About the difficulty of this game.

[Roknar]

TL;DR;
If you think the game is too hard, just keep going and/or start a new play-through.
It's very hard on a blind first play through, but once you know what's coming, it's a cakewalk. So I guess "git gud" applies?

-----

I just finished playful darkness on my second play-through and it really hit home what I hear people say. I keep seeing these conflicting messages.

On the one hand you see countless threads about how ridiculously hard the game is.
And yet, you see an equal amount of people saying how easy it is. Well, turns out they are both right.

My first play-through was on daring and I had on ok time, except for some stupidly high difficulty spikes. Kenabres especially was really hard and some encounters like that brimorak were unwinnable. I was ONLY able to beat it by cheesing it until Lann got a lucky opening crit, Those things with sunder? kicking my ass. Dretches giving me nightmares, etc... So I try to survive those...only to learn later they basically only exist in kenabres -_-

Later things settled down a bit, occasionally I had to go out of my way to rest and prepare for an encounter to have a chance at beating it, but I was getting stronger.
Then playful darkness happened......what...the....hell?

I don't know how often I had to reset that fight and when I finally won? I had gone through all my rez scrolls, literally all my summons, including level 1 giant rat equivalent scrolls , 70% of my party was dead (some twice over) and even then I only barely squeezed out a win by the skin of my teeth. So yea, I was cursing the difficulty of the game..that was not fun anymore. Everything was missing, only hitting on natural 20ies, which it then even ignores 75% of the time!... (act5 was still still a blur though because of persuasion 3, barely had to actually fight....)

Then on the second playthough I wanted to to make a graversinger play-though with legend, knowing I would get that early. And my entire party was built around having a chance against playful darkness. I wanted to do it legit. Just a chance though, I refuse to do random dips or take non nonsensical domains. So I went and made a rovagug centered party.

Finally! A chance to use destruction domain. Always avoided that because I thought it was suicide to give enemies more damage....Fast forward to playful darkness, on core, so should be even harder.

I buff up as far as possible, charge in...aaaaand my tank pretty much one-shots it?
....wait, what? I have neither guarded hearth nor lethtal/reckless stance, and yet I was able to have guaranteed hits on it (had mark of justice but I had that last playthrough too).

the whole game so far has been a breeze. Bosses especially are basically a joke, the random encounters are much harder as I am usually exhausted and out of buffs with a pretty martial heavy list. I am finding myself at a point now where I am seriously considering unfair because of how easy this is.

I never thought a second playthough would be this drastically different.
At every point I have been wiping the floor with the encounters that I struggled with first.

[Gracey Face]

The reason for the difficulty being wierd is because there's a huge variance in the possible power of character builds. In an actual tabletop game the DM would tailor the encounters to the group that's going to be playing but Owlcat decided not to do anything like that and just stuck with a level of difficulty that seems to be too high for most new players (though to be fair they included difficulty options that should mitigate this, but I have heard people say the difficulty is wild and swingy even on lower difficulties). Additionally beyond their chosen level of difficulty owlcat are just really bad at encounter design, which makes the problem worse.

This is the main reason, beyond you knowing what is coming (which will always make things easier), on your second playthrough you've already seen what works and what doesn't so you're making less build mistakes and so the general power level of your party has increased.

For example you say your party now is martial heavy, martials just break the game, what was your party in your first playthrough like? You had a bunch of casters right? You were using summons before, but now you know with the exception of creeping doom summons are a ridiculous waste, etc. It's not knowing what is coming as much as you've had enough experience to build a stronger party this time.

[D-Black Catto]

palyful darkness wasn't a problem for me, also on daring. just pre-buff and summon a couple of summons to keep it occupied, deal with the shadows and then kill the playful darkness as usual

also don't listen to gracey, it's a common knowledge on this forum he has no idea what he's talking about, as proven by countless threads, including this one
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1184370/discussions/0/6821308966012165651/

[Chronocide]

Originally posted by Roknar:

I never thought a second playthough would be this drastically different.
At every point I have been wiping the floor with the encounters that I struggled with first.

I mean, how many hours have you played? It does make sense that you'd get better at it...

