Would people recommend Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous for someone who was just "okay" with Kingmaker, prefers turn-based to RTWP, and doesn't like individual combat encounters lasting more than 2.5 hours?
I like what I see online about the choices and build options, but I am worried the length of combat and the overall crunchiness of the Pathfinder system might make the game too time-consuming.
I am playing it now! I am in Act 3. I skipped Kingmaker, though, so can't say how it compares to that. I am playing a sylvan sorcerer with a great pet named Leaf. I am playing in turn-based mode on normal difficulty. Some of the battles are a bit long. I like it well enough, though, that I will probably finish it. I don't do any prebuffing, which seems fine on normal (maybe it makes some fights longer, though?).
Best part so far: Mythic paths: I picked Azata, which is great! I get a cute pet dragon and can make plants grow everywhere.
Worst part so far: Traveling on the map + resting system + encumbrance. Anytime you want to go anywhere, you have to travel on a map with lots of random encounters. You also often need to rest when traveling on the map, and of course, resting has random encounters, too! This is all before you can even start a quest. You can build some fast travel teleportation circles, but they take forever to build in multiple places and also have a cooldown. Once when I was leaving an area, it said I couldn't leave unless I dropped some loot!
Writing: Quests are well done. Dialogue is mixed. I would like more dialogue with companions in general (other than banter) and the romance didn't have much content so far. On the other hand some noncompanion npcs have walls of text for dialogue. Full voice acting would have really helped them cut down on those wall-of-text dialogues!
My understanding is that the romances in WotR really get going only in Act 5. But the problem is that some of the dialogue choices you make in the early Acts with the potential romance companions matter in how the romance works.
Yes fatigue and resting on the world map are a serious pain. Totally agree. For encumbarnce, there is an option to make it not affect your movement in Settings. But your total carrying capacity will still remain limited by your party's total strength. So belts of strength are good even for the caster types in your party.
Originally Posted by The Red Queen
I confess I ran out of steam I think around half way through Kingmaker, despite the fact that there was loads about it that I liked. I found the timed quests stressful, but the thing that finished me off was a couple of areas with loads of fights with generic enemies that took absolutely ages and lots of micromanagement. I think the final straw was an area with tons of electricity spamming wisps.
I suspect part of my problem was that my characters weren’t built very well, as while I found the interface that showed class progression to help with levelling up was very good (hopefully the BG3 full release will have something similar), the sheer variety was bewildering and I probably made some poor multi-classing decisions not knowing the ruleset. And reading this thread I may not have been doing enough pre buffing either.
But thanks to suggestions here, I might give it another go and just crank the difficulty down to make it less frustrating!
The way to get through those painful areas in the final Act of Km is to turn the difficulty all the way down, including setting enemy damage all the way down, and then just blasting your way through those areas.
Yeah, character creation, including how you level up your companions, is very critical in the Pathfinder games, and can be very daunting because of the incredible range of character development choices and paths available. For both games, I highly recommend their guides on Neoseeker (their Fextralife pages can be very useful too), especially to help with at least building your companions in an optimal way, so that even if your PC is non-optimal your party will still be strong and awesome.
