T w e n t y S i d e d
I got nothing this week.
I played a few rounds of Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, not anything new.
The only other thin I’ve had time for was working on my GED. I’ve gotten most of it done, I’m just working on reading literacy and writing.
Anyone else doing anything interesting?
How to Forum
Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things when you talk to each other.
Who Broke the In-Game Economy?
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
The Best of 2017
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
Mass Effect Retrospective
A novel-sized analysis of the Mass Effect series that explains where it all went wrong. Spoiler: It was long before the ending.
Ludonarrative Dissonance
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
More Star Wars: Zero Company. Still generally enjoying the game, still have some complaints. There was a mission that annoyed me (and caused my first reload) because it had an enemy who would counter all attacks by meleeing. “No problem”, I thought to myself, “I’ll attack from on top of a building”. Cue the enemy running up and attacking me on the building. Ok, next up I tried from the middle of the building. Still got hit with a melee attack. Ok, time to be clever, I’ll overwatch them, it’s really powerful against melee enemies in this game. Nope, didn’t even go off. Anyway, I got past that and otherwise it’s been fine.
Anakin is in the game, which is actually pretty reasonable given the time it’s in and what you’re doing. I could have done with him complimenting the main character OC do not steal a bit less. Ah well, he was very amusing in gameplay. This isn’t a game that usually hits 3 digits of damage.
The game gave me a really massive powerup by letting people have secondary classes. Feels good.
While I do enjoy the operations that you can do between real missions, I wish that more of them explained their rewards. Like, I’m not actually making a strategic decision when I can spend 50 intel on operation A and get [unknown reward] or 75 intel on operation B and get [unknown reward].
I also played through Delete. If you’ve ever played minesweeper and thought it could be a good game if it just didn’t suck, this is the game for you. Same basic rules as minesweeper but it takes it into the third dimension (so you’re selecting faces as mine or not and adjacencies can get funky, luckily if you click on a numbered space it tells you what faces it’s measuring), the levels are fixed (so you’re never stuck in a 50/50 with no way of telling which is correct), and there are a few other twists like, for example, being able to twist part of the level. The downside of the fixed levels is the game is ~2 hours long but it’s also very cheap so whatever.
In Palworld we tried to defeat the shrine boss and got squashed. I’m now doing side missions until the next attempt.
In Scrap Mechanic I could cheese the second trashbot battle the same way, I could cheese the first. All you need is a few seats to get back to the elevator and you can ignore all the bullet hell stuff. Then I tried to build a flyer, but I’m missing a few component kits to level up the thrusters to level 5.
Also starting Forza Horizon 5. It takes some time until you finally can run in a normal race. “I have an hour. Let’s try a few rounds” wasn’t going to happen. I hate the wheelspin progression system. All you get for being good at racing is random bullshit faster. So racing and winning is almost unnecessary in this racing game. The rewards being randomized or gifted for no particular reason robs the player all agency progressioning.
At leas the driving feels good and the map is beautiful to look at.
Baldur’s Gate 3 continues, very, very slowly. I think all I did this week was invade the house of a small child, embarrass him at hide and seek, and then kill his dog. (He seems to have disappeared afterward. Maybe I didn’t embarrass him at hide and seek after all.) We also let a fairy out of a lamp, and then reloaded and didn’t let a fairy out of a lamp. But that means I’m in the same place I was last week, with a fairy in a lamp.
Brotato may have finally hit a tipping point; I slammed my face against Artificer long enough to knock down Nightmare, and then quickly followed it with a Nightmare Ranger victory, meaning all the characters I wanted Nightmare clears with now have Nightmare clears. I’ve faced Abyss Wave 17 enough times to be fully convinced it’s deeply unfair garbage, and have decided that level is bad enough by itself to never play on Nightmare again. So back to happy and healthy Level 5 runs with Doctor.
I also had the boy disappear, claiming I’d failed, that quest seems a little buggy. As for the fairy I would
let them out, it’s zero downside all-upside, if you want that information.Replayed Thronebreaker. Damn I love that game. Possibly my favorite of the Witcher titles.
