Core Difficulty

[A Classy Gentleman]

So "core" is Mutasafen casting haste and tossing five bombs to open a fight.

If I ever get to play a PnP game I'll just stick to DnD. Core pathfinder is just too hard for me

[Rhatha]

Pen and paper Pathfinder is closer to normal. Core here is a misnomer. Like Kingmaker before it the difficulty was tweaked here to fit the crpg format. You can adjust it at will, though.

[StingingVelvet]

If you want to match the PnP feel you'd need to use custom difficulty and do things to lower Owlcat's buffs but remove some "normal" difficulty assistance. I'm not a PnP guy but that's what I've read countless times, anyway.

That said Owlcat do say core is the balanced difficulty for people who want a challenge. Owlcat's design philosophy is also all about insanely hard optional battles and battles you will guarantee die on the first couple tries until you figure out tactics and buffs you need. They love that stuff.

[Kasa]

Core is not TT core, it's what the decided to name the difficulty after Daring mostly because of how the death mechanics work.

If I had to say something closer to a TT experience (not an expert):

- Critical hit normal
- Death's Door off
- Dead rising after combat off
- Remove negative effects on resting off (blindness won't be removed for ex) off
- Remove controlling effects after combat on (can't poke a companion awake so....)
- Enemy stat adjustment Moderately weaker
- Damage to party 1.0
- Additional behaviours on
- Weather effects heavy

I looked up Labyrinth Minotaur in the srd and compared it to the Enigmatic Labyrinth Minotaur in the ivory tower and when enemy stats where set to moderate they were very close to the same.

As for the number of enemies setting, I'm not sure.
I'd set it to large to compensate for the enemy AI being stupid but then again Owlcats games are VERY combat heavy so perhaps smaller encounters would be more fair and closer to TT.

[Pipmalice / 悪気ピップ]

The encounters are designed around normal. Though i agree that fight is incredibly brutal and wouldn't mind to see it be adjusted a bit more inline with the other fights. Core uses the default pathfinder ruleset, but since the game isn't balanced around that , encounters are incredibly difficult (TBM helps a lot) But on PnP a dm would be able to adjust fights accordingly and you generally have way more agency, you wouldn't be put against an aoe enemy in a forced ambush with no way out in a certain position. you'd have way more agency on how you got there, where everyone is standing. what actions you take prefight, like here you can't do anything mid conversation, in PnP you could've already tried to shoot him.

[Andante]

Originally posted by StingingVelvet:

If you want to match the PnP feel you'd need to use custom difficulty and do things to lower Owlcat's buffs but remove some "normal" difficulty assistance. I'm not a PnP guy but that's what I've read countless times, anyway.

That said Owlcat do say core is the balanced difficulty for people who want a challenge. Owlcat's design philosophy is also all about insanely hard optional battles and battles you will guarantee die on the first couple tries until you figure out tactics and buffs you need. They love that stuff.

PnP is notoriously easy and many players complain.

Why do people use PnP as some kind of gold standard when its standard is sh!t to begin with.

PnP pathfinder, a lvl 20 mythic naked party can kill the demon lord descari by tossing a rock at descari and one shotting it with no gear. No I'm not even exaggerating, descari pnp stats are laughable.

[Kasa]

Because pathfinder is not about "winning" it's about making a story.

You don't "BEAT" pathfinder, you play it with your friends making interesting choices and characters.

Sure you can crunch numbers to be absolute monsters but you get board of that relatively easily I'd image after a while.

And as you said it's not hard to optimize, I personally like optimizing as well!
But that's just doing math and reading the rule books it's not hard, the trick is to make it fun for everyone.

Owlcat has turned the numbers up to "you better know rules and optimize every choice" at higher difficulties which would be perfectly FINE, except they names that mode "core" and it confuses people who come from the table top expecting well... table top.

[Pipmalice / 悪気ピップ]

Originally posted by Andante:

Originally posted by StingingVelvet:

If you want to match the PnP feel you'd need to use custom difficulty and do things to lower Owlcat's buffs but remove some "normal" difficulty assistance. I'm not a PnP guy but that's what I've read countless times, anyway.

That said Owlcat do say core is the balanced difficulty for people who want a challenge. Owlcat's design philosophy is also all about insanely hard optional battles and battles you will guarantee die on the first couple tries until you figure out tactics and buffs you need. They love that stuff.

PnP is notoriously easy and many players complain.

Why do people use PnP as some kind of gold standard when its standard is sh!t to begin with.

PnP pathfinder, a lvl 20 mythic naked party can kill the demon lord descari by tossing a rock at descari and one shotting it with no gear. No I'm not even exaggerating, descari pnp stats are laughable.

It still depends on the DM . But it is generally on the easy side because dieing is so much harsher than it is in a game where you can just press reload. But if it is too easy for the people playing the DM can simply adjust the stat blocks of the enemies. Its only as easy as they want to make it. Making PnP often feel like the right difficulty if the DM is good. (Some issues with parties with big skill difference, where 1 player minmaxed and 1 shots everything when the rest dies in 1 hit) and thus taken as a gold standard

[alex]

Originally posted by Andante:

PnP is notoriously easy and many players complain.

