Pathfinder: Wrath of The Righteous (WoTR) is a very impressive Classic RPG. While Kingmaker felt more like a classic fantastical adventure, Pathfinder: Wrath of The Righteous delivers an engrossing and epic campaign, deep lore, and, at times, feels like a power fantasy.
Pathfinder: Kingmaker’s premise feels much more like a classic RPG adventure - the stakes start low, but the story unfolds, and the stakes rise. Wrath of The Righteous already starts with super high stakes, and they only keep increasing. Which isn’t a bad thing, but is a point of contrast between these games.
Enemies tend to have a lot of anti-player bias, frequently walking past your companions to specifically target the player character, even when the player character is not the biggest threat or has the highest Armor Class amongst the party.
The game’s balance is totally centered on min-maxing. To the end of Act 3, and in Act 4 and 5, you face enemies with absurd amounts of Armor Class (AC) and enormous bonus to their attack and damage. Many times, you’ll miss every single attack and have your tanks being one-shot. The game boils down to killing enemies before they can kill you. This makes classes that can deal high amounts of damage from a distance and attack early, like archers, extremely powerful.
The Random Generated Numbers to this game’s mechanics can be frustrating if you’re unlucky. Fortunately, the Story Difficulty in this game seems much more useful than in Kingmaker.
The way the game’s magic work makes it that only about 15% of all magic spells and skills are actually useful, and strategies become extremely limited. Enemies in this game can be put into three categories: cannon fodder, elite and bosses. Cannon fodder are enemies that usually don’t live very long in any battle - they don’t have enough HP or AC to survive, and they don’t have high damage or attack bonuses, meaning they don’t pose much of a threat. Bosses are the most powerful enemies, boasting super high AC, damage and attack bonuses, usually taking a few turns to go down and easily one-shoting every character in your party. Elite are in a spectrum in between cannon fodder and bosses, which means you can find elites with super high AC, attack bonuses and damage to one-shot your characters.
The problem is that most magic is only useful against cannon fodder enemies, exactly the ones you don’t need to use limited resources to deal with. For a spell that, for example, inflicts a debuff on enemies to work, it has to go through two barriers. The first is the spell resistance, which is usually very high on elite enemies and extremely high on bosses, and the second is the actual save the enemy has to do. The problem is that most late game spells have difficulty checks on saves around 32 to 36, but elite enemies and bosses can easily have +40 or higher on saves, effectively making all spells like the one described totally useless against the enemies where they could help.
So, there are actually only four types of spells that are actually worth using, as in, they are reliable: buffing spells, summoning spells, healing spells and Hellfire Ray. Buffing spells allows your characters to reach insane buffs on their attacks, which is mandatory if you actually want to hit enemies. Summoning spells make any boss a cakewalk, as you can just summon an entire army to distract the boss while your damage dealers kill it. Healing spells are good to deal with cannon fodder enemies, as they allow your party to heal from the intermediate damage these enemies do. And Hellfire Ray is a spell that: is easy to use, is single target (no risk of friendly fire), has two types of damage (can more easily bypass resistances), has many casts, is a touch spell (meaning it effectively lowers enemies AC) and, the most important, can do damage even if the enemy succeeds at the save throw, meaning you’ll only have to go through the enemies’ spell resistance to have your spell do something.
So, any boss in this game is beaten by the same strategy: buff your party as much as possible, summon an entire army to distract the boss and have your damage dealers (specially archers) damage the boss while your mages and casters use Hellfire Ray to quicken the process.
The game can be very buggy. It is not uncommon for your spells to just "whiff", specially the ones you have to be close to the target. Although WoTR has noticeable higher production value compared to Kingmaker - there are a few cutscenes that move the camera around and have special animations - they are quite clunky.
There is a disconnect between the actual game and the Crusader Mode. Many times, people state that your funds are low or that your armies are elsewhere, but you have tons of Finance Points and powerful armies that decimate every enemy in their way.
Overall, Pathfinder: Wrath of The Righteous is one of the best, if not the best, CRPG I have played. It has issues, some minor, and some grand, but it is still a very enjoyable experience, providing hundreds of hours of gameplay, due to its absurd amount of variety, in classes, Mythic Paths, role-play opportunities in quests and in the main story.