DiRT Rally 2.0 dailies (the problem I had with winnings not getting paid out has been fixed), other than that I’ve been flip-flopping back and forth between Nioh 2 (first Nioh game I’ve played, a bit easier than Dark Souls but also somewhat more complicated), which really makes me work to get the rust off, and Dragon’s Dogma 2, which does various things differently than DD1 but by and large it’s an improvement (no more having to plan out your build before you even start if you want to get strong enough to beat the superboss, but unfortunately no more Double Vault); and I really love DD1, so I’m really loving DD2.
I didn’t get the time to play anything this week. I did manage to do a bit of setup for an Arkham Horror Second Edition Board Game PBF that I’m running, and a Battlestar Galactica Board Game PBF that I’m in is building towards a conclusion (in that one, I played a Cylon Leader but at this point I have no possible way to meet my objectives, so I decided to just help the sole Cylon win, since that’s what most of my motives are about anyway. It’s pretty tight.)
Spent last week dealing with replacing a water heater that randomly died (on top of teaching classes), so what with desperately grading homework over the weekend to catch up I didn’t have much time to play. I notched up another victory in Terraformers for the exclusive scenario that comes with owning all three DLCs, where you turn one of Mars’ moons into an interstellar colony ship. I’m slowly working my way up the difficulty levels for that one, it’s the last scenario left for me to beat at every difficulty. It’s fun because where most of the scenarios are about focusing on one particular aspect of the game, this one specifically requires you to progress on the systems added by all three DLCs simultaneously.
Also finished the final level of the fan-made campaign Baz’s Mod in Manic Miners, the fan-made LEGO Rock Raiders remake (which I encourage people to check out, it’s a fantastic remake and still holds up well). The final mission in the original game requires you to collect 50 energy crystals; in Baz’s Mod it’s 350 crystals. But while with 50 crystals you can hide them away by 2s and 3s around the map with the occasional seam of 4 and still have it be a fun treasure hunt (especially because you can have more than 50 total on the map so the player doesn’t have to find every single one), with 350 you basically have to include a massive dump of them somewhere (unlike anything the base game had), which can only be found after digging up pretty much everything diggable on the map (which gets boring), and which really only serves to artificially inflate the time it takes to complete the level.
Overall it wasn’t terrible, but I have a newfound respect for the original game designers. As a kid I thought I wanted longer levels with a higher crystal collection requirement; now I know I definitely didn’t.
(WotR) I figured out what spell Sosiel was taking those Spell Focus Conjuration/Greater feats for! He takes the greater one at 11th, the same level he gets access to Chains of Light: a spell that ‘paralyzes’ (because this game equates physical constraint with bodily shutdown) the target, specifically themed around use against Demons and such, and it has SR:no! Now, don’t ask me why the chains of magical light are considered non magical when previous spells such as Constricting Chains and Vinetrap that transmute or conjure physical matter are foiled by spell resistance, because the answer is that no one thought it was important to do a sanity pass on how any of their spells work, obviously.
So I let him take his derpy feat, loaded him up with Greater Commands and Chains of Light and Divine Power, put him on the Triceratops (now “Large”, as in it’s clearly taking up Huge space but they’re only giving it Large modifiers), grabbed Nenio to try out her newly metamagic’d and filled out suite of illusions, and set forth. To Wintersun!
And if you know what’s in Wintersun, you’ll know why that was a bad idea. It’s full of mind-immune trees, animals with lol hit dice and thus like +25 on all saves, and of course a few demons. Despite having Seelah with Greater Aura of Courage one of the dumb trees hit half my party with Fear, causing them to run into a more trees and also a gang of rangers and “slayers” and a druid, as I eventually reload after Ember dies, I pick her back up, she dies again, and I spam through forgetting to pick her up, and reload. That one group of humans is the only target in the region that the illusions and slumber hex I brought work on, and they have to be hard smashed with multiple AoE disables so they don’t just machine gun someone down, while hiding behind their own Mass Stoneskin. That went well (after reload), but the rest of the zone was a total slog. Got an even more broken summon boosting item, which then made me fight a lv17 druid ghost four different times, because someone thought that would be fun, and I did all four fights without remembering I did have exactly one ghost touch weapon in the party. This did cause me to discover that Seelahs Mark of Justice ability, which acts as “Smite” Evil but the whole party gets the benefit, has some real BG3 coding- it boosts the damage of each individual Magic Missile. And I am now *thoroughly* sick of all their Ancient Sarkoris stuff, having done this zone immediately after the Last Sarkovian DLC, which is a problem ’cause I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a big factor in everything from now on.
