll point it out when we reach it.  We're tearing right through the hapless cultists without a lot of trouble. Outside of the rare mini-boss monsters, most encounters have trouble even hitting us before we merc them.   This encounter drops a magical ring. I think it's a +1 AC ring. But because the party is collectively not very good at arcane lore, nobody can identify it. We'll have to wait until we enter act 1 and get the next companion in a couple updates.  Deskari really messed up Kenabres, both physically and politically. The city, after this mini cataclysm, is in for some dark days ahead.  Anyway, the second basement is ahead. You can actually see the water cascading down both the stairs and the walls. So within a few days, this "maze" is gonna be unusable.   This person, the Hand of Hosilla, is our target.  The note he's holding is what we're after!  What a nice lady.   There are two fights remaining in the basement - this one and the water elemental mentioned in Hosilla's orders. This fight is pretty dangerous because it's a big group against our own.  Low level Pathfinder combat sucks. It's a million missed rolls and the ones that do hit are deadly as hell. Camellia went down during the fight and Cookie very nearly joined her. It was all thanks to the Brute enemy who hit like a truck and dodged like Ali. Once he went down, the rest folded like a house of cards. Our reward for finishing the fight?  "This door's got a strong lock on it. You'll break every lockpick you have and it still won't budge. Believe me, I've tried."  This is about the only decent reward in the lot. It's a pretty alright early-game scalemail, perfect for Seelah. But we can't identify it yet. So onto the pile it goes for now.  Before we take on the Water Elemental, I'm gonna have the party make camp. The buff spells ran out a while back and we've been feeling their loss ever since. We're gonna need to be at our best for the water elemental, who is an optional super hard boss encounter.  Hitting the 'R' key will bring out a ghost icon of the party's camp. Just stick it somewhere where it's green and...  As you might imagine, you can't rest in the ankle-deep water. That doesn't make for very good sleeping.  This brings up the camping menu. Seelah will do her best to put down protective rituals, Lisbeth will (somehow) camouflage the camp, while Wendy will take second watch. But wait... we're missing someone.  Against what I'm sure are endless protests, Camellia is not gonna get a free pass because she's "nobility" and "doesn't have to work." Her rear end is taking the first night watch shift. Everyone in the party, pets excluded, can only do one job. So while Lisbeth is better suited to doing night watch than Camellia, Liz is also the better person to do camouflage. Night Watch tends to be where those who can't do anything else wind up.  Time Passed: 1H 0M  Seelah is kinda dumb. Shaman wield nature magics like druids.  "What does it matter where the power comes from? What matters is it's on our side."Time Passed: 8H 0M  Corruption is a mechanic that won't pop up too much yet. It plays a bigger role later in the game as a way to mitigate you spending weeks out in the field. The short version is that Lisbeth (in particular) has a bar that fills when she camps out. This bar is how much the corruption of the Abyss is affecting her. The bar can be emptied if she rests in a sanctified location, or if she makes use of rare holy items to purge it. If the bar fills up all the way, we get a game over because, presumably, the corruption takes her over and kills her/transforms her into a demon.  Now that we're rested up, let's hit the buff button and get into a fight. I'll explain this later on when we have more than 3 spells to show off. But this is the Bubble Buffs mod. It automates casting buffs for you by casting them all simultaneously. It still uses daily spell slots to do it, so this is just streamlining what would otherwise be a tedious process.   Dmitry V. Silantyev - Champions of the Abyss (This is one of my personal favorite tracks in the game!) I put this in turn based mode too, but it's actually a pretty simple fight. You see, most enemies can be knocked prone. So all we need to do is get Cookie to land a single hit. Camellia is trying to land Evil Eye (-AC) on the elemental, while Seelah is using this...  On reflection, this water elemental is not evil. So I don't know why I expected Smite Evil to work against it. But it's supposed to make enemies easier to hit. Most enemies in the game are evil, so this is a good tactic in most other situations.  This is why the water elemental is so dangerous. It missed three of its targets and crit two others. So Camellia and Cookie both immediately dropped to critical HP from a single attack.  