Why do people use PnP as some kind of gold standard when its standard is sh!t to begin with.

PnP pathfinder, a naked party can kill descari by tossing a rock at descari and one shotting it with no gear. No I'm not even exaggerating, descari pnp stats are laughable.

Because "Core Difficulty" has historically and is implied in this game to mean that it is the difficulty that most closely matches the tabletop experience. It even uses language like "Your characters will suffer full damage from attacks", and "Enemies will have usual power", all of which implies that this is intended way to play the game.

If they re-named Normal to Core and Core to Veteran or something than there wouldn't be nearly as many people complaining.

[belangf]

Even on normal, the difficulty is all over the place. In the Upper City there's a vampire leader you meet in the streets that open the fight by charging with multiple melee attack that drain levels and insta-killed anyone, plus 4 or 5 other vampires that cast domination (turned out to be a fun fight anyway). But then the whole arena is a joke and I kill the champion with a single phantasmal killer.

I think the word Core is not the problem. It's just that Normal says it has "weaker" enemies so players assume that Normal is easy. If I remember correctly, even the old Baldur's Gate had a Core setting which was tougher than Normal.

[Mravenrocks]

Well Owlcat has 7 different difficulty modes and allows you to customise your own personal difficulty. Because with a system like PF plus mythic levels the players knowledge of the system is too wide.

So Owlcat balanced the game around Normal + RTWP and gave you the option to change most thing about difficulty.

Like you have people complaining that Normal or Core is too hard while people like me are complaining that the nerf to Unfair in the last patch made it too easy.

It's 100% impossible to balance a compute version of PF for everybody with so many players. The best answer is always adapt to the what the game is doing, change the difficulty mode or change the sliders and use a custom difficulty (or in my case use a mod to restore the pre-nerf Unfair difficulty).

[Kasa]

@Mravenrocks

To be fair, they didn't "nerf" unfair. The post literally says fix and unplanned.
If it was a nerf they would have said reduced difficulty or some such.
And you can't nerf something that wasn't on purpose.

That's like saying holding a sword in two hands did x15 times strength damage instead of x1.5 and so was changed to the proper x1.5 was a nerf.
It's an error and was fixed.

A lot of people got used to unfair being even more brutal and that's well and good but it's incorrect to call it a nerf when it wasn't intended in the first place,

"1.06
Misс
Unfair difficulty had unplanned additional improvements to enemy stats - fixed;"

[Mravenrocks]

Originally posted by Kasa:

@Mravenrocks

To be fair, they didn't "nerf" unfair. The post literally says fix and unplanned.
If it was a nerf they would have said reduced difficulty or some such.
And you can't nerf something that wasn't on purpose.

That's like saying holding a sword in two hands did x15 times strength damage instead of x1.5 and so was changed to the proper x1.5 was a nerf.
It's an error and was fixed.

A lot of people got used to unfair being even more brutal and that's well and good but it's incorrect to call it a nerf when it wasn't intended in the first place,

"1.06
Misс
Unfair difficulty had unplanned additional improvements to enemy stats - fixed;"

I'm tired of this discussion, even if it was a fix it made the difficulty much easier for people like me who were actually enjoying the game more than KM because Owlcat was keeping their Kickstar promise of WotR being more brutal and hard than KM.

I would have been happy with them "fixing" Unfair and adding another choice on the monster difficulty slider to keep the pre-nerf Unfair.

Luckily the makers of Toybox managed to add an Unfair Brutal slider to restore the previous difficulty and even add some harder ones.

[Kasa]

Originally posted by Mravenrocks:

Originally posted by Kasa:

@Mravenrocks

To be fair, they didn't "nerf" unfair. The post literally says fix and unplanned.
If it was a nerf they would have said reduced difficulty or some such.
And you can't nerf something that wasn't on purpose.

That's like saying holding a sword in two hands did x15 times strength damage instead of x1.5 and so was changed to the proper x1.5 was a nerf.
It's an error and was fixed.

A lot of people got used to unfair being even more brutal and that's well and good but it's incorrect to call it a nerf when it wasn't intended in the first place,

"1.06
Misс
Unfair difficulty had unplanned additional improvements to enemy stats - fixed;"

I'm tired of this discussion, even if it was a fix it made the difficulty much easier for people like me who were actually enjoying the game more than KM because Owlcat was keeping their Kickstar promise of WotR being more brutal and hard than KM.

I would have been happy with them "fixing" Unfair and adding another choice on the monster difficulty slider to keep the pre-nerf Unfair.

Luckily the makers of Toybox managed to add an Unfair Brutal slider to restore the previous difficulty and even add some harder ones.

If you're tired of this discussion then don't bring it up ya?
Again it's perfectly FINE to use a mod to remove the fix and add additional difficulty, but that's what it was a fix, both grammatically and factually plain and simple.

[Miskatonic]

Fixing something and nerfing something can both be true. This is the weirdest argument of semantics I've seen in a while. Or have I missed something and the word nerf has become a naughty word?

[Babbles]

I actually agree, OP: Owlcat's Pathfinders have a couple of seriously silly ideas - Alchemists being number one. 5 Alchemists are just silly OP.