I also suspect that I’m noticing something I may have also noticed in Kingmaker: these mobs are way too powerful for one of the first three quests they give you for this act, indeed, the closest nearby. Sounds like auto-scaling, sigh.
Confirming that you can only rebuild characters back to the level you got them, and thus Sosiel only down to 6th (and his first mythic is hard-picked as well), I tried setting him up with Sorcerous Reflexes and Ascendant Summons, and yeah it worked fine. But still something’s off. I only really did one fight after that so I can roll back and try something else, probably that suggestion of a domain to get him his own mount. They’re broken as hell, but they’re also fun and not in any other games so might as well go all-out. If I knew when the next mythic point was (deliberately not looking it up, yet), I might have him take the first half of 24hr spell just to setup, as I am getting tired of having to watch buff timers.
Regarding my own build, playing Sosiel makes me wish I’d gone Herald Cleric, but then I remember the only reason he can have such simple prep lists is because I’m the one carrying all the needed immunity and status removal spells, spontaneously. Creeping Doom rather annoys me, because 3.5 very specifically made them centipede swarms, and these are spider swarms. Due to the game letting the swarms gang up (and whatever stats they’ve assigned), they are quite effective though, particularly as I have little that works against sufficiently high AC and swarms don’t need attack rolls. Woljif was kinda setting up for that, but as I’ve said he annoys me now, and he doesn’t have enough spell pen anyway: touch spell sneak attack doesn’t work if SR.
Last time I played it paralysis was kinda OP in WotR because a paralysed character/enemy could be instakilled by inflicting any amount of DEX damage.
And yeah, mounts are roughly as good in WotR as they are in Mount and Blade.
I kind of like the idea of Conjuration spells ignoring Spell Resistance. The spell part of a conjuration is actually creating the thing (like a ball of acid), then the damage is caused by hitting someone with said acid. You do less damage, but that’s the tradeoff.
You could immediately say “hey, doesn’t an Evocation spell conjure flame/frost/etc, which are also a normal, non-magical things?’ to which I guess the only answer is Shut Up, Nerd. And then there’s spells like Vinetrap and Constricting Chains which don’t count, because reasons.
Still, I think the idea’s neat. It’d certainly annoy me if an enemy failed to fall into a pit that opened up beneath them because of Spell Resistance.
It’s so weird that Acid Arrow ignores SR and Acid Fog does not.
This is where you need a director- a mechanical director (rather than an art or sound etc director). Once upon a time Spell Resistance meant resistance to spells: I suspect pre-3.x the only way to ignore SR was to convince the DM your harebrained scheme should work. Then someone decided some spells should be non-magical enough to ignore spell resistance, likely based on such previous rulings. Then someone decided there should actually be a bunch of spells that ignore SR, because it’s not fair that the poor spellcasters have to make attack rolls for their spells to work- and while obviously everyone else has to do that for all their attacks, there is some merit to the idea, since spells are a limited daily resource that is expected to work, and heading into 3.5 they were getting rid of doublecasting via Haste so you’d only get one chance per round (seriously, no one had *any idea* how many things that “obvious fix” to Haste was going to touch). Particularly for their upcoming attempt at a minature line where they wanted things to both use the incredibly complex ruleset and also be simple enough for a mini’s game.
Thus, we get the Miniatures Handbook with its Warmage and the Orbs, dictating that forevermore any Conjuration spell that deals damage should obviously ignore SR. And to their credit, most of the non-Orb spells that do so take significant penalties in exchange. But what about Transmutations? No, ignoring SR is for Conjuration, not Transmutation, bad! What about those Evocation spells that are clearly Conjuring physical matter? What about the Conjuration spells that are clearly *not* instantaneously conjuring non-magical physical matter? Summoning spells explicitly *allow* SR. And wait, if that SR:no conjuration works because it makes a real thing exist, that means I should be able to bottle the acid at least.