Cookie doesn't successfully land a trip attack until turn 3, when most of the elemental's HP has been depleted. It dies before its next turn comes up.  During the fight, Lisbeth used her "Summon Nature's Ally" ability, which summoned a shade named "Woljif". Okay then?  More evidence this was a well-entrenched cultist base. Wendy's gonna have a lot of 'splainin' to do.  This ring is our prize for taking on the water elemental and living. It adds minor resistance to frost. I have never used it. This entire encounter is the definition of "absolutely not worth it."  Believe it or not, we're more than halfway through the "maze" now. All that remains is one smaller side branch and that's it. I originally wanted to cut the update here, because we've covered a lot of ground. Then I looked at the length. This update, right now, is half the size of the previous one despite covering 10x as much gameplay. So let's keep going.  This is the bunk room I mentioned earlier. Bear in mind that we're only two rooms away from the start of the dungeon. Most of what we've covered so far has been a gigantic technically-not-optional branch.  Take a look! We fought the elemental in the room on the far right. We entered in the middle bottom, above the winding cave passage.  Another cultist champion shows up in this small storeroom. He goes down like a chump thanks to Cookie.   A usable torch on the wall opens up a secret passage full of  This is the second half of the chapel we walked into at the start of the update. So all the progress we've made thus far has been closing the loop. There's no shortcut back, but running back, if we had to for some reason, wouldn't add much more than 30 seconds.  This is the blood pool that Hosilla mentioned. Lizzy decided to donate some of the cultists' blood to it.  And this is the torch Hosilla mentioned in her orders. We'll need to go in here to get a key to open the inner sanctum.  Straight across the hall. Business first, then exploring!  The second Hand of Hosilla is hanging out in here.  Wendy and Lann both said, as I recall, that this was an ancient maze. And yet these bodies look pretty fresh. I have no idea what's going on anymore.  This is an identical copy of Hosilla's Orders. Unless I'm mistaken, you can't get in here without finding the first copy. The key's what we're after anyway - it opens the way to the exit. And we could head straight there! But there's loot to be found first.  We find a wrecked cage in a nearby room full of monitor lizards.  Smashing a few jerks...  More junk in a hidden room...  And top top things off, a couple of earth elementals in this chamber. These are presumably the same ones that killed the maze builders.  If there's one thing the maze is good for, it's giving you a bunch of Cure Light Wounds potions.  This looks like progress, but it's not. This leads the way to a pretty hidden side chamber, and the whole reason we even came this way in the first place.  This nasty torture chamber has some trash enemies, sure.  But it also has a little puzzle in it. If I were a better LPer, I would have secretly shown the answer to this earlier. The answer was just out of sight in a screenshot much earlier in the update. Let's go take a look!  This was in that big meeting chamber... the one we camped in. Yellow-Blue-Red-Yellow. Easy enough!   Inside, a cutscene takes over.  Liz and Seelah walk up to this altar, and Seelah touches it. Dmitry V. Silantyev - Crusade Victory Theme Seelah peers closely at the sword, which seems utterly unexceptional to you. "Wait, this is... No, it can't be!" Her eyes light up. "I know that hilt! Radiance, the sword of the great Yaniel, that's what this is. But... it's meant to be in the Tower of Estrod with all the other relics... That's what I heard, at least." "Well, of course this rusted piece of metal must be that very same sword!" Camellia rolls her eyes. "I think you merely wish that this were the illustrious sword of legend." "You don't get it — I've seen this sword a hundred times, in paintings and in the hands of the Yaniel statue. I've even thought of going to the Estrod museum to see the real thing in person... How did it get here?"Items Received: Radiance "What's so special about it?" Seelah frowns. "Now... nothing, I guess. But this sword was legendary in its day! People say that when Yaniel held it, the blade would glow, striking demons left and right. Soldiers would see Radiance's light from afar and take heart, rushing into the fray and winning. But I don't know what's wrong with it now, or how to restore its power. All I can sense is that they made a mockery of it." "You're empathizing with an object? Extraordinary. Are all paladins so tender-hearted and sensitive?"", "Sensitive in a way, yes. We're highly attuned to evil and everything wrought by demons. Radiance was in evil hands, and, as