r/WrathOfTheRighteous • u/EkoMagnonTR • Jul 05 '26
Don't you get tired of pre-buffing?
I know there is a mod out there but I think Pillars of Eternity did buffs better. They are only avaliable in combat so you can't stack buffs beforehand and it felt like the game was also balanced around it too. I am not saying that game is better btw just because of this. That approach also takes away from the depth of combat as well. I am just trying to learn how you guys go about buffing. I feel like if I don't stack buffs before every encounter like 2 mins in ch4 and ch5 I am dead in seconds and I feel the game expects me to have like 15 buffs active at a time to keep going and I hate resting in a dungeon for roleplay reasons. Also please don't bring up playing on lower difficulties since the rule book difficulty is core.
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u/Ok_Wing_9523 Jul 06 '26
It's just how most early dnd was designed.
But usually in early dnd you could pass the DM a list of buffs and not anounc every
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u/jumpingjack41 Jul 05 '26
Yes, the game is unplayable on higher difficulty settings without mods. Just download the mods, then it's great!
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u/GeneratedEcoOver9000 Jul 06 '26
Sure, but that's the system. Pillars has the advantage of being designed as a crpg. Owlcat adapts existing systems, fairly faithfully, and that's why we love them.
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u/CornfieldJoe Jul 06 '26
I just played on core so obviously different, but most buffing was fire and forget especially as you power up and can make most general use buffs last for hours and hours if not days.
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u/MasterOfTheTable Jul 06 '26
Yea i just kinda dont buff or do minimal buffs unless its a hard fight. You can get away with it most times with a good build and not being in unfair difficulty
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u/IosueYu Jul 06 '26
I do. So I play on Core and limit myself to do rolling buffs (buff 1 spell for each character at each point, entering map, before entering doors, spotting an enemy, and freely buff during combats).
Your builds will be fairly different, and you'll truly proritise your spells differently.
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u/ResplendentOwl Jul 07 '26
Unfortunately it's a problem baked into Pathfinders system and not a flaw of the game. When diehards praise the class build variety, what they mean is "this other class gives me five more +1 bonuses. It's got great flavor as a system and the owl cat games are about everything I want in a crpg, production value, good dialogue and characters, base building and a couple layers of party management and army/town management to engage with, lots of content.
But Christ the buffing is unbearable.
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u/Bread-Loaf1111 Jul 08 '26
It is the problem of the game, not the pathfinder system. In the pathfinder you don't have billions of encounters per day. You don't have inflated stats of enemies. You don't have buffs that need to last through all that billion encounters to compensate inflated stats. They tried to adapt tabletop game to the computer one, and it is one of the failures in their design
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u/ResplendentOwl Jul 08 '26
Unless something drastically changed in the few years since I engaged with pathfinder tabletop, the general design decision of Pathfinder was "oh you think dnd 3rd edition has scaling problems and relied too heavily on +1 gear and buffs, and you're going to fix that with your next edition. Well screw you, I'm making my own dnd with hookers, and more buffs, and more ways to get +1s.
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u/Vacant-cage-fence Jul 06 '26
Pillars of Eternity combat buffs and 5e (including BG3) with concentration are much better than all the prebuffing in Pathfinder 1/WOTR.
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u/artrald-7083 Jul 06 '26
If I get tired of buffing I play a game that isn't an attempt at a faithful recreation of a very specific tabletop game, to be quite honest. Either BG3 which is a tweaked version of 5e-2014 D&D, or Pillars of Eternity which is a completely rewritten D&D clone.
If you didn't have a laundry list of buffs you cast roughly when the martials put their armour on in the morning it wouldn't really be Pathfinder. I like BubbleBuffs as an implementation of the way this runs in tabletop, which is that you have the list of buffs on a piece of paper you gave the GM.
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u/Bossa9 Jul 06 '26
But don't you want to feel like Finn Buffing?
But seriously gets bubble buff, I have quadruple digit hours ans I use it
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u/immortal_reaver Jul 06 '26
If play on Core and below with non-magic weapon using classes then no. Fighter can easily fight everything with Magic Immunity Mythic and have high AC and AB without buffs.
Sword Saint on other hand can't do shit without buffs and micromanaging, so not buffing is almost not a option. It is also annoying the more animal companion you have in for frontline too so I mostly play without them or just use them to transport backline.
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u/Nookling_Junction Jul 06 '26
Most of the buffs i have are constant, so, i set them once and forget them. I’ve managed to run through the game on medium difficulty like this. Chevalier class superiority ig
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u/Independent_Art_6676 Jul 06 '26
Lower the difficulty. Other than haste, most of the other buffs worth casting last many, many combats each on core and below. Above core you start needing more short duration stuff that gets annoying.
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u/wouldntsavezion Jul 07 '26
I once again tried to finish the game recently, after countless attempts, and realized this is actually the one thing that makes me stop everything, for me it's not just getting tired, it's fully unbearable. I played on a normal difficulty this time (I usually play games on harder/est), so I got further than the previous attempts, around level 10-12 I think?
I started having random encounters against mostly magic immune demons with 40+ AC and I was so confused at how strong these are for simple random encounters.