I do agree with gracy in the respect that the party build can really vary the difficulty of some encounters.

Undead, for example, I think are easier for good aligned parties than they are for evil aligned. Especially if your guys heal with negative energy. Plus a lot of the anti-evil classes have good alignment requirements (which is BS, since evil is way more likely to want to murder evil than good is...)

[Roknar]

First party was Lann (later arushalae), woljif, daeran, ember and seelah. I kept them all as is.
Trickster. I did not multiclass them (Unless the game lets you change from the ground up, I very rarely modify companions in general for RP reasons)

Lann/aru as ranged dps (pretty much hard carrying the party)
Daeran as pure healer/buff, switching later to animal domain and summons because I got tired of him being so slow from the summoner item that perma slows you and because he couldn't do anything else himself.
Seelah as pure tank.
Ember wasn't really much of anything was my initial healer until I found daeran and the fire ring for spontaneous casters. then I pushed her as ray caster (to discover later that focus touch != focus ray...)
woljif was all over the place. first dual wield, but kept missing, then conjuring CC spells seemed really nice, until they fell off a cliff with mobs being immune and Saves shooting through he roof, eventually using him as a polymorphed dragon.

Main was a pure skill monkey master of all. and I do mean pure. I had class focus everything except magic device because I didn't have enough int to get everything. By end he had 40+ in everything and only then did I squeeze in some combat skills.

Second party was main 2H warrior, all mercs (because I hated the fixed initial levels and the remaining companions didn't interest me)
shield bash mutation warrior, BFT, Skald "healer", Holy light warrior and inquisitor.

As mentioned gravesinger on main + trickster crits (to go legend eventually)
Not much to say on mutatgion warrior, he's built to make use of the healing scimitar and the light/dark shield. That's where the heals would really kick in. (turns out I don't need it...)
BFT does BFT things then just kind of shuffles along, in case I want to camp and rebuff.
Holy light is kind of disspointing, but I wanted to try it and not use a regular paladin. geared for tripping with fauchard so he can still do some damage.
Skald is healing with fast healing song and lesser celestial (shouldn't proc, but it does) & renewed vigor.
Otherwise geared for extra damage, so powerful & wrecking instead of relenteless/lethal.
Dualwielding throwing axes.
inquisot was supposed to provide war and destruction domain buffs, but I find I very rarely get the chance. For normal fights there is no point in wasting the shared judment aura and bosses are usually dead before I get a chance to apply it. Now I just turn him into a dragon, at least his buffs still work if I ever get the chance. He a walking ring of power dispenser. (which I almost regret, it totally breaks the game)


So yea, first party full of casters and hybrids with plenty of missed potential and broken builds. Second party is 5 beatsticks, 6/7 counting the horse and bismuth and one buffer.
The two are NOT the same. but the first one is especially bad because of how you don't know what's going to work and if you want to play blind..well you're going to find out the hard way that your plan is not going to work out, and every time you have less room for correction as you go. I could have respecced..hell I tried, but I found it buggy and decided to be safe and just live with it.

As for summons, yes....totally useless except for creeping doom and maybe elemental swarm. The conspiracy fight in the abyss really cemented that. summons...summons everywhere. And none of them contributed anything beyond being a meat wall. Not doing that again.

[Roknar]

Originally posted by Chronocide:

Originally posted by Roknar:

I never thought a second playthough would be this drastically different.
At every point I have been wiping the floor with the encounters that I struggled with first.

I mean, how many hours have you played? It does make sense that you'd get better at it...

I do agree with gracy in the respect that the party build can really vary the difficulty of some encounters.

Undead, for example, I think are easier for good aligned parties than they are for evil aligned. Especially if your guys heal with negative energy. Plus a lot of the anti-evil classes have good alignment requirements (which is BS, since evil is way more likely to want to murder evil than good is...)

yes but that's exactly the thing. The game provides you a ton of spells that work only against a specific alignment....except they are all rubbish because you are only fighting evil and of that 99% are outsiders. Now everything being evil is hardly an issue unique to wrath of righteous, but those spells do literally nothing. So if you are playing an evil campaign, and given Lich is a thing you might actually fall into that trap and end up with paperweights.,

Like with the initial enemies, sunder seemed pretty powerful. It certainly worked against me...until you realise that almost all enemies fight naked. And then hybrids in general work very poorly. If you take CC spells for example, you really heavily need to push the DC of those, otherwise they become useless. In my case, I changed my mind down the road and Woljif had some melee, some cc, some of this some of that and it even worked fine for a while, until I hit a brick wall around act 4. Enemy saves went up a lot and they came with tons of immunities.

