That’s no lie.
I kind of feel that way about loot too, especially given how you have to use feats to focus/specialize in weapon types. I get that they’re trying to be faithful to pathfinder but I wish they made broad categories… like “sword” instead of long sword, bastard sword, short sword, etc…
It’s sad to get a cool halberd when you’re specialized in greatswords.
I completely agree. I hate how specialized those feats are. There are a ton of +1 weapons I’ve run into of all sorts of weird types, but it just doesn’t seem to make sense to specialize in any of them, so I’m ignoring all of them. I just got my first +2 weapon which is a club. It’s not like I’m going to specialized in clubs. Similarly one of the first magic weapons I ran into was a +1 dueling sword, which could be cool, but how many dueling swords are out there, if I specialize in dueling swords, am I going to reach the point where all the weapons are +5, but I’m still stuck with my +1 dueling sword, because I haven’t found a better dueling sword available anywhere?
I wonder if crafting is eventually as easy and expected as the tabletop game, wherein high level crafters are expected to spend all their free time slowly ratcheting up the + bonuses on the entire party’s gear with everyone’s accumulated wealth by level so that everyone follows the difficulty curve exactly as prescribed.
For instance, my Eldritch Scion Magus is built with the expectation that by the time magic gear is fully mandatory, I’ll be able to pay a wizard to sculpt me a +X Agile Rapier at will. Cuz I mean I got no Strength at all and am gonna really need that Dex to damage to shore up Piranha Strike and Arcane Strike…
This is a trap that a lot of RPGs fall into. Pillars was the same, and they actually tried to fix it by making top tier weapons (artifact? legendary?) work with all proficiencies. BG2 back in the day suffered from this problem as well, the cool weapons were spaced too far apart so you’d get a good sword in chapter 2 and use it until just before the end of original campaign. With broader categories you could casually switch weapons to avoid these large gaps between upgrades.
Yeah, for sure. Also I want to give a nod to PoE2 for once again showing me how they improved on the classic DnD stuff (with things like custom scripts, more abilities per encounter for all classes, better per/encounter difficulty tuning, etc.) by also doing something great with weapon proficiency, in that you can use any weapon without any problems, and when you have proficiency you gain access to a neat little ability/modal but that’s about it. Find an amazing Halberd? Give it to someone. Boom. Sure, Fighters and some classes have even more options, and you could have picked two-handed weapon bonuses, but that’s okay, it works with the halberd just fine!
Haha, you wimps. Pathfinder uses the 3.0 rules of weapon groups like “simple weapons,” “martial weapons,” etc. In D&D 2.0, you could only be proficient in specific weapons. Proficient in long swords but want to use that magical short sword? That’s a -4 penalty, sir.
Ya that Nymph thing was…something. Having just finished Chapter 2, I find myself torn. I really want to keep playing, but the balance and polish just isn’t fully there.
The problem that’s revealing itself now is how fucking terribly built the NPC party characters are. While I like them for personality and backstory, their stats are just idiotic and it’s starting to cascade into real problems. I’m fighting stuff with 28+ AC now and I basically have 3 party members including myself who can even hit things reliably. Octavia and Linzi just pretty much sit there and debuff and caste haste. Don’t even get me started on the only tank NPC in the game with 16 charisma…sigh.
There’s a really fantastic game here, but I think I’m starting the see the limits of what such a small team could do. Sure, they ported the entire Pathfinder rule-set and AP, but the gameplay polish that comes through iteration and testing is revealing itself. I’m sure it’ll get even worse as people get deeper into the game that wasn’t even in beta.
Argh - do I continue or wait for the patches and mods?
The deeper problem* is the AC and DC on stuff. DC 22 for a mobility test? What am I, back flipping on a high wire? What sadistic DM set the DC for this shit? Everything is a DC of 18 or higher. I thought 15 was more the “this is challenging but doable for someone skilled” type target? WTF?
I actually called this out in the beta, but the DC values are the same as they were then. You never see something in the low 10’s when your party level 1 or 2, it’s madness.
*I say it’s a deeper problem because the companions should NOT need to be super efficiently designed, they should be designed to be cool and something like what a new player would put together because that could well be what the main character looks like. I’d rather every build was viable than the answer be all the characters have to be as hyper tuned as the enemies. Hyper tuned characters should be what you build a hand-made party for and put the game on challenging mode.
Too bad hand made characters are prohibitively expensive to fill your party slots with. :(
You’re probably thinking of D&D 5th edition DC’s. At 4th level I already have +10 (or more) in some skills, and steadily rising.
D&D’s proficiency bonuses come much slower.
To a degree maybe, but Pathfinder doesn’t use the standard D20 plus single digit thing. IIRC, it goes up to like 30+ in the tabletop. Looking at certain fights and reverse engineering the mobs and the CR, you can see that default Pathfinder assumes 4 PC’s in the fight. Owlbear was like “Okay, they’ll be 6 people in the party most likely, each optimized in their actions (because 1 person in controlling them) - so therefore lets bump it…this much.”
