Too many buffs/skills/debuffs

[deadsanta]

I really feel like the ability creep in CRPGs like Pathfinder is getting out of hand. Just fighting rando mobs in WOTR and they show up with 15 passive and active abilities, dozens of resists and immunities and buff/debuff like mad. Forget about the bosses, every fight is reading 40 lines of abilities and then casting your buffs while stealthed, and then the fight is either a win or a wipe in the next 30 seconds.

I feel like this game could be much more fun if buffs and debuffs and mob/player abilities and skills were more limited. I have the most fun with the Zen archer guy, mainly because you have like 2 buffs and 5 choices of abilities to use, total. Spread over 6-8 characters and pets, that's really all you need for tactical choice and variety, the 40 or so I actually have to choose from on my chars is just exhausting to consider. Every. Single. Fight.

The alternative is to switch on the ultra dumb AI and have it blow me the fark up with area spells and waste cooldowns on trash mobs. There has to be a better balance.

[Alealexi]

İlk olarak wizard1200 tarafından gönderildi:

İlk olarak pandariuskairos tarafından gönderildi:

The combat in mechanics in Solasta are superior so far to any other crpg

I think that you should try Wildermyth or Trials of Fire, because the combat mechanics in Solasta are great, but suffer from the 'streamlined' rules of D&D 5e in my opinion: flanking has no effect, casting a spell in melee range does not provoke an attack of opportunity, the hp increase faster than the damage which results in more tedious fights, ...

Why would a melee touch spell cause AoO? That is just nonsense archaic thinking. If you cast a spell in melee does give disadvantage.

[Alealexi]

İlk olarak NamelessOne tarafından gönderildi:

Once you suggest borrowing mechanics from 4e, your argument is dead.

I agree.

[Alealexi]

İlk olarak TCPippin tarafından gönderildi:

İlk olarak Something completely different tarafından gönderildi:

I also strongly doubt you ever opened a 5E book if you think all character are equally strong. Classes, sub classes and feats have a lot of synergy

No, they don't have "synergy". It's 20 ways to deliver Xd6 damage with different flavor.
Every character in 5e is more or less a carbon copy. Case in point? Skills, or more precisely, skillpoints. In 3.5e or P1E, you can spread your points over all available skills to be a "jack-of-all-trades", you can choose some to max and some to level on alternating levels. In 5E, skillpoints don't exist; you are required to choose which skills you're going to max, and every other skill may just as well not exist for you.

5E might be ok for a complete newbie, but if you stay with it - it's like staying in kiddie pool thinking that's what swimming is about.

So naive to say they are all carbon copies. It is clear you never opened a 5e book and just spew what the bandwagon says.

[wizard1200]

İlk olarak TCPippin tarafından gönderildi:

Wow, for the first time in my life I see someone who claims to enjoy 4E. Also known as "the version where they tried to port MMORPG to PnP".

The abilities per encounter mechanic was the only thing i enjoyed about D&D 4e :)

İlk olarak Alealexi tarafından gönderildi:

Why would a melee touch spell cause AoO? That is just nonsense archaic thinking. If you cast a spell in melee does give disadvantage.

Because it requires basically two actions: casting the spell and attacking the target. An attack of opportunity is better in my opinion, because the effect scales with the opponent: an attack of an opponent with low damage will less likely break your concentration.

[NamelessOne]

İlk olarak Alealexi tarafından gönderildi:

İlk olarak TCPippin tarafından gönderildi:

No, they don't have "synergy". It's 20 ways to deliver Xd6 damage with different flavor.
Every character in 5e is more or less a carbon copy. Case in point? Skills, or more precisely, skillpoints. In 3.5e or P1E, you can spread your points over all available skills to be a "jack-of-all-trades", you can choose some to max and some to level on alternating levels. In 5E, skillpoints don't exist; you are required to choose which skills you're going to max, and every other skill may just as well not exist for you.

5E might be ok for a complete newbie, but if you stay with it - it's like staying in kiddie pool thinking that's what swimming is about.

So naive to say they are all carbon copies. It is clear you never opened a 5e book and just spew what the bandwagon says.