a paladin, I can tell you they did nothing good to it." "Who's Yaniel?" "No! You've never heard of Yaniel? She's famous all over Golarion! She was a great woman. She was born in Mendev, and when the crusade started, she couldn't just sit idly by. She dedicated her life to the crusade. People say she was audacious and spirited: she was always the first into battle and she never sacrificed other peoples' lives for a tactical advantage." "That's how she's been remembered: as an incredible warrior who seemed to blaze with righteous fury. In all the images of her, she looks capable of driving all the demons back to the Abyss single-handedly! But then something happened between her and her commanders. Maybe they envied her, maybe there was more to it than that, I don't know. But anyway, she went into the Worldwound without her fellow soldiers... and she didn't just survive the mission, she even brought back crusaders she rescued in there! Can you imagine?" "She died as she lived — proudly. She was covering the escape of the refugees fleeing Drezen — that's where she perished. She wasn't even forty, very young for a half-elf. But I guess I don't have to explain that to you! You half-elves live twice as long as we do. If you think about it, the crusades aren't even a hundred years old. That's how little time separates us from the heroes of legend. Yaniel could still have been alive today... But fate decided otherwise." "You know a lot about Yaniel. Are you a fan of hers or something?" "I suppose you could say that." Seelah chuckles. "I've always felt an affinity with Yaniel. I know what it's like to not be what your commanders want you to be. Whenever I used to feel under pressure, I always thought of Yaniel: maybe some people didn't like how she was, but to the people she pulled out of the Worldwound, she was perfect. And to the people she saved on the battlefield, she was incredible. And to those who keep her memory alive, she is a hero. That's what counts." "How could a priceless relic end up down here?" "Yaniel disappeared, but by some miracle Radiance was recovered from the battle. No one else has ever wielded it — it is Yaniel's blade and always will be. That's why it was put in the Tower of Estrod with the other crusade relics. But now it turns out that somebody stole it..." Seelah laughs. "I have this weird feeling, like I'm rescuing a fellow warrior from a dungeon. We can't just abandon it, even if it's no use to us. It's no use to anyone down here. But what if it could be repaired?" "Let's keep going." Right now Radiance is still a scythe because of the nature of the GreatRadiance mod. But we can easily change that, and I'm aiming to do so! But I'm also going to work on getting Lisbeth up to Chaotic Good so she can use it in her main hand. As we progress through the game, Radiance will occasionally upgrade. And when it does, it's always spectacular. In the hands of a good-aligned hero, it becomes a best in slot demon murdering implement.  Alright, all the way back out we go. We're going clear across the hall in that large chapel, to the door opposite where we just left. In here are some Dretches and a demon summoning ritual circle. Dretches are super low level demons, but they're priority targets all the way up through the end of the game. You see, Dretches are one of the few demons that are likely to cast crowd control spells that shut down a large chunk of your party.   For the sake of keeping these short, I'm gonna call the update here. The end of the dungeon is just through that door, but there is a lot of talking coming up. I saved before and after the upcoming bits and there's more than 25 minutes of difference between the two saves! So join me next time when we confront whatever evil lurks at the end of this maze, and then hopefully escape up into Kenabres. Encyclopedia Golarionnica Tome of the Minotaur - Sermons from the Labyrinth Hosilla's Orders Almost New Diary Drezen
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Jul 18, 2022 00:07
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I think you mean Radiance is a sword, not a scythe. In most games players who don’t use long swords with their main character will probably give it to Seelah. Yeah, Wendy is hiding something. That’s not good. Lann will be able to identify the first corrupted mongrel you kill as a missing hunter he knew. But he doesn’t know much beyond that and is as surprised to see cultists as most of the party.
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Jul 18, 2022 00:25
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achtungnight posted:I think you mean Radiance is a sword, not a scythe. In most games players who don’t use long swords with their main character will probably give it to Seelah. It's definitely a scythe right now.