The game does not reward experimentation, at least not in the short term. Take Divinity 2 by comparison. You can freely respec at will and the game is better for it.

[D-Black Catto]

Originally posted by Roknar:

As for summons, yes....totally useless except for creeping doom and maybe elemental swarm. The conspiracy fight in the abyss really cemented that. summons...summons everywhere. And none of them contributed anything beyond being a meat wall. Not doing that again.

well what else do you want to use summons for

With summons, you dont need a tank. summons distract enemies while you are dealing damage

enemies are so stupid they even use debuff spells that your summons are totally immune to on your summons

you summon summons right in the middle of enemies, or even better, in front of your party before fight and you're set. elementals and golems are especially good for that.

you don't need healers either, healing sucks. just don't get damaged in the first place through dealing damage and cc and buffs.

with pre battle buffing mirror image/blur/displacement/greater invisibility/stoneskin/arcane nimbus/protection from alignment/archon aura/aura of courage/protection from energy/cats grace/whatever/all of them at once every character you have is a tank. gods help your enemies if you debuff them after that as well.

[fox5s]

@ the OP, you are exactly correct. I believe the reasons for this are because, when judged by PnP standards, Owlcat is a ♥♥♥♥ DM that uses several dirty tricks as crutches. These include, but are not limited to: arbitrary stat bloat, stacking multiple templates that are worth more than the sum of their CR, and handing out permanent buffs to mobs that have no logical access to them for no reason other than to screw over the player.

All that said, Owlcat also includes all the tools necessary to overcome their dickery and tricks. However, you might not know how to access many of those tools on your first run. Once you do, things can easily become a cakewalk.

[Roknar]

Originally posted by D-Black Catto:

Originally posted by Roknar:

As for summons, yes....totally useless except for creeping doom and maybe elemental swarm. The conspiracy fight in the abyss really cemented that. summons...summons everywhere. And none of them contributed anything beyond being a meat wall. Not doing that again.

well what else do you want to use summons for

With summons, you dont need a tank. summons distract enemies while you are dealing damage

enemies are so stupid they even use debuff spells that your summons are totally immune to on your summons

you summon summons right in the middle of enemies, or even better, in front of your party before fight and you're set. elementals and golems are especially good for that.

you don't need healers either, healing sucks. just don't get damaged in the first place through dealing damage and cc and buffs.

with pre battle buffing mirror image/blur/displacement/greater invisibility/stoneskin/arcane nimbus/cats grace/whatever/all of them at once every character you have is a tank. gods help your enemies if you debuff them after that as well.

The game provides with a host of buffs for summons, even more so for heals.
You can't fault anybody for building around those. And those won't have a good time.
Though I disagree with healing to a degree. It works, but it's better to lean heavily into offense.

Pre-buffing is also easily said. doubly so if you are coming from kingmaker.
That taught me that every second spent resting? you pay for it in the end game. So I pushed as long as I possibly could without resting. I would be running on fumes for large parts. Espcially since the game tries to instil a sense of urgency.

And you don't know what you will be facing and when, with limited resources.
So in a first play-through you're going to be very conservative with when you spend them.
And not using them makes the game MUCH harder.

[Chronocide]

Originally posted by Roknar:

yes but that's exactly the thing. The game provides you a ton of spells that work only against a specific alignment....except they are all rubbish because you are only fighting evil and of that 99% are outsiders. Now everything being evil is hardly an issue unique to wrath of righteous, but those spells do literally nothing. So if you are playing an evil campaign, and given Lich is a thing you might actually fall into that trap and end up with paperweights.,

Like with the initial enemies, sunder seemed pretty powerful. It certainly worked against me...until you realise that almost all enemies fight naked. And then hybrids in general work very poorly. If you take CC spells for example, you really heavily need to push the DC of those, otherwise they become useless. In my case, I changed my mind down the road and Woljif had some melee, some cc, some of this some of that and it even worked fine for a while, until I hit a brick wall around act 4. Enemy saves went up a lot and they came with tons of immunities.

