Yeah there are more than a few nightmare fights that don’t give you much warning. The Mook was part of the main story. Like, you had to fight this dude to get to the end of the game. So he wasn’t some side quest or whatever. He was just some random dude I’d killed I think dozens of. I don’t even think his name was any different than the last 3-4 of the same guy I’d killed on the same map.
Playful is probably the worst of them in that regard, but there are quite a few here and there.
It’s like they were like, “lol, remember how many TPKs we got from those Ferocious Owlbears in the Narlmarches in KM? Let’s do that, but just everywhere!”
That or half their shit is bugged and Fuck You ACs aren’t even intended.
Yeah fuck that guy. I killed the named boss without even targeting him, just focusing everything I had on the mook. I never did kill him on Daring.
I hate the demon city. Its so annoying to move your party around with pathways mostly being closed, and then opening for a few seconds while things ‘align’. I found myself standing on a bridge for several minutes just waiting, doing nothing, so I could cross it to get off some island.
I have bunch of quests and I have no idea where to go. The descriptions are complete shit. I would love quest markers on the map. When I travel it shows quest things, but according to the UI, I have like 6 quests in a tavern, but they do not actually take place in said tavern as far as I can tell.
The movement of the city is controlled by rotating your camera. They were dumb and put this in a tooltip category that is likely long disabled by the time you get there.
You get waypoints in the city but I wish they happened faster. It can get frustrating figuring out where you need to go at times and how you need to get there. Once you have some waypoints unlocked it’s not so bad.
Oh, to make it worse sometimes doors to areas bug out and disappear. It took me forever to find how to enter an area for a companion quest, I looked all over. I looked up a video guide finally and I found it was an area I had searched a dozen times. I thought maybe I needed to rotate my camera right so spent time with that. I quit for a time, reloaded the game, and the door/entrance was in the obvious location you would expect, it had just been bugged.
What’s not fun about needing nat 20s to land a hit or running into a rando with 8 attacks that hits your tank on a 2?
Is it just me or is there a real lack of defensive boosts for heavy armor characters? Where’s the heavy armor mythic abilities and stuff like that? Arcanes get the nifty Mage armor buff that provides as much or more AC as the best armor I’ve found not to mention you get to keep your Dex bonus which can also be cranked with buffs and gear. I feel like it’s really hard to keep Seelah ahead of the enemy attack growth curve. Armor/shield upgrades have felt sparse!
I was complaining about that upthread. I have a million gold and nothing to spend it on.
Fully buffed my main tank character has an AC of 39 and there monsters who’s tohit is bigger than that.
Its total bullshit and not fun. They couple super high hit chances, with extreme damage with like 6 attacks around. No balance at all. You can’t even crowd control them because they are all immune to everything but raw damage.
The pushback I typically hear on the forums is “That’s why the developers provided difficulty settings that you can change on the fly” but that’s a total bullshit answer and a copout to even attempting to tune the content. When I hit some hard content, I want to sit back, look at my tools, my party composition, and my tactics and figure out how I can get past it. Telling me to adjust the difficulty just adds more murkiness where I’m not sure if something is supposed to be hard, if I’m doing something wrong, or if the particular mob/encounter is just whack.
Where it really annoys me is when I’ve spent a ton of time clearing an area without too many problems and then I run into one of those assholes with no warning and I realized it’s been quite some time since I’ve quicksaved, despite trying to remember to do it more often. When the first round rolls by and Seelah is down and I’ve got other party member’s CC’d or in dire straights I get really irritated at the thought of having to replay most of the area thanks to an overtuned BS monster. With player clairvoyance I can do better if I reload, but I’m staring down at repeating 30 minutes of content that I just played through and really don’t want to go through again due to something like this.
As you say, I just find it bullshit and not fun. Insurmountable? No, definitely not. It pushes all the wrong buttons for me and just feels like careless and sloppy content design.