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Jul 18, 2022 00:41
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Huh, I somehow managed to miss out on Radiance completely in my game, despite usually being very anal about exploring every location thoroughly. Also, jesus christ Camellia is such a giant rear end in a top hat.
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Jul 18, 2022 00:55
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Nordick posted:Huh, I somehow managed to miss out on Radiance completely in my game, despite usually being very anal about exploring every location thoroughly. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Jul 18, 2022 |
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Jul 18, 2022 00:59
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I'll admit, it's a bit strange that the mod which allows you to swap what kind of weapon Radiance is defaults to a scythe. No real insightful comment here, it's just odd. Also regarding Radiance, this is actually a point where your class choice matters - if you're playing a Paladin, it immediately becomes a +1 weapon rather than being stuck at masterwork for a while.DoubleNegative posted:
Note that for magical items with permanent effects (so rings of protection, cloaks of resistance, +1 weapons, etc.) they will absolutely still work even if you haven't identified them yet. And the developers aren't cruel enough to mix in cursed items into normal loot so there's no real downside to trying them on even if you don't already recognize them on sight. There's a small handful of items in the game you want to be cautious about, but they're generally signposted at least a bit.
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Jul 18, 2022 01:09
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Who would have known that the first dungeon in the game is a Knights Templar site.
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Jul 18, 2022 01:24
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The Shield Maze is an archetypal Baphomet cult site. There's plenty of variety among demon lords, and Baphomet's kind of evil is the kind that loves burrowing in underground in elaborate bases beneath civilized societies to corrupt them from within.
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Jul 18, 2022 01:46
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Lord Koth posted:I'll admit, it's a bit strange that the mod which allows you to swap what kind of weapon Radiance is defaults to a scythe. No real insightful comment here, it's just odd. Also regarding Radiance, this is actually a point where your class choice matters - if you're playing a Paladin, it immediately becomes a +1 weapon rather than being stuck at masterwork for a while. It's currently a scythe because before I started the LP, I was playing the proof of concept of Zenic's run. So I installed the scythe version to give it a test run. The way the mod is set up, you have to specifically download a file that changes it into a specific type of weapon. Once we get into Act 1 proper, I'm gonna change it into either a dagger or a kama or something for Lisbeth to use as her mainhand.
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Jul 18, 2022 01:46
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If this weapoin is from The Heavens, wouldn't it be Lawful Good in alignment?
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Jul 18, 2022 02:53
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To me, the Shield Maze is very tough. Most of the early game is tough. I'm still having trouble in the first half of Act 1. Also Since my Magus uses an Estoc, I gave Radiance to Seelah. Being Cold Iron really helps her fight Demons. Really only Me, Seelah, and Camillia do much of anything against Demons, which is most of what I've fought so far. Also went through the Maze with Wendy but chose Lann at the end, cause gently caress Wendy's plans. Edit: One thing I've noticed is this game is quite Magic heavy as most companions are either Magic or can be built Magic. Seelah, Camillia, Eldritch Scoundrel, Witch, Oracle, Wizard, Cleric, and Ranger are all Magic, and Lann can be built Magic pretty easily. Only Wendy and Hellknight can't be built Magic easily. I only mentioned the classes of the companions we haven't gotten yet, just for added spoiler protection. ChaosStar0 fucked around with this message at 08:14 on Jul 18, 2022 |
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Jul 18, 2022 08:03
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It's kind of the edition problem really. Most everything is magic at least a little because going pure non-magic generally doesn't work that well.
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Jul 18, 2022 08:52
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JustJeff88 posted:If this weapoin is from The Heavens, wouldn't it be Lawful Good in alignment? It is in the books! Even more than that, it's exclusively a Paladin Weapon. If you're not a paladin, it doesn't really do anything. Wrath of the Righteous Book 1: The Worldwould Incursion posted:When handled by a paladin, however, the blade suddenly glows with golden light and functions as a +1 cold iron longsword that radiates light as a torch on command. The weapon shifts and changes its form to match the paladin's deity's favored weapon (in the hands of a paladin who doesn't worship a deity, the weapon remains a +1 longsword) We shouldn't need a mod to fix this, but.. oh well. I guess they assumed that most players would give it to Seelah, and for an Iomedae Paladin the Longsword is the weapon of choice. Maybe Owlcat just implemented it really early and didn't bother to go back and make this a feature.