Game is definitely bias in being anti-evil. Not just this PC game, the entire pathfinder ruleset is very lopsided in that sense.

I suppose the rational is that you don't really need anti-GOOD weaponry in order to damage good characters. But it's kinda bigoted in how the game seems slanted against a a particular playstyle/character group. Wish they would present it differently.

Regarding Sunder, that's an issue with sunder in the Pen and paper too. It's helpful when it's helpful, and useless the rest of the time. Disarm is similar.

As for DC and enemy saves and enemy immunities, game has a custom difficulty which includes those saves and DCs. If your abilities are "useless" because the difficulty is set to high, that's on you, since the difficulty can be lowered whenever you want.

Originally posted by Roknar:

Take Divinity 2 by comparison. You can freely respec at will and the game is better for it.

I think the limit on retraining/respecing is for "immersion" and not for mechanics.

But the game is mod-able and has a customized difficulty, so I think this point isn't really a failing for the game.

[Gracey Face]

Originally posted by Roknar:

The game does not reward experimentation, at least not in the short term. Take Divinity 2 by comparison. You can freely respec at will and the game is better for it.

The idea of not being able to respec at will being a difficulty option comes from the way there's some feats that are worth taking early on because they make the game easier at that point but are wastes of feat slots later on. The save boosting feats being obvious examples, but there's also things like taking an extra hex feat to get cackle earlier so you can cackle stack basically right out of the gate.. You trade off lategame power for earlygame power.

Being able to respec removes choices like this and means you can get the best of both worlds. While I personally think being able to respec at any point is the best option there is a good reason for stopping it.

[Chronocide]

Originally posted by Gracey Face:

Originally posted by Roknar:

The game does not reward experimentation, at least not in the short term. Take Divinity 2 by comparison. You can freely respec at will and the game is better for it.

The idea of not being able to respec at will being a difficulty option comes from the way there's some feats that are worth taking early on because they make the game easier at that point but are wastes of feat slots later on. The save boosting feats being obvious examples, but there's also things like taking an extra hex feat to get cackle earlier so you can cackle stack basically right out of the gate.. You trade off lategame power for earlygame power.

Being able to respec removes choices like this and means you can get the best of both worlds. While I personally think being able to respec at any point is the best option there is a good reason for stopping it.

As an aside, I think the current respec system wouldn't be good if it were something you could do constantly, not for the obvious reasons, but it seems to reset your alignment choices each time you respec.

Honestly, kinda annoying that it doesn't lock you into the alignment you currently are based on your choices, when respecing.

[THAC0]

Originally posted by Roknar:

TL;DR;
If you think the game is too hard, just keep going and/or start a new play-through.
It's very hard on a blind first play through, but once you know what's coming, it's a cakewalk. So I guess "git gud" applies?

-----

I just finished playful darkness on my second play-through and it really hit home what I hear people say. I keep seeing these conflicting messages.

On the one hand you see countless threads about how ridiculously hard the game is.
And yet, you see an equal amount of people saying how easy it is. Well, turns out they are both right.

My first play-through was on daring and I had on ok time, except for some stupidly high difficulty spikes. Kenabres especially was really hard and some encounters like that brimorak were unwinnable. I was ONLY able to beat it by cheesing it until Lann got a lucky opening crit, Those things with sunder? kicking my ass. Dretches giving me nightmares, etc... So I try to survive those...only to learn later they basically only exist in kenabres -_-

Later things settled down a bit, occasionally I had to go out of my way to rest and prepare for an encounter to have a chance at beating it, but I was getting stronger.
Then playful darkness happened......what...the....hell?

I don't know how often I had to reset that fight and when I finally won? I had gone through all my rez scrolls, literally all my summons, including level 1 giant rat equivalent scrolls , 70% of my party was dead (some twice over) and even then I only barely squeezed out a win by the skin of my teeth. So yea, I was cursing the difficulty of the game..that was not fun anymore. Everything was missing, only hitting on natural 20ies, which it then even ignores 75% of the time!... (act5 was still still a blur though because of persuasion 3, barely had to actually fight....)

