Wednesday, August 26, 2026
Buffed
In Wrath of the Righteous, I am now level 15, and in the early phases of act 4. As I certainly mentioned several times over the years, I am not a big fan of D&D/Pathfinder systems above level 10. They generally don't scale very well, and tend to get a bit silly. This is even worse in Wrath of the Righteous, where in addition to regular levels you also get mythic ranks, which are even more powerful. Now your mythic path can work more or less well with your class. And every combination can break the game in a different way. If I had for example played a necromancer wizard with a lich mythic path, the story of how I am overpowered would be a different one. But here is my example, of a cleric (crusader) on the angel mythic path.
The idea of the crusader cleric is to have a cleric that is reasonably good at melee combat. Now besides healing, clerics have a lot of buff spells. Those either make you just plain stronger, or they protect you in some way against various negative status effects. In the Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous games that normally results in a game loop where if you unexpectedly encounter an overly strong enemy that does something like poison your whole group and you lose the fight, you will reload and do much better on the second try. Because if you know what that enemy is doing, you can put that specific anti-poison buff on your group. But as there are quite a lot of different status effects you could protect against, and the buffs don't last forever, it is unlikely that you will have the correct protection spell on you when you meet an unknown enemy.
My angel cleric breaks that system. The mythic path allowed me to take the mythic abilities "enduring spells" and "greater enduring spells". That means that any buff with a duration of more than 5 minutes now lasts 24 hours. And the abundant casting mythic abilities increase the number of spells that I can cast every day. Plus the angel mythic path gives even more powerful buffs and increases my cleric caster level, allowing me to cast higher level spells. The overall result is that I can now put a whopping 20+ different buffs on my whole group for 24 hours, increasing their combat stats and protecting them from basically every status effect in the game. And my main character has some additional personal buffs that turn him into a fighting machine. Plus he doesn't have to cast buffs during combat anymore, so he has more turns in which he can hit enemies. And the other group members are also putting out more damage, because it doesn't happen anymore that they are disabled or weakened by some status effect, plus they have some positive buffs making them stronger.
Now act 4 of Wrath of the Righteous is pretty tough in some spots, and being overpowered sometimes actually feels necessary. But personally I don't enjoy that sort of high-level gameplay all that much. At lower levels I used to sneak into rooms to see what enemies were in there, and then cast the right buff for every situation. Now I just have every possible buff on the whole party all the time and just don't care what special status effect attacks the enemies have. So although I very much enjoy playing Wrath of the Righteous and played over 200 hours already, I am still pondering whether I want to finish act 4 and 5 to get to the end of the game, or whether combat at the highest level is just too silly.