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Jul 18, 2022 13:33
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So would a Paladin of Irori wield Radiance as a pair of knuckles?
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Jul 19, 2022 00:10
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ChaosStar0 posted:Edit: One thing I've noticed is this game is quite Magic heavy as most companions are either Magic or can be built Magic. Seelah, Camillia, Eldritch Scoundrel, Witch, Oracle, Wizard, Cleric, and Ranger are all Magic, and Lann can be built Magic pretty easily. Only Wendy and Hellknight can't be built Magic easily. I only mentioned the classes of the companions we haven't gotten yet, just for added spoiler protection. wologar posted:So would a Paladin of Irori wield Radiance as a pair of knuckles?
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Jul 19, 2022 14:29
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ChaosStar0 posted:To me, the Shield Maze is very tough. Most of the early game is tough. I'm still having trouble in the first half of Act 1. Also Since my Magus uses an Estoc, I gave Radiance to Seelah. Being Cold Iron really helps her fight Demons. Really only Me, Seelah, and Camillia do much of anything against Demons, which is most of what I've fought so far. Also went through the Maze with Wendy but chose Lann at the end, cause gently caress Wendy's plans. You also forgot Ex-Paladin/Ex-Hellknight but he’s optional and who knows if we’re going to get him.
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Jul 19, 2022 14:44
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Checking in. Completed the game once Angel and midway through my second run Azata. Wendy is effective and interesting, but a wee bit too evil for my tastes.
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Jul 19, 2022 15:51
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achtungnight posted:You also forgot Ex-Paladin/Ex-Hellknight but he’s optional and who knows if we’re going to get him.
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Jul 19, 2022 17:12
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Unless they're specifically built for damage spells, the most impact a caster has in WoTR is through buffing the martials (or themselves, depending.) There are some pretty wild things you can do with a damage spell build though.
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Jul 19, 2022 18:32
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I will respectfully call absolute bullshit on that. Casters in this game are top tier (and in general in Pathfinder) and most of my fights were won on the backs of my many casters dumping huge amounts of debuffs and CC. Sure, they have to roll to get past spell resistance, but there's many many features that make that trivial later.
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Jul 19, 2022 19:45
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I also found casters to be best for stacking buffs. 2 casters buffing ranger girl and hellknight made the martial characters into chainsaws. Direct damage and cc spells are just lackluster comparatively. And that was with a caster MC
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Jul 19, 2022 19:49
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I found that a dedicated caster of divine and arcane each to be the best to basically be able to swipe the best buffs and CC respectively, since conjuration CC is incredibly broken in many circumstances. Arcane as an Arcane Trickster also allows them to contribute burst damage via the sneak attack Scorching Rays if you just want something specific dead fast. Granted that works less well with the NPCs as given unless you do some shenanigans. (At least on the Arcane side. The Divine caster kind of does his job just as well as a PC built to do it would).