Most of the classes have correct choices, and why bother choices. The bad choices won't actively make your character worse, or put you off the curve too much. I guess that's a win for accessibility. Same problem with 2e PF. It's an illusion of options.

In PF 1ed once you get past the noob traps and feat taxes, there are far more options. Yes, you can munchkin your character if you want to. But you can also have adequately powerful and unique characters that are completely impossible in 5ed.

[TCPippin]

İlk olarak Alealexi tarafından gönderildi:

So naive to say they are all carbon copies. It is clear you never opened a 5e book and just spew what the bandwagon says.

So naive to say they aren't all carbon copies. It is clear you never delved into mechanics and think that Steve the Noble Elf Fighter is drastically different from Jane the Commoner Dwarf Fighter, because one is male elf, and another is female dwarf.

I've already said why they're the same: because there is no skill point allocation. And skills are (mechanically) the most important thing in any PnP RPG.
You want to prove me wrong on that one, or you're going to keep up with personal attacks?

İlk olarak Alealexi tarafından gönderildi:

That is retarded. Touch spells should never cause aoo. Casting a range spell in melee is fine but a melee spell?

Another brilliant personal attack with no substance.
Do you even know what "touch spell" means? It means you have to touch someone. Like, physically reach out with your hand and touch them either on armor, or on open body part.
Unarmed attacks without Improved Unarmed Strike cause AoO. Why touching would be an exception?

[jabbapaul]

Yes, it sounds as if Pathfinder may not be the best product for you, since the Pathfinder 1e rulesest is basically just a slightly modified D&D 3.5e, which was specifically forked by people who vehemently disagreed with the Wizards of the Coast Roadmap for D&D which was all about simplification. In Pathfinder, the added complexity is seen as an asset, not an issue.

The added sophistication you described, compared to Kingmaker, is easily explained by the different circumstances. We are no longer fighting bandits in a forest or zombies in a dungeon somewhere in the under-developed Stolen Lands,. The enemy is now a relatively well-organized paramilitary cult, hence the reported buff-fest, which was pronably by the book, as I don't recall Owlcat ever putting their own creations into the game, in place of the actual lore.

If you are open to mods, there are a few that might help, such as Buff Bot & Auto Buff:

https://www.nexusmods.com/pathfinderwrathoftherighteous/mods/4
https://www.nexusmods.com/pathfinderwrathoftherighteous/mods/15

[MaLal]

Alealexi I would recommend being careful with your wording, okay?

[VoiD]

Agree with the OP, that's why I've prefered the 5e-based games, there is just no comparisson, it's superior in every way, and specially in digital gaming.

There are little to no "empty levels" where you get some junk like +1BAB or something like that that doesn't really change the way you play in the least, no need to multiclass into abominable levels just to make a functional characters, teh AC values are way more balanced, damage counts for something, you don't just play russian roulette all the time where everything attacking you misses all the time and there is no real combat going on, but when you get hit you're probably dead, hell even the skill curve is a lot better where lvl 2 or 3 characters have plenty of cool things to do in their own turns, with special unique skills, abilities, special actions, instead of some junk like "autoattack forever" "now turn on a crappy skill that reduces your attack bonus and gives you something else and keep auto attacking forever"

The more I play this 5e I didn't even know it existed as I don't keep up with pen & papper RPGs, the less I feel like playing the primitive/cluttered versions.

[NamelessOne]

If you think that a +1 is a dead level you must not know about feat prerequisites. Sure, it's not exciting like gaining a major class feature or another spell level, but it's more important than you are making it out to be.

5e is like swimming in a kiddy pool with an overzealous lifeguard. Sure, you can have fun. But it's shallow and limiting as a system (mechanics). As a narrative system it's okay, there are better.

[VoiD]

İlk olarak NamelessOne tarafından gönderildi:

If you think that a +1 is a dead level you must not know about feat prerequisites. Sure, it's not exciting like gaining a major class feature or another spell level, but it's more important than you are making it out to be.

5e is like swimming in a kiddy pool with an overzealous lifeguard. Sure, you can have fun. But it's shallow and limiting as a system (mechanics). As a narrative system it's okay, there are better.