The correct way to design such spells has nothing to do with the School, and everything to do with the actual mechanical design. If it’s deliberately weaker than SR:yes spells of its level, there you go. If you want an effect to be “non-magical” for style, then it needs to match mechanically. And most importantly, when you’re dragging a bunch of different items from god knows how many authors into a single place, you need to choose and/or edit them so that they work as a cohesive whole. But hey, that would mean a DM actually doing their job, can’t have that.
Vinetrap specifically- Entangle is SR:No. Oh but this is *conjuration*, and on this occasion the writer has decided that means SR:Yes (the scant number of SR:No conjurations in WotR makes the ones they left in even more glaring). And apparently it’s from “Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Chronicle of the Righteous”, and is supposed to have much more complicated gradual effect with three different versions. Of course, Entangle has always had the vague question of whether there needs to be actual vegetation to control (SR:no), of if it transmutes them out of the ground (SR:maybe)- and the version in this videogame absolutely smothers the entire area with an ocean of vines the likes of which I’ve never seen. That’s a conjuration, bub.
Constricting Coils (I misquoted the name)? Sure sounds like a conjuration, but no, it’s Enchantment! It very specifically functions as Hold Monster, except “except that the target is constricted as if by the coils of a large snake” dealing damage. So it is in fact functioning in the videogame the way it was written, it was just written badly to begin with. In “Pathfinder Adventure Path #42: Sanctum of the Serpent God”.
Chains of Light, is apparently *also* functioning as intended, because the PFSRD entry does indeed say it paralyzes. So once again we have a spell written by someone who doesn’t know how to translate ideas into simulation mechanics, this time for “Pathfinder Player Companion: Champions of Purity”.
So we have one spell from what sounds like their version of Book of Exalted Deeds, a fancy (literally) flowery disabling spell too complicated to model in the videogame, one from what is basically the player-version of that book which directly contradicts the function of SR, and one from an extremely specific adventure path that seems to have been written specifically so the bad guys could deal some damage while casting Hold Monster with a name that doesn’t sound anything like what it actually does. All three are found in these two games as essentially core spells, while plenty of *actual* core spells simply don’t exist.
So in a way, the Owlcat Pathfinder games do indeed carry the perfect spirit of “The Game”: a bunch of spells drawn from multiple disparate books, generated and iterated on by god knows how many people, given no sanity check because they’re “official published material”, with all effort put into char-op’ing their PC-classed monster builds to fight the players rather than building a functional base first. Why do we have *four* different spells that Paralyze a Monster? Why are two of them Conjuration, two Enchantment, and one of the Enchantments sounds explicitly like a Conjuration? Why does the most blatantly magical one ignore magic resistance? Because that would have required putting some thought into direction. And this is why it *infuriates* me that these games are so hard to mod, because in tabletop these are all two-word fixes. Anything that runs on a known set of rules like DnD should have its DnD mechanics editable in * notepad*. It’s literally one tiny little flag in a spreadsheet.
(Oh, and Acid Fog? SR:No in both PHB and PFSRD, that one’s entirely on Owlcat).
More broadly, the imbalance is so bad it really does go far past the “there should be some bad choices so good choices matter”. So many things that you can just tell were left exactly as “written” because they didn’t *need* to change it, so they suck (all sorts of spells and feats and features, like basic summon spells), and other things that they needed to change which became ludicrously powerful (mounts and “animate” dead in particular), and yet other things changed or left out for seemingly no reason (no Meteor Swarm? DBF?). But this a core problem (or even feature) of 3.5 and PF. For all people trumpeted it as fixing things, all PF did was make a new pile of stuff that had its ups and downs, then kept remixing it and adding more stuff that jumbled it further.
