Pathfinder: Wrath of the ******** hate thread

[Cedric]

This is one of these games I had tried twice, but always dropped because the prologue is beyond boring. Every encounter is mindless and idiotic. "Here, fight flies. Okay, now fight some lizards. Now a few centipedes. Exciting! Oh, you thought the dungeon would be better? Nah, just fight 50 cultists. Gameplay!"

I am now on my third attempt and, to wring some fun out of this turd, set the difficulty to Unfair to appeal to my inherent masochism. To make it a bit harder I picked a useless class, the 9-Tailed Sorcerer, which means I need to rely on my NPCs which I buff while watching my CC fail because enemy saves on Unfair are idiotic. But that's not the problem.

The problem is the pandering. I haven't even started the game and a ****** talks to me. Okay, I get it. It's the 21st century, you gotta pander to programmers which are 90% transgenders in waiting. Fine. Okay. So I force myself through the prologue dungeon, and what greets me after a (surprisingly) fun bossfight? A blue-haired lesbian half-orc Paladin. First of all, the idea of Half-Orc Paladins is ******** to begin with, but I get that this old-school racism is out of mode. Whatever. Sure, let's assume this is one of the 1% half-orcs that are more human than orc and can control their murderous impulses. Sure, whatever. But no, not only is it a Paladin and a half-orc, it also has to be a lesbian, with blue hair. And who does this lesbian say is her wife? The ****** from the prologue! So does that technically make her straight? Do gender swap potions in Pathfinder change your chromosomes?

I don't think I can put up with this. The encounters are boring, the pandering is horrible and the only thing that even kept me interested is the "how do I cheese Unfair?" aspect, which is similar to playing Icewind Dale on the expansion's highest difficulty from level 1.

Will it get any better? How much longer until I get the supposedly based gnome?

[GothGirlSupremacy]

I was going to reply seriously then I saw "gnome" instead of "game" and decided to type this instead.

[MadPreacher]

At a certain time in your life you are going to make a decision on a cut off date for new media. As you age you find all the things you like being insulted and demeaned in ways you didn't think possible. To spare you the grief I recommend you stick with games that are before 2016 minimum. You'll thank me.

[viata]

stick with games that are before 2016 minimum

2006.

[MadPreacher]

stick with games that are before 2016 minimum

2006.

Everyone's cut off date is different. I put in 2016 as that was before the Trump Derangement Syndrome gripped liberals and made them visibly insane.

[rusty_shackleford]

Even ignoring all the various social justice crap, the game just isn't good. The fun part of Kingmaker was the first half, the second half sucked. WotR is basically the second half of Kingmaker dialed up to 11.

[Acrux]

I can't believe I'm about to admit this, but I actually like Pathfinder (NOT Golarian) at low levels. I think it fixes some of the problems with 3.5. But higher level PF adds its own new set of issues and I don't recommend it at all.

Kingmaker up to the fight with the Stag Lord, or even the Trolls quest, is pretty good. The lack of responsiveness to character decisions, or things like weird perception checks, are it's biggest problems. It starts to really fall apart soon after that. Wrath of the Righteous just adds on to that bloat. I tried the "low level" campaign for WOTR and even it was terrible with too much "extra" stuff.

[Ratcatcher]

How much longer until I get the supposedly based gnome?

You get Regill in act 2. The quest for having him join your party is pretty easy to spot since you will be explicitly asked to send help to some Hellknights.

Tip: Whatever you do, don't level him up as HK as it's a meme class. Going pure fighter is better. You can use some more convoluted build with him if you care abou that.

[Fedora Master]

Even ignoring all the various social justice crap, the game just isn't good. The fun part of Kingmaker was the first half, the second half sucked. WotR is basically the second half of Kingmaker dialed up to 11.

Correct. Kingmaker peaked around Pitax and then fell off a cliff. Wrath "peaks" around Ch2 and only gets worse from there.

[Incognito]

Played Kingmaker till I beat the Stag Lord. The dreadful companions made me quit. Can't stand the annoyingly giggly bard, the waman barbarian with a ******* anime sword bitching about men not taking her seriously in fights, and the peak modernity of a bisexual half-orc and slutty half-elf in an "open relationship". I know there are custom mercs to hire, but **** it. If you have to artificially cut content to make a game palatable, it's not worth it. Never touched WotR.

[Cedric]

It's so much worse in WotR. You thought it was annoying and forced in KM? Ahaha, you haven't seen nothing yet.

Well, I should have trusted my instincts. I've finished Chapter 1 (on Unfair) and honestly it hasn't gotten any better at all. It's a waste of time, like Pillars of Eternity (though I will say this game makes me like Pillars, which I hate, just a little bit better as at least it wasn't so in your face pandering.)