It seems they got themselves into trouble because you can’t just bump the system like that. It’s creating CR15 mobs at level 6, which is completely broken hah. Well, not broken, but you need luck and your entire parties skillset to win :P
It’s possible. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time I thought something about Pathfinder Kingmaker was broken only to realize later it’s actually working as intended. If the DC’s are about right for Pathfinder, and I do indeed have big numbers at level 5 now for skills I’ve put lots of points into, then so be it. But when my highest skilled Trickster stat is +9 and I find a chest that requires me to roll a 19 to open (DC 28) it’s very … well, it doesn’t feel great.
I actually am really enjoying this game, despite the imbalances.
My problem is that I don’t know what anything means. I don’t know anything really about the monster I’m trying to kill. I have a spell called ‘Protect from Alignment’ and it has like 6 options… but I don’t know how to tell the alignment of what i’m fighting and need protection from.
My bear companion apparently doesn’t have an icon in the party area, so I’m not even sure where its health is tracked.
Then I get even more confused reading some of the replies of this thread from people who are veterans of the pen and paper game. I’m quite worried I’m going to gimp a build because I have no idea how all the numbers relate to one another.
Ya I mean the game works fine - and you or I could set the difficulty to Easy to Story mode and probably be just fine and not worry about specifics like Protection from Teamwork Touch Saves Evil +3 Blah Blah. I’m just too stubborn :P
Aw c’mon just pop a potion of + stat, turn on Inspire Competence from your Bard, Bless from your Cleric, Teamwork from another party member, and now you only need a 14!
(Does PF:KM even support Teamwork actions???)
The impression I get thus far from my limited playtime and reading about the game here and elsewhere is that if you tune the game to tabletop level difficulty (a midway point between Normal and Challenging), you will need to be prepared to munchkin-style minmax your character and, as soon as you can afford it, mercenary hand-designed characters, to pass through with the bare minimum of issues (but since the game does roll off of d20 as its core mechanic, there is always going to be a high degree of randomness at play, to the point that any reasonably strong bad guy you fight always has a 5% chance of critting and one-shot killing a weak party member like a Wizard or Sorcerer).
If you tune down to Normal, you can probably do without the minmaxed mercs, though I’m unsure how badly the weirdly built, non-minmaxed prebuilt companions are gonna scale in the late game, especially if there isn’t an extremely player-controlled crafting system to supplement their weaknesses. Either way, certain fights are going to be slogs.
Easy is probably the sweet spot for someone uninterested in hyper intensive charop (character optimization).
Which is. . .
. . . yeah, I’m just gonna go back to my earlier comment about the “this is what playing under a bad GM feels like.” When the GM views the game as a contest he wants to win (and I’m not being unwoke here; these GMs are always dudes, hah) against the players, he can absolutely abuse the system to pull some of the BS PF:KM does early on. Most reasonable, decent GMs would scale a lot of this back and adapt to their parties.
Hell, the magic items issue alone. . . no one I know uses truly random rolled loot tables. When they’ve got a Elven Curved Blade focused two-handed Fighter in the party, when they go delving into a nasty dungeon at level 13, sure enough, there’s a chest in there with a +3 ECB! WHODDA THUNK IT!
I’ve hit a fail state on my current playthrough and the only way out appears to be losing significant progress.
I’m trying to deal with the troll problem. It’s been a difficult but doable quest so far. I have to rest every fight or two. I’m nowhere close to finishing the dungeon itself. And suddenly, while outside and resting before heading back in. . . Your Kingdom Has Been Destroyed, game over. We’ll come back to the game over in a second.
I can’t get back to the kingdom in time to do anything about this. I bring this up because the Kingdom UI b utton on the world map screen is no longer present when I get to the world map. A bug, I’m sure. But what the fuck. I had no idea there was any danger whatsoever. I’ve probably camped in this place 6 or 7 times. Let’s say a week’s worth at least. I had no indications there were any problems.
The game over gives me no useful information. An event appears to have failed, and I lost -1 to something. But I can’t even see my kingdom stats because the Kingdom UI is pure fucking garbage, created by people who have never played a decent strategy game. Did a stat go to 0? That’s possible, but that seems crazy since they were all teens or higher when I set out on this little quest and at no point was I given an indication that any of them were about to jump down a well between leaving the fortress, a couple of stops, and the troll lair. So it seems like this is either another bug threw a calculation off, or the game didn’t do a good job pointing out “hey, this stat is getting low you need to do something”.
Basic Kingdom UI screen, mandatory: all kingdom stats, and something indicating if an advisor is occupied (and how long until they no longer are). All of this information is 1-3 clicks away (or hovers, which is obnoxious in its own right). And not present half the time when you want to make decisions.
I dont think so, I dont think it has Take 10 or Take 20 either.
You just reminded me I haven’t used Guidance a single freaking time. Facepalm
(Cleric level 0 spell for the uninitiated)
If there arent an consequences to failure, you just keep trying until you succeed.
28 is tough, but 17 is possible.
and at least in my limited exposure to the game thus far - you don’t have to make DC checks for every member, just one. Perhaps that will change (in a way, it should - to get back a bunch of stuff blocking a path, I would imagine, everyone would need to make an acrobatics check)