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Jul 19, 2022 20:05
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I don't think martials are bad in Wrath, they're just not very flexible. You can get 90% of a martial while also getting a bunch of cleric, druid or wizard spell slots. Those spell slots then let you cast self-only buffs to make up most if not all the 10% deficit, plus cover a bunch of crucial buffs for the rest of your party. In a good party comp for Unfair-type difficulties you want characters to cover a couple different important bases (tanks AND provides bard song, does physical damage AND cleric buffs AND community domain, etc), because if you run with 6 pure classes you're inevitably going to miss out on something that you need in order to get your numbers higher than the enemies' numbers. Maguses, shamans, oracles and friends can be made as tanky as fighters, hit almost as hard, and bring a lot of other things to the table. Sneak attack builds tend to benefit the most from going all in on not-casting and are I think still the highest single target damage builds you can find. The problems with sneak attackers are 1) "immune to precision damage" is a condition that exists on some enemies specifically to gently caress them and only them over, 2) almost any martial will delete their main target if they can full attack, but light weapons don't have reach so sneak attackers tend to lose out on attacks due to a lack of targets compared to Strength types and 3) it's difficult for a max sneak attack build to do useful things other than sneak attacking. All that said, I ran with 20 levels of Cavalier of the Paw on my main character. She could mount up at level 1, was my primary tank throughout the game and consistently produced hilariously big numbers on Charge. I think I got the "300 damage in a single hit" achievement at level 10, on a Halfling with a Strength build. Cavalier is not that flexible and a better (and more Unfair-oriented) build would dip fighter and maybe monk for more overall numbers, but the combination of physical immortality, giant alpha strikes and teamwork feats for everyone should be good enough to be quote-unquote viable on any difficulty. It's just that bringing a pure martial character to Unfair means you're putting more constraints on your other 5 slots, since you're leaving more holes that they now need to fill.
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Jul 19, 2022 20:31
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Never played Pathfinder, but utter caster supremacy was the bane of 3e, 3.5e and PF. 5e is already struggling with that and I'm not optimistic about the new PF because P&P gaming nerds are too stuck in the past.
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Jul 19, 2022 22:43
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JustJeff88 posted:Never played Pathfinder, but utter caster supremacy was the bane of 3e, 3.5e and PF. 5e is already struggling with that and I'm not optimistic about the new PF because P&P gaming nerds are too stuck in the past. they toned it down a little bit, but, well, considering the core appeal of pathfinder to begin with was "we're bringing all the system mastery bullshit back" the solution chosen was to give martials a couple more tricks to play with while leaving casters nigh-unstoppable deities. this being a single-player video game, however, the balance swings back towards martials because unlike any tabletop game ever, in this game you will have more than four or five encounters between rests.
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Jul 19, 2022 23:33
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Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:they toned it down a little bit, but, well, considering the core appeal of pathfinder to begin with was "we're bringing all the system mastery bullshit back" the solution chosen was to give martials a couple more tricks to play with while leaving casters nigh-unstoppable deities. I'll put it this way... why have a class system that's a classist system when everyone can pick their class? Doesn't that simply mean that everyone will opt for the most overpowered classes? Having asked the hanging question, what is the rest system in the PF games? I assumed that it was like the BG/IWD games where it's essentailly 'whenever you want'
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Jul 20, 2022 01:16
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JustJeff88 posted:I'll put it this way... why have a class system that's a classist system when everyone can pick their class? Doesn't that simply mean that everyone will opt for the most overpowered classes? It's basically wherever you want, but there's time pressure and Abyssal corruption to limit that in Wrath.
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Jul 20, 2022 01:34
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wiegieman posted:It's basically wherever you want, but there's time pressure and Abyssal corruption to limit that in Wrath. Or if you want to get the achievement for beating the game on Core difficulty in under 75 rests. I think it's called Sadistic Game Design.
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Jul 20, 2022 03:44
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Galick posted:I will respectfully call absolute bullshit on that. Casters in this game are top tier (and in general in Pathfinder) and most of my fights were won on the backs of my many casters dumping huge amounts of debuffs and CC. Sure, they have to roll to get past spell resistance, but there's many many features that make that trivial later. yeah no fuckin' way, casters are still godlike because casting Win The Fight wins the fight, and there's many versions of Win The Fight out there. plus you can buff other dudes just fine and still have plenty of Win The Fights. and some of those Win The Fights don't check SR at all, and yeah every caster will take things that make their SR checking Win The Fights almost always beat SR. grease is level 1, after all. martials are still useful to have of course! i wouldn't wanna play an all caster party, personally. the "but they can swing their sword all day!!!!" non-argument from actual tabletop pathfinder does actually hold merit in a single player CRPG where you're playing every character and have roughly five million percent more fights per rest than in tabletop, and the limitations of the medium mean they can always contribute rather than have caster enemies simply fly out of their range and nullify their existence in the midgame and having friendly casters use utility spells to negate their skills. plus someone has to actually put the sword in all the nerds that you've greased/slept/webbed/shoved into a pit/feared/bimbofied/etc and some things really do just need to be smacked down with number sticks. and really with all the mythic nonsense going on, eventually a mythic vital strike bloodrager is indistinguishable from a dc 99 finger of death that only works in melee range and doesn't care about death immunity. wiegieman posted:It's basically wherever you want, but there's time pressure and Abyssal corruption to limit that in Wrath.
