Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

Shadout wrote:

Lich is quite amazing so far imo. But yeah, being evil (or at least neutral, which has been enough to keep the quests going for me so far) is not what I usually play.
However, it also gives me additional chances to be friendly toward my

Spoiler:

wannabe spider

companion as well my completely neutral and innocent

Spoiler:

shaman

companion. Serving your friends dinner from time to time is surely a Good action?

Next playthrough will be on the side of Good for sure. Although, I stumbled upon the Swarm-that-walks boss fight yesterday. Looks like it is a few steps beyond the Lich when it comes to evil. Now I want that too. Why does evil always win in the cool factor department :/

I am loving my Winter Witch Lich playthrough, although i found i missed out on an undead companion in my quest to stay neutral as long as possible. Debating whether to go back to the beginning of act 3 to make that happen or just press forward.

I'm still debating whether my second run will be aeon or Angel

thrawn82 wrote:

I am loving my Winter Witch Lich playthrough, although i found i missed out on an undead companion in my quest to stay neutral as long as possible.

Oh no! Can you say which one? Maybe I can still salvage my game.
Especially one of the upcoming undead companions seem critical to my team setup. Although you can of course just get a merc companion instead.

Speaking of companions, I'm really happy with just how likeable Finnean is. It seems like games often make those types of characters as annoying as possible, but aside from his ... limited grasp on his own nature, he's a delightful individual, and I really enjoy it when he chimes in about stuff.

Also, getting

Spoiler:

Trever

as a companion was pretty cool. Though by the time I did, I was pretty well covered on melee wrecking machines.

Shadout wrote:
thrawn82 wrote:

I am loving my Winter Witch Lich playthrough, although i found i missed out on an undead companion in my quest to stay neutral as long as possible.

Oh no! Can you say which one? Maybe I can still salvage my game.
Especially one of the upcoming undead companions seem critical to my team setup. Although you can of course just get a merc companion instead.

Yea. it happens fairly early in act 3 and it's one that can totally skate by without you even noticing. I would never have known had I not seen the character on a list of possible companions

Spoiler:

There is a knight named Ciar with an apprentice who you find in a cave in Wintersun. things inevitably go badly and you have to go back to him and report to him what happened to his apprentice. If you appease him with bluff or diplomacy, you lose out on a later opportunity to defeat him and raise him as an undead companion

Tip for once you wind up in

Spoiler:

The Abyss

in what I assume is late mid-game.

If you need some moving scenery to move, and it's not moving, try using the camera to look at it from a different angle. I've found that works very consistently.

Oh well, I guess you cant say you weren't warned.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/c3FLLHq.png)

thrawn82 wrote:

Yea. it happens fairly early in act 3

Must have picked the right choices, got him a short while ago.
Not the guy I was looking for though, seems like he shows up later.

Swarm companion spoiler

Spoiler:

You get to make clones of yourself instead of party companions.

fangblackbone wrote:

Swarm companion spoiler

Spoiler:

You get to make clones of yourself instead of party companions.

That... is awesome.

Might have to save and do 1½ playthrough as lich and swarm, if I even can choose swarm. I saw a guide, but it sounded like I had failed some of the earliest requirements. But then I still got the dialogue above, so now I am not sure.

As I recall, you have probably already done the right thing with the queens remains. You then have to find a book that talks about someone who tried to do what you want to do and then bottoms up - glug, glug, glug.

So I wound up making a choice I didn't expect with regards to my final mythic path. I went with

Spoiler:

Legend.

Not only did I find Iomedae to be fairly convincing, but I also know that you basically turbo-level and have a new level cap of 40 with Legend. I haven't been using the Angel abilities all that much, so I think I'll see how this plays out.

WARNING

When doing respecs on the main character, Improved Two-Weapon fighting does not "stick;" the feat vanishes after the level where you selected it is submitted. It's very frustrating, and I have submitted a bug report.

Similar issue with Selective Channeling.