[rusty_shackleford]

@Cedric
If you just want a Baldur's Gate 1-style game, try out Black Geyser. It's OK, nothing special, but not offensive either.

[Fedora Master]

It's telling what sort of people Wrath attracts long-term. Gigglesquee BioWare Romance **** and turbo autistic buildfags. No middle ground.

[Cedric]

That's something I didn't want to mention but since you brought it up-

The build-faggotry is stupid. I don't know if this is because of Pathfinder or because of the game but they really took all the parts I dislike about 3.5 and made it worse. Furthermore, although all these stupid builds exist, usually DMs wouldn't let you play them because you are clearly just trying to break the obvious holes in the system. Plus, even if you don't look up "Zomg Rowdy Rogue dip Sensei Vivisectionist Paladin Scaled Fist" multiclass build you'll be pretty much fine as long as you use the buffs and cover your bases (which on Unfair would be AC 90~ tank, arcane spells, broken-*** community domain, hexes, bard can't hurt, all to buff your DPS. Which is pretty boring too. Nothing wrong with buffing up but when you have so many that you end up spending ages just to do your post-rest routine it's not exactly exciting.

[Fedora Master]

The absolute shitton of classes and subclasses is on Paizo. Everyone likes options but they took it too far.

[Cedric]

Even though many of us older RPG fans are a bit autistic, I can't tell you how much I miss the days where it was just about a dwarf, a paladin, a thief and a wizard and a cleric meeting in a tavern and killing evil things for loot and glory. That was the best RPG experience and somehow, this doesn't quite capture it.

Black Geyser? Haven't heard of it, worth a look.

[Ratcatcher]

The absolute shitton of classes and subclasses is on Paizo

You're right. They didn't implement all classes tho. It means someone had to make a call about what's in and what's left out of the game. Why implementing butchered classes that cannot properly function in a cRPG, like slayers? They even made one of the NPC companions a slayer.

Why implementing dozens of classes just to have half or more of them crippled by bugs for more than one year?

And going beyond classes, the ******** choices on part of the dev team pile on and on. Why allow Azata Zippy magic to also affect melee attacks like vital strike? They patched it out as a bug later on but that's not a bug. If it was a mistake since the beginning, why not fixing it earlier?
Why is metamagic implemented by absolute morons? Do they even know what instant spells are?

Paizo is a beacon for all things pozzed and WotR is a very badly written module, I keep repeating this to everyone faulting Owlcat for everything present in the base module. Some **** is completely their fault tho.

[rusty_shackleford]

It's just an illusion of choice, it undermines the entire point of classes. I have no issue with some type of subclass mechanic — however the system wants to refer to it(kits, etc.,) I have an issue with a hundred classes and most of them heavily overlap with others.

e.g., how could anyone justify this class existing?
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/hybrid-classes/hunter/

Hunters are warriors of the wilds that have forged close bonds with trusted animal companions. They focus their tactics on fighting alongside their companion animals as a formidable team of two. Able to cast a wide variety of nature spells and take on the abilities and attributes of beasts, hunters magically improve both themselves and their animal companions.

Role: Hunters can adapt their tactics to many kinds of opponents, and cherish their highly trained animal companions. As a team, the hunter and her companion can react to danger with incredible speed, making them excellent scouts, explorers, and saboteurs.

Its parent classes are druid and ranger, but the ranger is already treading this ground. What archetype does this class bring to the table that wasn't already fulfilled?
The answer is, nothing. Because Paizo does not understand classes.

Classes are not just a grouping of skills, feats, and similar. Classes are archetypes. Write that down 100 times, repeat it out loud. This design can only spring from the mind of people who do not understand the material they're working with. To be entirely fair, as Gygax correctly noted, this started with 3E itself.

The main differences in the older works I did and 3E are style of writing, reliance on archetypes, limitatations on character advancement, availability of and creation of magic items, and general single-class play for human characters.

What they're trying to use classes for is not what they were meant to be used for.


It's also just bad design in cRPGland because how the hell are you going to make reactive content for that many classes? Answer is, you don't. You end up just using the skill system and ignoring one of the most important aspects of D&D altogether. How could anyone think this is good design?

[rusty_shackleford]

Black Geyser? Haven't heard of it, worth a look.

It's the only IE-inspired game that actually feels like Baldur's Gate. It's also the only IE-inspired game to actually hit the target it was aiming for, to some degree. All the others were like setting out to write a fantasy novel that rivals Lord of the Rings, whereas Black Geyser just set out to write a fun novel like The Hobbit.

[Fedora Master]

I like Effortposting Rusty more than Shitposting Rusty

[NaturalSelectionist]

I would love to see someone use the same engine to make a game set in some non-pozzed fantasy world. Kingmaker kind of annoyed me by giving you mostly female front line characters at the start. A female bard, rogue, priest/druid, bow ranger, or sorceress makes sense, but a female knight, melee paladin, barbarian, melee warpriest, etc. - nah. That kind of thing should be limited to one per game or it loses its uniqueness and believability. WotR went full ****** with it and piled on the woke **** with it.