Like we’ve got this Witch, and Oracle, and Shaman. All have their own little themed lists of things, like Domains except they also control available class features. Many of them have the same names, but are ever so slightly different depending on which class you’re talking about. The spell lists are never quite the same and often take the version of a spell that *doesn’t* match what the list actually does- Tsunami’s untyped damage on a list that’s entirely about dealing *Cold* damage, etc. Nearly identical abilities seem to spin a wheel to decide their action cost, duration, and daily usage limits. Shamans get the insanely powerful Slumber Hex, but not the upgraded version that Witches can have, but that upgrade doesn’t matter- it’s like giving someone Suggestion and not Dominate, for combat purposes there is no difference. I mock PF for its standardization in that they “improved” things by giving everyone more feats, and then giving everyone a menu of class features that was basically more feats, and then letting you mix-and-match those lists., but it turns out when they started making more unique things it actually got worse? Researching to build a character for this game was nuts.
Or the Slayer. It’s what, a “hybrid” fighter/rogue/ranger? It has full BAB, exactly as many “talents” as a Rogue, can trade those talent for Fighter feats if it wants, has 1/3 sneak attack instead of 1/2, and has a “studied target” ability that is the equivalent of free bardsong on themeslves basically all the time except it stacks. It doesn’t’ have the maximum dedicated favored enemy bonus a Ranger could have (and suck against everything else) or a tiny list of insignificant spells, but otherwise it’s basically just taking all the features. Rogue just had their lunch *and* dinner eaten, the only unique thing they seem to have is dex-to damage, with specific chosen weapons, and the Mythic system opens that up to everyone. Might not be as bad in tabletop where you can find some random broken ranger spell and there’s a *couple* more skills so the slayer might not get everything, but here? Well I do at least appreciate that their difficultly rating of 1/4 stars= easy is correct.
This has been another installment of Fizban Complains About DnD.
Don’t forget that Vanguard can give their party 1/2 of their Studied Target bonus for a number of rounds equal to their Intelligence Modifier, kinda making them a Freebooter knock-off trading Ranger Spells for Sneak Attack.
Well… Rogues had their lunch and dinner eaten when Vivisectionists became a thing (Rogue-like BAB and Sneak Attack, but with Alchemist spells and Mutagen? And they can use a Discovery to get Infusion so they become the only class capable of casting Shield on someone else? Not bad). Best thing Rogue offers is a massive amount of skill points, but because the party shares skill check outcomes (if, say, Lann succeeds at an athletics check to climb up to a roof then the entire party ends up on that roof) having lots of skill points to go around isn’t as important as it is in Realms of Arkania (when the party needs to swim every member needs to roll their swim check to avoid drowning).
It was a nice read, thanks for taking the time to type it out, especially considering I know pretty much nothing about Pathfinder PnP (pen and paper, for anyone wondering).
I think I finally got bored of Rimworld. Or, at least, I’m going to have to branch into a whole different set of mods and overhaul the game experience before I get interested again – which might happen, but not any time soon.
So I reinstalled Pathfinder: Wrath of The Righteous, since Fizban’s discussion here has triggered some fond memories. My character’s a Kineticist, which has the benefits of a) being simple (but not too simple) and b) being (I think) a unique idea that doesn’t translate to other systems well*.
I’m also using mods, including one that allows you to fully all companion characters from level one. Partly for experimentation purposes, but also partly for peace of mind: I just can’t be bothered to track 6 party members’ worth of spellbooks, especially as there’s a considerable overlap with what a lot of them do.
So Wolgrif is now a Sword Saint, which is apparently (when well-built) one of the best martial classes in the game. Amusing, because all his combat barks are about how he doesn’t want to fight up front and is scared, while he’s actually one of the best tanks I’ve got.
Similarly, I decided Camellia’s half-caster class was way too much trouble and simply made her an Aldori Swordlord, which sounds cool, kind of fits the character (bored noble takes up fencing to pass the time / hurt people legally) and has an attached prestige class! But it’s underwhelming, mostly because of the way the system handles Weapon Finesse: to use a dexterity weapon properly, you need to buy two feats, or multiclass into being a rogue – and then you can only ever use one weapon type effectively!
Similarly there’s just some feats that are like a ‘tax’: my Kineticist character’s first four feats were decided for them: without Precise Shot and Improved Spell Penetration, they mostly just threw harmless special effects around. And a lot of the enemies are resistant to element damage even if you do hit/get through SR!