Pathfinder: Kingmaker’s premise feels much more like a classic RPG adventure - the stakes start low, but the story unfolds, and the stakes rise. Wrath of The Righteous already starts with super high stakes, and they only keep increasing. Which isn’t a bad thing, but is a point of contrast between these games.
Enemies tend to have a lot of anti-player bias, frequently walking past your companions to specifically target the player character, even when the player character is not the biggest threat or has the highest Armor Class amongst the party.
The game’s balance is totally centered on min-maxing. To the end of Act 3, and in Act 4 and 5, you face enemies with absurd amounts of Armor Class (AC) and enormous bonus to their attack and damage. Many times, you’ll miss every single attack and have your tanks being one-shot. The game boils down to killing enemies before they can kill you. This makes classes that can deal high amounts of damage from a distance and attack early, like archers, extremely powerful.
The Random Generated Numbers to this game’s mechanics can be frustrating if you’re unlucky. Fortunately, the Story Difficulty in this game seems much more useful than in Kingmaker.
The way the game’s magic work makes it that only about 15% of all magic spells and skills are actually useful, and strategies become extremely limited. Enemies in this game can be put into three categories: cannon fodder, elite and bosses. Cannon fodder are enemies that usually don’t live very long in any battle - they don’t have enough HP or AC to survive, and they don’t have high damage or attack bonuses, meaning they don’t pose much of a threat. Bosses are the most powerful enemies, boasting super high AC, damage and attack bonuses, usually taking a few turns to go down and easily one-shoting every character in your party. Elite are in a spectrum in between cannon fodder and bosses, which means you can find elites with super high AC, attack bonuses and damage to one-shot your characters.
The problem is that most magic is only useful against cannon fodder enemies, exactly the ones you don’t need to use limited resources to deal with. For a spell that, for example, inflicts a debuff on enemies to work, it has to go through two barriers. The first is the spell resistance, which is usually very high on elite enemies and extremely high on bosses, and the second is the actual save the enemy has to do. The problem is that most late game spells have difficulty checks on saves around 32 to 36, but elite enemies and bosses can easily have +40 or higher on saves, effectively making all spells like the one described totally useless against the enemies where they could help.
So, there are actually only four types of spells that are actually worth using, as in, they are reliable: buffing spells, summoning spells, healing spells and Hellfire Ray. Buffing spells allows your characters to reach insane buffs on their attacks, which is mandatory if you actually want to hit enemies. Summoning spells make any boss a cakewalk, as you can just summon an entire army to distract the boss while your damage dealers kill it. Healing spells are good to deal with cannon fodder enemies, as they allow your party to heal from the intermediate damage these enemies do. And Hellfire Ray is a spell that: is easy to use, is single target (no risk of friendly fire), has two types of damage (can more easily bypass resistances), has many casts, is a touch spell (meaning it effectively lowers enemies AC) and, the most important, can do damage even if the enemy succeeds at the save throw, meaning you’ll only have to go through the enemies’ spell resistance to have your spell do something.
So, any boss in this game is beaten by the same strategy: buff your party as much as possible, summon an entire army to distract the boss and have your damage dealers (specially archers) damage the boss while your mages and casters use Hellfire Ray to quicken the process.
The game can be very buggy. It is not uncommon for your spells to just "whiff", specially the ones you have to be close to the target. Although WoTR has noticeable higher production value compared to Kingmaker - there are a few cutscenes that move the camera around and have special animations - they are quite clunky.
There is a disconnect between the actual game and the Crusader Mode. Many times, people state that your funds are low or that your armies are elsewhere, but you have tons of Finance Points and powerful armies that decimate every enemy in their way.
Overall, Pathfinder: Wrath of The Righteous is one of the best, if not the best, CRPG I have played. It has issues, some minor, and some grand, but it is still a very enjoyable experience, providing hundreds of hours of gameplay, due to its absurd amount of variety, in classes, Mythic Paths, role-play opportunities in quests and in the main story.