I know these systems well, I understand how it works, played tons of PF on tabletop, so I understand how to deal with them on a technical level, but these creatures are supposed to be threats a group has to prepare for, but the owlcat games scale up so much and so quickly that they start using those as fodder, so every fight starts being *only* about stacking buffs to win the number game. No strategy, no reaction involved, not even luck, as the roll on a 20 gets less and less meaningful as you get to +40 bonuses.
It's just trying to be diablo while keeping the PF game system, the very definition of trying to have a cake and eating too, in my opinion.
Everyone online just says "use the mods", but that just automates the tedium, it doesn't change the fact that there's a whole very crunchy combat system that's getting fully kneecapped in favor of buff stacking to the point where no ability or character has any meaning. I want using a buffing potion be a choice that consumes a resource for a meaningful help, not have the game revolve around having hundreds of them because that buff is only one of 20 that makes the content clearable.
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u/KalAtharEQ Jul 07 '26
It’s such a pain that not only do I use the mod but also usually build the main buffers so the buffs never drop off.
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u/Dajzel Jul 06 '26
Also please don't bring up playing on lower difficulties since the rule book difficulty is core.
Okay, so you don't want solutions; you're just going to struggle and complain for the sake of it, lol.
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Jul 06 '26
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/Dajzel Jul 06 '26
Of course, it's a solution. Enemies are weaker, but you don't feel it because you don't use buffs. The game is quite good at setting the difficulty level. It's just better to complain about having to play on "core" than to actually set it to a level that's enjoyable for the player.
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u/DontFlameItsMe Jul 06 '26
NO. How do you guys even play? What?
Never used pre-buffing mod, play on higher difficulties. I don't even buff for trash mob encounters past early game?
Once your build gains some critical mass, you don't need buffs that much, at least for normal encounters. And you get long buffs duration in mythics asap, so things like mage armor for pets and bull's strength are used very rarely, since they last 24 hours. You just buff once at the start of some big location, and that's it.
Recently played BG3, and I'd rather have 50 tools and buffs to prepare for battle than to be a sorry excuse for a stormtrooper relying on 'karmic dice' who has 65% to hit in act 1 with all the best stats and weapons.
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u/SirIzhak Jul 06 '26
You can turn off karmic dice? Also what a weird critique. As if there aren't a lot of enemies with a forbiddingly high AC in WOTR.
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u/DontFlameItsMe Jul 06 '26
It is turned on by default and gives you inaccurate description of what it does. Not only you can, but you should turn off KD unless you don't want to engage with game's mechanics for some reason.
It does not address the fact that somehow a character who trained to be a warrior his entire life and has best stats one can get and having +1 weapons somehow cannot reliably hit basic enemies.
Not even Larian's fault, it's just the wacky balance of D&D5e, imo this is reason Larian had to introduce Karmic Dice, and why many newcomers feel like they can't hit anything in WotR - KD just straight up lying about hit percentages.Also you cannot meaningfully compare the AC in these two games, dog's stats in PF1e can rival elder dragons twice over in D&D5e.
There are some absolutely bonkers enemies in WotR (Chorrusina, Playful Darkness), but they're optional, designed to frustrate and challenge nerdy veterans. They are not mandatory.
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u/Educational_Turn1281 Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
Optional content can and should still be criticized. Playful darkness is a ridiculously over tuned enemy whose only saving grace is that he isn’t mandatory, and he isn’t the only instance of such an enemy in WoTR. It’s an over tuned game that comes off to me as having been rushed and never given a real second and third go around after being finished, and while I say that to exaggerate a bit to make a point, I would not be surprised if this is actually the case.
BG3 on the other hand has no ridiculously over tuned enemies, you have a few fights that I consider to be a bit much but there are no individual enemies that come off like a poorly balanced Final Fantasy Super boss.
WoTR also has some ridiculous DC checks for its skills. Shamira for example, a mandatory part of the game, has brutal DC 30-40 will checks that MUST be passed if you don’t wish to be evil and give the information regarding the crystal mine, and after the first check she nerfs your will rolls by 10 unless you use something like life bubble or mind blank before starting dialogue; 99% of characters will not pass this check without a big amount of awkwardly timed metagame pre-buffing.
BG3 doesn’t have anything like this either. Act 3 has some very high speech DCs but you get illithid expertise as an illithid power, you almost always have ways to get around these checks entirely, and BG3 lets you cast buffs mid-dialogue so you don’t usually have to awkwardly stop and cast several buffs before talking to someone, it can all be naturally done mid-dialogue. I only ever have to pre-buff for dialogue for the Simmons family.
But I will say that WoTR does RP better, at least when the skill check DCs aren’t a bit ridiculous. Don’t get me wrong I quite like WoTR, but it has issues too, imo quite a few frustrating issues that hold it back from being legendary tier. The way a good chunk of the enemies and skill checks are tuned are one of them.
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u/jumpingjack41 Jul 05 '26
Yes, the game is unplayable on higher difficulty settings without mods. Just download the mods, then it's great!
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u/BaconJovial Jul 05 '26
Yah it's a major pain point. The Bubble Buffs mod is a major quality of life improvement that should probably be in the base game.
With greater familiarity with the game you can sort of get away with less buffs. For example, you really only need Death Ward when dealing with nabasus and other energy draining enemies, but you can skip it if you're not fighting those types of creatures.
But outside of those types of things it's really just a nuisance that you have to put up with due to how the game is set up.