Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous vs BG3

Well Yes I enjoyed Morrowind as well and I'm looking what what the next one will be that they are currently working on for 6th as they did announce that there would be another one.

Skyrim and Morrowind are not quite the same. They are first person fantasy games more akin to Call of Duty and such. I am comparing current tabletop RPG turned into video games.

I haven't played Solasta, but BG3 definitely > PF: WotR

Yeah, I have to admit I certainly prefer BG3 so far. Pathfinder is repetitive and utterly crap writing.

Never liked Skyrim a single bit, in general, but I'm more specifically very confused in how it does even begin to fit in this direct comparison.

Even if it was going to, by loosing up the parameters a whole freaking lot, there would be probably other 10-15 titles of the last decade alone that I would put above it.

I've been playing so much BG3 that I neglected Solasta, so I haven't beaten it yet, but so far, it is definitely better than PF. I was fighting 2 minotaurs last night and thought about the minotaur fight in BG3. Solasta's minotaur fight was 1,000 times better. My characters were level 6, I snuck up on them, got surpise round, killed one before they got a chance to act, but that sucker took 2 fireballs and a Guiding Bolt, plus my ranger had 2 attacks with his heavy crossbow and Hunters Mark. But when the second charged my dwarf cleric after stomping his foot and roaring... Awesome! That's how a minotaur should act. Not jumping around like Hulk and doing a Hulk smash and getting like a million attacks.

Anyway, back to PF. So frustrated with it right now. Can't figure out what to do now, wandering aimlessly, running into enemies that are too tough. I'm about ready to just stop playing.

That is because Solasta plays as D&D is meant to be played. I liked the combat in that game so much that I want random encounters to trigger when travelling, whereas in PF I always roll my eyes. That coming from someone who does not like TB that much.

Still do not understand why people are so adamant about keep playing without touching the difficulty options if they are not enjoying the game. It´s one of the few games that have so many options to customize your experience. I understand if you may not like the tabletop ruleset, or a party-based game, do not like the story etc, but if the problem is that the encounters are too tough... but well, to each their own.

Bg3 still have time and wiggle to improve but right now I´m going for PF: WoTR. The character creation system and combat rules of the former are too simplistic and monotone for my tastes (I do not even blame Larian, it´s a 5e thing. It works well in the tabletop, but it's a little lacklustre for videogames, at least for me. It also happened to me in Solasta) and I do not think that is going to change in the final version of Bg3.
The environmental interactions are superb and fun to play tho. I also find their depiction of the Sword coast very faithful to the original, with lots of easter eggs and lore about other campaigns and characters.

What I found in WotR are lots of ways of roleplay, unique dialogues, world reaction to your choices, the characters and interactions with NPCs and companions (To be fair WotR has much more and the Mythic paths have their own story). That´s one of the things I enjoy the most about games, replaying the game and find different dialogues or different paths depending on your choices, like in Alpha protocol, tyranny, etc.
I do not know how it´s going to be in BG3. Still have hope for the game. It's still a beta.

But right now I played the druid beta of Bg3, didn´t touch the game in months. Finished Solasta twice, never played it again. Black geyser keep me entertained until I started Wotr. I have more hours in Wasteland 3 than in the other two combined.
Right my hours of WotR have three digits, so I think my preference is clear. I have to say I also played a lot the first game, mostly the endless dungeon after finishing the game several times.

In the end, I´m overall overjoyed about the RPG titles coming this year. We were in a time of a new golden age for CRPGs, with many titles coming. I thought at first that they were going to overlap, but so far we could play the beta of Bg3, enjoyed Wasteland 3 , then Solasta and the Black geyser beta, and now I assume we could play PF:WoTR until bg3 comes later on.
In the end, I didn´t even have to choose. Just save money ( a lot). As Tali would say, Still totally worth it.

To each their own. We all have our personal preferences. For me (and judging BG3 by what I've seen of the game without having yet played it myself):
P:WotR > Black Geyser > BG3 > Solasta (with BG3 edging out Solasta only because it is set in the Forgotten Realms)

In my experience (currently act iv) it pays off to have at least one character who can reliably touch ac. Because the bloat on normal ac gets ridiculous in this game, while touch ac remain relatively low. My party just fought an enemy with 71 normal ac and 17 touch ac. To hit something like that with fighters you need to know how to raise the numbers yourself, whereas e.g. a grenadier alchemist will have no issue. Bombs target touch ac, ignore spell resistance, with the ascendant element feat ignore energy resistance, so about the only thing the enemy can do is reflex save.