Damn, I think I might be at the end of act 3, but just ran into a mini boss called Playful Darkness. That was insane. If it got to any of my characters it would drain their lvls and kill them in one round. After a bunch of tries I found one spell that could hurt it. Only, it turns out, when it "dies", it was one of those monsters that just fall to the ground but stays alive. And nothing seemed to be able to finish it off. Not sure what did it in the end, but a Coup de Grace from Seelah somehow got through. 52000 xp :O

Also started to use turnbased mode a lot, despite my misgivings. Really helps a ton on the harder fights.

Shadout wrote:

Damn, I think I might be at the end of act 3, but just ran into a mini boss called Playful Darkness. That was insane. If it got to any of my characters it would drain their lvls and kill them in one round. After a bunch of tries I found one spell that could hurt it. Only, it turns out, when it "dies", it was one of those monsters that just fall to the ground but stays alive. And nothing seemed to be able to finish it off. Not sure what did it in the end, but a Coup de Grace from Seelah somehow got through. 52000 xp :O

Also started to use turnbased mode a lot, despite my misgivings. Really helps a ton on the harder fights.

It's got regeneration that can only be shut off by positive energy damage. And yeah, that thing was AWFUL.

There are many bugs with respeccing your main character. I reported a bug weeks ago where changing your race will retain the size of the original race. So if I change from human to halfling, it looks like a halfling but acts as a medium sized race at least when it comes to being able to mount an animal companion.

Also, if you have not been paying attention to Owlcat's Last Azlanti Competition, where streamers race to finish the game with one save game, there are 2 finishes at around the 80 hour mark. (79, and 85 with over 100 quests completed)

That sounded crazy. Turns out they are "only" playing on Normal. Dont get me wrong, that is still immensely impressive. Just assumed it was at the highest difficulty, PoE2 style, which made it seem more like impossible.

Well it is if you die, you are done. There are a few fights I've found in the game that will kill you if you stumbled on normal the first time. Hell, a few of the streamers ended their journey at the water elemental.

I think Wintersun in act 3 is famous for difficulty spikes if you are inexperienced. I'd wager that is where a few of the other early streamer deaths happened.

The streamers must also do the crusade system. It looks like a lot more fun when they do it, so I just watch

I noticed there was also a death or two to a succubi which is a difficult fight if you don't have early burst. I can only imagine what it is like fighting on Core or higher.

Wohoo, I finally managed to get to Neutral Evil. I only had to profess my love for slavery. No problem. As long as it isn't quest destroying choices (such as kill whatever character you are speaking to), everything is fine.

fangblackbone wrote:

There are a few fights I've found in the game that will kill you if you stumbled on normal the first time.

For me that list is; *checks notes* nearly all fights

Was thinking it was like PoE2s Ultimate Challenge. Apparently it took a few months for the first one to do that, and 3 years for 12 people (which was the amount Obsidian said would get some reward) to finish that. Pathfinder seems like a much harder game on its highest difficulty though. At least the first game was.

fangblackbone wrote:

The streamers must also do the crusade system. It looks like a lot more fun when they do it, so I just watch :)

I've definitely been doing the crusade system. As far as I recall you could really screw up your game in Pathfinder 1 if you set the kingdom system to auto, so wasn't going anywhere near that.
Other than being slow, I dont think it is so bad. Better than the Kingdom stuff for sure. Even have a bit of tactics in it. Also seems nearly impossible to fail it, which is probably a good thing.

Also seems nearly impossible to fail it, which is probably a good thing.

I managed. Well I know what you mean but I lost my second battle with what I thought was a superior force. I was wiped and the enemy only lost ~15 units. So I "noped" out and set crusade to auto.

It hasn't hurt me so far but that is because I haven't really played much further with that party.

Ah yeah, very easy to lose individual battles, had many random oneshots of my armies, but meant losing the whole thing, like how it could snowball out of control in the first game with no way to do anything about it.
For most of act 3 I could get through the fights with zero losses. A few fights required reloads and adjusting starting layout of the armies though. Worst threat was enemies who could mindcontrol my armies to oneshot each other

That sounds fun...
I had a hard stop in Kingmaker BTSL when I had to defeat the Enchanter I believe was one of the 4 bosses. The one with the giant 40 ft mind control aura that also had a room full of elder elementals. I had like 2 dozen summons and still couldn't get to him.