Still I’ve gained my first Mythic level now, which gave me Ascenedant Element so no-one can resist my fire blasts. I look forwards to burning a fire elemental to death with it. Similarly, Wolgrif and Camellia can get Mythic Weapon Finesse, which allows they to use their specially-selected weapons properly…
…what I’m saying is that it takes Divine Intervention to fix the flaws in this blasted system.
I’ve been umming and ahing about which mythic path to take. I originally intended the Aeon path, because it allows you to shout ‘YOU’RE LYING!’ at anyone who tells you something other than the objective, technical truth…but I realised that the roleplay is basically that of the Grey Robes/Auditors from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. As in the antagonists from a comedy book series. I’ll probably just go with Angel; it fits what I, personally feel.
*If anyone can think/has heard of of a way to port this concept into D&D 5e, I’d be interested to hear it, but also a bit sceptical.
I think the Kineticist is kinda similar to the Warlock and Dragonfire Adept from 3rd edition DnD; kinda similar is still quite a difference, though. And I don’t know anything about DnD editions after 3.5, so I don’t know how hard it would be to port those to 5th edition.
I think kineticist was based on the 3.5e warlock. They both have at will blasts that they can infuse with various effects. Kineticist has a lot more options though, as well as the burn mechanic that lets them do burst damage when needed.
5e dropped most of the alterations to eldritch blast via invocations and instead just buffed eldritch blast so that its pretty good on its own. Not very much like kineticist anymore though.
Indeed, third agree here- except they entirely missed the point of the Warlock being dead-simple, barely caring about ability scores, and having true at-will abilities. So really not based on the Warlock at all. It might have also had some of Incarnum’s blood in it too, from before they just made a whole not-Incarnum book instead.
More likely it’s just trying to be Avatar: The Last Airbender but also with Burst Damage because everyone knows direct damage spells suck so if you can’t even deal a full 1d6/level/round you’re worse than the worst type of spells and shouldn’t exist. And so they went to one of the standard “extra effort” ideas for when you’re trying to pretend your class doesn’t have its own dedicated resource: con damage (the others are fatigue, and hit points).
I never played or analyzed it myself, but a poster on GitP said Kineticist wasn’t bad, playable, but you had to manage your burn- not in the sense of never taking any, but knowing when and how much to take to get the bonuses out of it.
I suspect in this videogame version, it’s basically Warlock but more complicated.
As for how to port the Kinetiscist to 5e? Pretty sure the entire design is antithetcal. 5e got rid of the entire concept of touch attacks and gave all magic-users scaling at-will “cantrips,” making everyone into the blasting equivalent of a 3.5 Warlock, and rewriting their 5e “Warlock” into something completely different which lacks any of the at-will Spells it used to have. If Kineticist is basically Warlock, yeah it won’t survive the conversion either. Does 5e even have ability damage? Basically you’d set up the “Con damage” as its own mechanic which would jump through a lot of hoops and at the end of the day you’d have something carefully calibrated to have X/short rest uses of a thing that is functionally equivalent to spells, or are literally just spells.
That said, there’s a very high chance that someone on GitP *has* made their own version of a 5e Kineticist, maybe they cracked the code.
I was already aware that the Kineticist needs to roll for SR, but seriously this game is inconsistent. Most of the time it looks like they’ve made what was a common (endorsed by myself as well) decision to make SR Matter Again, putting SR:Yes back onto spells that had it removed and generally making sure that it’s a mechanic which matters. Normally this would be a bad idea in a game which features like 50% monsters with SR, but for those of us who know the mechanics and how SR is usually so easy to avoid, it’s a rather fresh change. But making it so huge only increases the attention- Glitterdust and Web still ignore SR, but the former barely does anything in a game where “blind” merely means 50% miss chance for attack rolls, and the latter’s PF nerf means it basically has attack rolls as a second allowed save. Acid Arrow ignores SR, but Corrosive Touch does not, and both are so heavily resisted they’re useless unless you’ve decided to be an Acid-mancer. The Slumber Hex is MVP specifically because as a Supernatural ability it doesn’t care about SR- but you’d think that the Illusionist’s Blinding Ray basic ability, which only blinds, for a single round, if you land the touch attack, would also be Su. But it is not, apparently (and even on PFSRD) Blinding Ray is Spell-Like, and thus allows SR. Some of those wacky Domain-ish features have their own very specifics Supernatural abilities, which in this game is actually kindof important. . . except not, because all your other spells are going to require SR taxes so you’re going to have them anyway, and by the time you get the good stuff you’ll have the full set.