Then on the second playthough I wanted to to make a graversinger play-though with legend, knowing I would get that early. And my entire party was built around having a chance against playful darkness. I wanted to do it legit. Just a chance though, I refuse to do random dips or take non nonsensical domains. So I went and made a rovagug centered party.

Finally! A chance to use destruction domain. Always avoided that because I thought it was suicide to give enemies more damage....Fast forward to playful darkness, on core, so should be even harder.

I buff up as far as possible, charge in...aaaaand my tank pretty much one-shots it?
....wait, what? I have neither guarded hearth nor lethtal/reckless stance, and yet I was able to have guaranteed hits on it (had mark of justice but I had that last playthrough too).

the whole game so far has been a breeze. Bosses especially are basically a joke, the random encounters are much harder as I am usually exhausted and out of buffs with a pretty martial heavy list. I am finding myself at a point now where I am seriously considering unfair because of how easy this is.

I never thought a second playthough would be this drastically different.
At every point I have been wiping the floor with the encounters that I struggled with first.

I think ppl complain about the differcult becouse there not use to a proper RPG over-all
yeah demons are hard some fights are hard
a proper RPG should have a wide varity of combat encounters some should be ez AF
some should be differcult
Defending w.e its called in Chapter 1 i honestly didnt find that bad I like it yeah its a jump in differculty over-all but its fun AF if you ask me, I like the change of pace made me feel like im in a warzone that there is indeed sieges and a number of things i gotta adapt to

[THAC0]

Originally posted by Chronocide:

Originally posted by Gracey Face:

The idea of not being able to respec at will being a difficulty option comes from the way there's some feats that are worth taking early on because they make the game easier at that point but are wastes of feat slots later on. The save boosting feats being obvious examples, but there's also things like taking an extra hex feat to get cackle earlier so you can cackle stack basically right out of the gate.. You trade off lategame power for earlygame power.

Being able to respec removes choices like this and means you can get the best of both worlds. While I personally think being able to respec at any point is the best option there is a good reason for stopping it.

As an aside, I think the current respec system wouldn't be good if it were something you could do constantly, not for the obvious reasons, but it seems to reset your alignment choices each time you respec.

Honestly, kinda annoying that it doesn't lock you into the alignment you currently are based on your choices, when respecing.

think most ppl would hate that
if they gave you an option that be fine
the reason why ppl would hate that is this games alignment system (and kingmakers) is ♥♥♥♥ bad / terrible.
there are jokes and memes about how bad it is especly in kingmaker

[D-Black Catto]

Originally posted by THAC0:

Originally posted by Chronocide:

As an aside, I think the current respec system wouldn't be good if it were something you could do constantly, not for the obvious reasons, but it seems to reset your alignment choices each time you respec.

Honestly, kinda annoying that it doesn't lock you into the alignment you currently are based on your choices, when respecing.

think most ppl would hate that
if they gave you an option that be fine
the reason why ppl would hate that is this games alignment system (and kingmakers) is ♥♥♥♥ bad / terrible.
there are jokes and memes about how bad it is especly in kingmaker

most people are fine with alignment system, and it was actually much better in kingmaker

you're just pushing your own agenda here

[Chronocide]

Originally posted by THAC0:

the reason why ppl would hate that is this games alignment system (and kingmakers) is ♥♥♥♥ bad / terrible.

Issue with the classic 9 alignment system, or with the implementation in the pathfinder games?

If you've an issue with the 9-alignment system, like D&D uses, to each their own, met lots of folks that hated it, though I like it.

As for the pathfinder implementation, I think the alignment system got kinda screwed up because they alignment locked several races/classes, which results in players playing other alignments and trying to find excuses why their out of alignment behavior "counts" as that alignment.

Like my demon should be evil because my behavior is evil, not because as a demon I can be nothing else. Creates the need to justify good behavior as some form of advanced evil, since I can't deviate from my assigned evil alignment.

Paladin players in particular, are just the worst examples of lawful good.