About 1/2 of the battles I managed to kill all the elementals but could never penetrate the aura without turning a couple companions against the party and almost instantly wiping. Hmm, I never tried pit spells though

Shadout wrote:

Oh well, I guess you cant say you weren't warned.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/c3FLLHq.png)

thrawn82 wrote:

Yea. it happens fairly early in act 3

Must have picked the right choices, got him a short while ago.
Not the guy I was looking for though, seems like he shows up later.

I ended up going all the way back to the end of drezen, spent the whole weekend playing through act 3 again much more proficiently. mostly made the same choices other than the one mentioned, but i leaned away from good a bit more, took the first undead companion along instead of seelah. almost back to the end of act 3

Shadout wrote:

Damn, I think I might be at the end of act 3, but just ran into a mini boss called Playful Darkness. That was insane. If it got to any of my characters it would drain their lvls and kill them in one round. After a bunch of tries I found one spell that could hurt it. Only, it turns out, when it "dies", it was one of those monsters that just fall to the ground but stays alive. And nothing seemed to be able to finish it off. Not sure what did it in the end, but a Coup de Grace from Seelah somehow got through. 52000 xp :O

Also started to use turnbased mode a lot, despite my misgivings. Really helps a ton on the harder fights.

i remeber that fight, he was horrific. i ended up managing a combo of CC and alpha strike to get him down, then he stayed on the ground for a long time until i figure out:

Spoiler:

his regeneration weakness is positive energy

Does managing the crusade suck or am I missing something fundamental? Is it worth pushing through (he asks in a thread of Wrathfinder fans) or should I just restart? Was fun until I got here.

I think act 3 is where it opens up and the difficulty goes haywire, even on normal. It seems like everything in this act has a ton of hit points and hits hard. And then you seem to have 1/2 chance to bump into something that is level 17+ and you are only level 10. There are guys that have 36 AC, but are undead/ghost and get concealment from being ethereal. So at that point it is miss, miss, miss, and on their turn they level drain you into oblivion.

I get the feeling that I need at least 1 party member that does ranged touch attacks. I know hellfire ray is really popular for this.

The Greengates fights seemed like it was the current sweet spot for difficulty. It was a nice escalation from rooms full of cultists with a sprinkle of demons. Sadly even a simple pack of Smilodons prove more challenging now.

Seelah died, so I went to the temple to revive her when I found that Sosial had that spell. I tried to use it and it wasn't working. It was reading comprehension fail since raise dead requires a diamond. So I guess it is back to Drezen to buy a scroll for me. (although I guess there should be a merchant that sells diamonds... that should be cheaper)

RE: Crusade. I claim no shame in putting it on auto

Bombs are the bomb!
I'm only level 2 but I one dipped wizard arcane bomber to get bombs and then went underground chemist (rogue) for sneak attack on bombs at level 4

fangblackbone wrote:

Bombs are the bomb!
I'm only level 2 but I one dipped wizard arcane bomber to get bombs and then went underground chemist (rogue) for sneak attack on bombs at level 4 :)

What was your initial class?

I am going:
wizard arcane bomber 1
rogue underground chemist X

or

Arcane bomber 1
underground chemist 4 (gets precise bombs for sneak attack on bombs)
vivisectionist X

Curious if I am screwed or not. I spent a lot of time marching my army around the map wiping out every single demon army before I did most of the main story in Drezen. With nothing to do but sit on their thumbs, morale has absolutely cratered.

Spoiler:

I've since entered the demon city and been relieved of command, just not sure if the army morale is going to be an issue in the future, or I no longer will have to do any crusade related tasks/missions.

Haven’t read the spoiler but morale cratering because there are no demons left to defeat feels like a very “Alexander wept because there were no more worlds to conquer” energy on the part of the crusaders.