If the Kineticist ignored SR, in addition to having touch attacks, that would be amazingly useful. As-is, I’ll probably build one at some point or another just to see how it works in the game, but I’ve got my hands full of these idiots already.
Something I *do* like, amidst all this complaining, is that the Angel spells just straight up don’t care about SR. To the point that if I didn’t know this shared most of its spell list with Kingmaker, I would expect they cut all sorts of SR:No blasting spells specifically so that your Mythic spells which ignore SR would be more important. That’s a pretty good choice, making it so that even a buffer/summoner who has no investment in beating SR can use Angel powers to attack anyway, the same way every character is being given summons and buffs from their Mythic lists as well.
I think (I may be completely wrong about this, though, and it may only apply to Kingmaker) that Kineticists only have to roll against SR when they use energy blasts (fire, electric, cold) and not when they use physical blasts (earth, wind, water), with composite blasts only requiring a roll versus SR for the energy component(s) (if any). I also think that physical blasts target regular AC instead of touch AC, which makes things like Eruption and Spray useful despite their reduced damage (at least versus enemies which aren’t likely to make their Reflex save, or which don’t have Evasion and have low enough health that 1/4th of regular blast damage is significant).
Pretty sure angel is the strongest mythic based mostly on spellbook merge and the fact that it ignores SR.
A while ago (long enough that I don’t remember details) I did an unfair playthrough with kineticist. I took two levels of witch of the veil first (for the incredibly broken free action invis that does not cost resources). I say incredibly broken, but there are enough things that see invis that you can still die frequently on unfair.
Anyway, I went with earth to start with. You miss alot in the shield maze, but it hurts less when you can invis after every attempt. Earth gives you access to a load of trip feats, which is nice for control. The trip feats work particularly well with deadly earth, since you can create a zone that trips them over and over again. In Kingmaker it was basically game over when you get deadly earth, but in Wrath getting DC high enough to auto trip everything all the time is tough (plus lots of enemies fly). Its still pretty good.
I took fire as my second element. If you take all the spell penetration feats the energy blasts do alright, but you still get resisted some of the time.
For mythic demon helps you to amp dc’s (for deadly earth, for instance) but I took trickster because I don’t like being evil. The trickster feats were less good on kineticist than on pure melee (like saint) but they still amped my blasts nicely, and I could give them to my party as well.
And I didn’t get it in under the edit window, but: Isn’t Aldori Swordlord locked to the finessable Dueling Sword anyway? The bigger problem is that it’s all about adding more and more Dodge to AC, which is lost if you lose Dex to AC, which means you need Uncanny Dodge. Which is from you guessed it: Rogue. Or Barbarian? Might as well give her the rogue levels.
I’m considering writing a brief guide or two if/when I finish the game: one to write down the default builds for people who want to know them (’cause my searches found nothing), and while I’m at it explain the problem I had ie: they’re literally for easy mode only. And maybe some basic effectiveness builds for the rest of the party- there’s a whole guide on steam for “Thematic Builds,” which sounds a little pretentious and I suspect is a lot more “Build” focused than I would do. If I’m looking to keep the character as unchanged as possible while making them effective above Easy mode, what do?
Which, if their damnable default build system worked intelligently, would let you just change one little thing and not require you to have the entire rest of the build written down oh there goes the rant again. . .
This week, I dusted off the Legend of Zelda: Echos of Wisdom. At first, I thought it was a conflux of new zelda and old zelda, and I couldn’t reconcile that. Now, I’ve come to accept it as its own thing a year after I got it and am going through it at a good clip. It probably helps that it’s from the same team that brought us that Link’s Awakening remake a few years ago.
Also, I had a blast playing Zeroranger with my brother in 2-player mode!