For defense, it's the same as in PK: the animal companion is the cheapest option. With items and buffing you can get the ac very high on some of them (the triceratops looks bulky, though I haven't tested it). Easiest to get one is through Seelah, as she can choose a horse. Alternatively, Lann can be easily made into a druid.

Pro tip: There is a difficulty option to remove the inflated stats of the monsters in the game, keeping the other difficulty options, something that makes the "bloat gets ridiculous" a moot point.

nevertheless, as said above, kineticists, alchemists and many spells target touch AC, you can pick mythic feats to ignore energy resistances, using the two companions or the classes with ac debuffs, like hexes or slayer/rogue combat skills, and pilling buffs and resistances usually makes your job easier.
Do not be afraid to use scrolls, potions or wands for particular combat situations ( death guard, stoneskin, delay poison, protection from energy/evil, remove paralysis, restoration, etc) You even have Nenio, that is a specialist making scrolls that you can even use at camp even if it´s not in your party.

Haven't played Black Geyser recently.

Enjoyed it but waiting.

Little thing I find odd:

I mentioned before but the spoiler regarding Lord Espen.

Also I think the chest in your room could've had more class specific equipment.

Also they're going to be adding it in the future but as of now when you pick up scrolls, probably other items as well, it doesn't say which class can use them.

People do have a point in regard to PF's difficulty because enemy stats are in fact inflated even on normal difficulty. I remember being so frustrated when fighting mandragora swarms that I went to look its stats on the PnP, and not only the enemy was way weaker, the XP gain in the game was literally 1/60 of the PnP. However, PF is such a crazy system that if you know to character build the inflated stats don't matter in the late game, my character could pretty much kill any boss in the game in 1 round playing on Hard.

The reason is that I like to play based on the legit D&D rules that were created for all players for tabletop. I am used to the ruleset. Of course, I haven't used 3.5e in a long time, but I like to play the games by the rules, not dumbed down versions of the rules that are created so that I can actually get through the game without save-scumming.

I have an issue with it because I'm a DM. So, as a DM, I have game sessions with players, and I fashion encounters based on the actual D&D rules. I don't create crazy, over the top encounters for each encounter so that they need to do a long rest afterwards in order to keep going.

The whole point of an RPG, and the whole point of a cRPG, should be that you are immersing yourself into the ROLE of a certain character or characters. You are becoming that person. It is called a ROLEPLAYING GAME so you can PLAY the ROLE of said character and experience as best you can what they are experiencing.

It drives me crazy when cRPG's make encounters so tough you have to save and replay the fights over and over again because it completely destroys the immersion. In tabletop, you can't reload, so DM's need to be careful so that they don't kill their players with the encounters they create. They need to craft them carefully so that they are challenging and fun, but not death defying each and every time. That's part of being a good DM.

It should be no different in cRPGs. If the developers do a good enough job at encounter building, players should be able to play through the game without needing to save scum using standard, D&D rules. Yes, there definitely should be an encounter or two here or there where you might be glad you are playing a cRPG and not a tabletop so you can save and reload if you die, but it shouldn't be a frequent occurrence. Save scumming in a cRPG should be more for those rare encounters that are climactic and end-chapter or end-game. I should not be save scumming because I visited some random sight and fought a pack of wolves with my level 6 characters, but the wolves are kicking my butt so hard that I had to save scum to beat it and had to replay the encounter AGAINST WOLVES like a dozen times.

I like Solasta because it has really done a phenomenal job at implementing the D&D 5e rules with balanced encounters. As I'm playing through the game, there has been 1 encounter so far that I save scummed because I couldn't figure out how to defeat the primary enemy. I had to look it up, and when I did I realized I was an idiot and wasn't thinking about a certain something I should have been thinking about. Once I realized that it was knowledge error, I realized that the encounter was totally doable if I'd just been thinking it through more carefully.