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Jul 20, 2022 05:52
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One time I GM’d an iron gods party with four full casters and a ranger in it. Nothing got to do much of anything, but also the Ranger wound up getting 99% of the actual kills. The rest got sent to the elemental plane of fire. PF casters are kind of schnasty, but you do need someone to murder the enemies you disabled while you play go fish in the back.
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Jul 20, 2022 07:09
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The Owlcat games are probably the most balanced casters vs fighting people has been in a d20 system for the reasons Kobold has mentioned. Of course 'most balanced' is largely because the tabletop power is nonsense, but still....
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Jul 20, 2022 08:15
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This game is absolutely chock-full of trash fights, which is were martial classes are good cause you can't run out of sword swing slots; it really felt like going back 20 years to BG on that end, and not in a good way - you see some monsters, you have your tank run in front of the party, everyone autoattacks everything (including casters with their crossbows), everything is dead in 10s. If you cut those kind of encounters to a third of what they currently are, the game's pacing gets progressively better (especially if you want to play turn based, although at least you can switch) while the relevance of martial characters gets progressively worse. If you had 5-10 fights per zone instead of 25-30, your casters would win most of these serious encounters; right now even when your martial character is "carrying" the party through a difficult encounter, it's usually cause they are buffed to the gills with arcane+divine goodies. E: actually, a single cast of Grease or similar spell can win the day even in a non-bottom-tier trash fight, and that's a lvl1 spell. That Italian Guy fucked around with this message at 12:00 on Jul 20, 2022 |
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Jul 20, 2022 11:58
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There are some weird moments in this game where you're supposed to be in a dramatic battle storming a city but nobody seems to mind if you decide to camp out in a room for a day or so.
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Jul 20, 2022 12:02
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That Italian Guy posted:This game is absolutely chock-full of trash fights, which is were martial classes are good cause you can't run out of sword swing slots; it really felt like going back 20 years to BG on that end, and not in a good way - you see some monsters, you have your tank run in front of the party, everyone autoattacks everything (including casters with their crossbows), everything is dead in 10s. Yes, having a bunch of trivial trash fights where the melee classes can sweep up and feel useful when in fact that are just letting the casters keep their limited-use artillery strikes is not good balance.
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Jul 20, 2022 15:47
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Ok, everyone is currently shrieking about CC spells in 3.P D&D being the greatest autowins that ever won, and that's generally true on the tabletop because most DMs aren't gonna read five million forum threads of boring nerds arguing over "practical optimization" and you have a party of characters that ranges the gamut from some guy's useless pacifist chef to Jimmy the Necromancer snd his undead hydra. If you play in Owlcat Land on higher difficulties people will make their saves because stats are inflated to poo poo and if you don't grease the water elemental he's beating your team into a pulp. This can be mitigated by being an exploiter wizard with a bunch of spell focus feats, but the game is going to make you earn your save DCs and I hope you didnt go all in on enchantment before you ran into Skeleton Town. Then you run into the goddamn infinity gargoyles and cry deeply because they have high reflex saves and are immune to grease. On the plus side, Owlcat got rid of charm monster and planar binding, and severely nerfed animate dead, so unlike real pathfinder you can't just replace the severely nerfed fighting classes with actually useful - and expendable - monsters and must instead make peace with a world where Jason Buhlman nerfed power attack.
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Jul 20, 2022 16:37
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