How I would prefer it if I’m in an area that I’m working my way through with some challenging but doable encounters. Then I come to a side area of sorts that has some cues that it might be very dangerous. Maybe there’s an NPC with some dialog, maybe there’s corpses piled around the entrance. Bonus points if environmental cues can be used to clue me in as to what type of encounter I might be facing. Dragon? Vampires? Mad alchemist that can throw a dozen bombs in a single turn? Then I can make a decision. Do I take the risk? Maybe I should rest and prepare here based on clues in the environment. Maybe I should quicksave so I don’t have to redo 30 minutes of content in case this is a Bad Idea.
That to me is fun. Walking into an area around L6 and having my entire party sucked into a Rift of Ruin that I had no warning of and didn’t have a chance to save against? Not fun. Walking through a city street and having a dozen alchemist bombs blowing up almost my entire party with no warning? Not fun. Annoying, frustrating, and a disrespect of my time. Because now I gotta go back to a save (not a problem in the Rift of Ruin scenario as it was the only encounter in the area but a major problem in others) and redo a bunch of shit I just did and make sure to save right before I enter that street/area or whatever.
Even without bugs, I find Core combat pretty unsatisfying because Owlcat has followed Pathfinder slavishly, but Pathfinder’s rules depend a lot on a real live GM to fudge and balance things. You’re at the mercy of D20 RNG in combat encounters that haven’t been adjusted for the kind of player you are. If you’re a min-maxer, great! If you’re not, then you’re kind of boned.
Really well said, this whole post. Signed, agreed, +1, etc, etc.
Oh my, yes. Core is for munchkins exclusively. I wouldn’t even suggest Daring for anyone uninterested in taking the PF ruleset and this engine both behind the shed.
Core is “lol try not to get doublecrit next time scrubbo” levels of bullshit, even with maximal munchkinnery.
How often do you guys rest by the way? I am still early in the game, just about finishing Act 1. I usually wait until I am out of spells.
I wouldn’t mind a Tactical Game based on Pathfinder. No real RPG elements, just Icewind Dale level of fighting monsters and killing things.
Something more than just the Endless Dungeon, since that gets old.
Maybe trim it down to 4 characters, because 3.5 and Pathfinder character building is so much more complicated than 2nd edition.
I run about 1 or 2 battles after I’ve run out of spells (if some of my longer buffs are still working), although I’m saving constantly at that point. I figure, my tanks can still run through some weaker enemies. But this means my Wizard is just blinding everyone, or my Witch is trying to put everyone to Sleep.
Yeah I tend to rest when my casters are dry or close to. Generally this means once in a long dungeon.
Resting/spell availability isn’t really the difficulty gate in this, at least as far as I’ve played.
Do you save all your buffs as well for when you fight proper enemies and just use normal attacks for the trash mobs?
I put up long buffs at the start of a map – Mage Armor, Fuck Your Bullshit (Communal), Barkskin – and then typically drop Extended Enlarge + Strength on my Slayer at the first non-trivial fight, and then per-round buffs on hard encounters. Early on the big breakpoint is third-level arcane for Haste/Displacement buff-wise, and Stinking Cloud + Delay Poison (Communal) is a cheat code for a ton of encounters.
Trash mobs melt to double-Slumber, the cleave machine, and the Gatlann Gun.
I’m a backer, but I haven’t really started playing WotR yet. From the general tone of this thread, it seems I should wait for more patches before I start? Both for more balancing and more bug fixing.
(I’m fine with the Pathfinder ruleset, I’m not waiting for it to be patched out :-p)
If you’re not feeling the FOMO, absolutely I would suggest waiting.
I get really frustrated but there’s a reason I’m still playing despite that. It’s a very ambitious and chonky RPG, which is part of the problem. Their ambitions seem to exceed their capabilities and they wasted resources on crap like the Crusade stuff.
You certainly would not be ill-served by waiting for patches, there are definitely a lot of bugs. Some of them are minor, some can torpedo your save. The later are rarer, thankfully.
If you don’t have anything else holding your interest right now or suffer from FOMO I would say jump in, just be prepared for the jank. If you have other things occupying your gaming time I don’t think it would hurt to hold off while they patch the game up.
Thanks for the advice. I’m not particularly bothered by FOMO - I waited several months before playing Kingmaker and had an excellent time when I did.
Honestly what you are describing is Solasta: Magister of the Crown, except that’s 5th edition D&D instead of Pathfinder, but 5E is a better system.