I would also like to see that game have some modified rules for character sex, where males get bonuses to strength, intelligence, hit points, will saves, and bonus spells from wisdom and women get bonuses to dexterity, charisma, fortitude saves (better disease resistance for dealing with babies), constitution/wisdom skills, and wisdom based spell save DCs. That basically gives each sex two stats they're good at and part of the bonus from each of the other stats. It makes it so men are stronger and more durable in melee combat while women must rely on range, stealth, or speed to fight, and affects the type of spellcasting they're more likely to go for.

It's just an illusion of choice, it undermines the entire point of classes. I have no issue with some type of subclass mechanic — however the system wants to refer to it(kits, etc.,) I have an issue with a hundred classes and most of them heavily overlap with others.

It allows for a good deal of customization. Your hunter example is somewhere in between the druid and ranger in both spellcasting advancement and combat skills. A lot of 3.5/PF fans enjoy the system for the tactical combat simulator side and the use of prestige classes and easy multiclassing to minmax their characters and party.

[viata]

I would love to see someone use the same engine to make a game set in some non-pozzed fantasy world.

How good is the engine? I have not played Pathfinder, btw.

[WhiteShark]

It's just an illusion of choice, it undermines the entire point of classes. I have no issue with some type of subclass mechanic — however the system wants to refer to it(kits, etc.,) I have an issue with a hundred classes and most of them heavily overlap with others.

It allows for a good deal of customization. Your hunter example is somewhere in between the druid and ranger in both spellcasting advancement and combat skills. A lot of 3.5/PF fans enjoy the system for the tactical combat simulator side and the use of prestige classes and easy multiclassing to minmax their characters and party.

If it were really about customization they would use a classless system. No, the goal is actually a system that appeals to the "deck builder" mentality: what's the most effective character I can make given these arbitrary restrictions? It's related to Ivory Tower Game Design which Monte Cook talked about ages ago in reference to D&D 3.5. Instead of strict archetypes or individual pieces, the system gives you a bunch of elements haphazardly glued together which you can then further combine into the twisted monstrosity known as a 'build'.

I don't think 3.PF players truly care about tactics all that much, either. It's more about seeing the build in action. Combat in these systems is described as 'rocket tag' for a reason. If you have a good build, you'll probably dominate level-appropriate encounters. If you don't, you'll get trashed. There's some tactical maneuvering to be done, but assuming basic competence, much more is decided by the character sheet.

[NaturalSelectionist]

How good is the engine? I have not played Pathfinder, btw.

BG or ToEE type engine with modern graphics. It's a little buggy sometimes but it's the best engine out there to run a 3.PF game today. Then again the temple+ guys have added prestige classes and the ability to play a couple other short campaigns through the ToEE engine which don't have as much wokeness.

[Lhynn]

I think the problem isnt so much too many classes, as too many subclasses.

The other big problem is how some classes make others have no reason to exist, even if flavor wise they are different. Bloodrager does everything barbarian does, but better.

[IDtenT]

Imagine playing a turn based game without a grid and without building the entire party from scratch. Cringe overload.

[Ratcatcher]

Imagine playing a turn based game without a grid

Like ToEE? Works fine. The problem with Wotr isn't a lack of grid, although it could definitely help balance the game in a similar way to tabletop.

building the entire party from scratch.

This too can be done in basegame WotR. The game has cringe overload and questionable decisions all over already, no point in piling on **** they managed somewhat right.

[IDtenT]

Wherever I go, I must also grid. You must be one of those people who do not move by grid on a tiled floor.

I only played the first game (for about an hour) and there you could only create the player character?

[Ratcatcher]

You must be one of those people who do not move by grid on a tiled floor.

...I used to as kid but managed to overcome my pervert nature.

I only played the first game (for about an hour) and there you could only create the player character?

In both games, initially yes, you can only create one. One of the first location you visit after the prologue tho offers an option to hire mercs. Those are full fledged characters you can build from the ground up, the only difference from your main being slightly lower attributes. I usually take at least one with me in each playthrough because the companions are, with some exception, very badly built.

[Fuze]

Kingmaker peaked around Pitax and then fell off a cliff.

Meh, Pitax is the lowest point in difficulty in the game, and the whole section with the hellknight is pretty awful.
The problem with the house is that is the game optimization make the "puzzle" thing a hassle. Imagine having to wait 30 seconds between each of your move in a puzzle, only for you to get bamboozled at the end and having to restart the whole process.
The encounter would be fine if they were not repeated 10 time each as a punition for the the ****** puzzle.