Of course it's important, nobody hits anything, it lowers the chance of not hitting anything, it works towards your next auto-attack, that's also boring in nature, but strong, but it doesn't actually do anything, it's a dead level, you're the same, with higher % chances, it's boring, it's bad, it's cluttered, the difficulty spikes are all over the place and it's far more reliant in RNG than actual strategy, once the bad roll is in you're most likely dead or close to death.

Also, these dead level bonuses are so important that they are the reason why you often have to equip + weapons and multiclass into a half dragon half undead from a different plane that's also one witht he nature, with the skills of an assassin archer expert in poisons but fights barefisted, god, the class system I swear, it was a good idea in theory, but terrible in practice, and the game's difficulty often expects you to keep up with the minmaxing just so you won't be playing a faceplanting simulator, it's annoying and very far from what an actual roleplaying game should be.

Don't ever confuse depth with excess junk/clutter, the whole point of the system, from a player's perspective, is to break the system and make the rules meaningless.

[NamelessOne]

The worst offender of the "dead" levels is fighter. But you get a feat every single level, odd levels you get the normal one AND a class feature. Even levels you get bonus feats.

It's your own lack of imagination and creativity that you can't figure out interesting things to do with that progression.

You also point to the extreme munchkin corner case builds and say you can't keep up if you don't. This is 100 percent untrue. You can pick the worst class in the game and be above the assumed power curve with reasonable and well thought out choices. You can't just dump key stats and choose dumb feats and pick up class features that don't work for your build obviously (but a lot of people are actually that dumb given the threads on the KM forums). But given even modest rules knowledge or ability to learn, nothing in this game is insurmountable. Sure, you probably won't be able to braindead clear on unfair difficulty like a Larian made game, but who actually wants that?

[Kulin]

I think a good start would be some kind of sorting. Short Term Buffs, Long Term Buffs, Personal Buffs, Group Buffs. It's a pain in the ass to pre-buff for me. To look for the right buffs often takes longer then the fight itself.

[TCPippin]

İlk olarak Kulin tarafından gönderildi:

To look for the right buffs often takes longer then the fight itself.

Drag&Drop them on sidebar if it's that hard to parse a spellbook.

Or switch to "story" difficulty and forget about buffing altogether.

[jabbapaul]

İlk olarak Kulin tarafından gönderildi:

I think a good start would be some kind of sorting. Short Term Buffs, Long Term Buffs, Personal Buffs, Group Buffs. It's a pain in the ass to pre-buff for me. To look for the right buffs often takes longer then the fight itself.

As I said the Buff Bot and Auto Buff mods might interest anyone who feels like you:

https://www.nexusmods.com/pathfinderwrathoftherighteous/mods/4
https://www.nexusmods.com/pathfinderwrathoftherighteous/mods/15

You can use either one of them to configure and later trigger a series of actions to be performed by specific characters onto themselves or other characters. Since the game does not have native mod support enabled, in order to install them, you first need to download the Unity Mod Manager and patch your installation with it:

https://www.nexusmods.com/site/mods/21/?tab=files

This is the hardest part, and requires some trust since Windows Defender will flag the file and require you to approve of its execution (if you've picked decent security defaults in your Windows 10 installation).

But once that is done, it's very easy to deploy mods, either by using the free Vortex App from Nexus Mods (which requires signing up for a free account with an email address, but in exchange allows for managing mods brilliantly and installing them with just one click right from your browser) or by just downloading the mods and unpacking them into the Mods subfolder in the Unity Mod Manager installation path (for the specific game).

EDIT: Please consider that the new beta was just deployed, and most mods have not yet been updated to support it, so this is not the best of times to mod your game. If you are interested in mods in general and you have the previous game, I suggest checking them out on Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Unlike for many other games, there's not that many Kingmaker mods, but what makes modding this game worthwhile is that a few of the available ones are very well made and really enhance your overall experience (Call of the Wild and Bag of Tricks particularly so; the former by considerably expanding the available classes and sub-classes [archetypes] you can chose for your characters, the latter by integrating into a single mod hundreds of quality of life improvements, fixes, tools and cheats, which can all be accessed through a handy new section in the pause menu).