That's how it should be. Challenging encounters where there are times my characters almost died, but it was not the norm. But then, Solasta implemented difficulty settings so that if that's not hard enough for you, you can crank it up a notch or two and REALLY make it hard for you. They also dumbed it down with certain settings too, so that the actual, legit 5e rules are the normal, balanced encounters, and the difficulty settings make it easier or harder depending on your preference.

I REALLY want Larian to do this with BG3. I do not like that in order to make it bearable to play Pathfinder, I have to dumb it down and not use traditional 3.5e rules. I know the rules. I've played the game. The encounters are set too tough (or my game is glitching too much) if I can buff my AC to 25 and petty wolves are killing me by rolling 8 or higher. That's nuts, and no fun.

They say what characters are able to use them if you look at them closely and the ones you cannot use are in red. but if you want an improved version that marks the ones you can use in green you may want to check https://github.com/cstamford/WOTR_EnhancedInventory

Makes sense since many spells are shared in several spellbooks, and you have your usual spellbook and the Mythic spellbooks.

With enough "use magic item", you can usually use all types.




The chest in your room´s equipment depends on the game option you choose. If you are a beta tester, a Kickstarter backer, etc.



I also DM´d and I am also aware that the difficulty perceived depends on the player. If you are playing tabletop you can modify the difficulty to suit your players. In a videogame, since you do not have a human DM, you can use the settings to pick your preferred poison.

I do not think there is such thing as "Play the games by the rules" in RPG. Even in tabletop campaigns you modify the encounters depending on how many players you have, the classes or the type of players you have... even the manuals of the campaigns usually offer choices to make changes, the core manuals refer itself as guidelines, not The Bible.

Some people have reported that the difficulty settings don't change the spell resistance on enemies. I'd need to test it, but if true it'd put the "just lower the difficulty" into question if it is your spellcasters who are struggling to land a spell.

As for defensive buffs, they don't always work as advertised, because some enemy abilities seem to be bugged and get through. The explanation I've seen is that they lack proper tags, e.g. a fear effect is not tagged as such.

A pity you do not have spells that ignore enemy spell resistance in the videogame or feats and race or class features to improve your chances to ... hey wait!

PD: I checked and you were right, the Spell resistance is static despite your game options. The other stats of the enemies, number and frequency, the abilities they use, etc you can change.

Compared to all the spells that don't? It's the same as with attacks, there are fewer attacks and abilities that target touch ac vs.normal ac. Not every spellcaster class is a wizard with multiple pit spells. So you either stack the numbers youtself, or use the few abilities & spells that don't require excessive number stacking. Because the underlying issue is that enemy design in WotR is very repetitive; there is no variation to this "bloat the stats" theme. I'm in act iv and combat has long gotten stale.

That pretty much sums up my feelings as well. With Playful Darkness the way to beat it is either:

a. make build that can beat it

b. use summon spam to defeat its "always hits, always kills its opponent" stats

And summon spam screws with my roleplay. Sending in forest of trees to die messes with the whole rejuvenating the land theme they've got going with the Azata path. It's just different type of play. "Start the battle, inspect the enemy, F8, spend 7 minutes buffing yourself, go in and beat the baddy because I've gotten gud!" It's fun but it's not immersive, it's not BG2 like.

And know this may sound silly to some but I never liked the 3.5 summons. Sending in a pack of dogs or a badger into die feels wrong. I get it, if you are good why would you be summoning monsters to fight for you but in 2nd ed / BG2 I had no problem using hobgoblins as cannon fodder.

Had similar issues with PoE. The endless paths dragon and the titan were stupidly hard. I know optional bosses are optional but when you're obsessive, things aren't optional ; I finished Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor for crissake.

Well sure. And I give credit to Paizo and Owlcat for setting up the rules so you still have fun feats after you've paid your feat tax. I never hit spell resistance because I've built that way. But it just underlines that a 3.5 mage needs to get to level 12 before it becomes functional.

But the DCs on some spells needs to change. Casting 16 -- not an exaggeration -- versions of remove curse to transform your party member from a dog to a human just isn't fun. Will I get the 20 this time? No! Do I sleep and keep up roleplay or do just break immersion and save scum . . .

So far for me in terms of quality its:

BG2ee > BG3 = Solasta (each has its strengths) > Pathfinder > DOS2