YMMV / Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

• Alt-itis: Given the sheer amount of available combinations of race, subrace, class, subclass, build, alignment, chosen deity and mythic path, it's extremely tempting to restart the game multiple times as you experience the events and begin to wonder if maybe a different character type would be better suited for the direction the story takes or your own playstyle. There's actually a complete respecc feature to help ameliorate the problem, but of course some people just want to roleplay the entire campaign consistently from beginning to end with one character and would rather restart than have their Lawful Evil female Gnome Wizard become a Chaotic Good male Tiefling Ranger in the middle of the adventure.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Staunton Vhane has received a lot of this. Is he a bitter man who made a terrible mistake out of good intentions and turned to the demons out of desperation for any kind of affection after a 70 year Heel–Face Door-Slam? Or is he a Never My Fault whiner who blames everyone else for the consequences of his actions and deserves no sympathy for his betrayal? This applies In-Universe as well with characters like Regill, Daeran and Lann advocating for the latter while Ember and Seelah think of him as more the former, and his brother Jhoran saying it's probably a bit of both.
  • Queen Galfrey, especially due to her actions at the End of Act 3 and all of Act 5. She strips the Commander of their rank unless they're an Angel and sends them to the Abyss ostensibly to find Nahyndrian crystals and stop the Demons. However, when she takes charge of the Crusade she makes numerous Idiot Ball decisions, most notably taking the Sword of Valor out of Drezen in a poorly planned charge and leaving the city open to be sieged despite knowing that it's a horrible idea. Her admittance that she sent the Commander and their party to the Abyss was partly out of jealousy don't help matters. Players think of her as either a Queen who made tough decisions and is cracking after leading a war for nearly a century or a neidermeyer of the highest order who is one of the biggest reasons the Worldwound hasn't been closed yet. Similarly, on the Azata path she'll chew you out for rushing the Midnight Fane without her despite the enormous tactical advantage you gain by doing so. Does she genuinely think that you needed her help and is chewing you out for taking a big risk or is she angry because this is the first unambiguous proof, not just to her but to the whole Crusade, that you're winning despite her rather than because of her? In this light, it makes her Idiot Ball moments seem more like an attempt to one-up you without understanding why your 'reckless' strategies work.
  • Is Seelah a good example of a paladin who isn't one of those straight-laced stick-in-the-mud types that give paladins their infamous reputation or is she a paladin-in-class-only who should have fallen for being too Chaotic? This will probably never get resolved as long as people have different views on what it means to be Lawful as opposed to Chaotic. The fact she can potentially disagree with her own goddess in person only adds fuel to this. The fact that Pathfinder in general has much looser interpretations of alignment overall doesn't help.
  • A semi-tongue-in-cheek, semi-serious one: Baphomet and Deskari, imposing forces of pure evil, or pathetic losers? Both are certainly dangerous and cause massive casualties during the story. However, people also like to attribute certain incel/internet nice guy elements to them. For Deskari, it's because he seems completely incapable of talking about anything but Iomedae and does increasingly radical things to get her attention, whereas she completely refuses to acknowledge his existence. As for Baphomet, his attempts at courtship have canonically been spurned by both Areshkagal and Nocticula, with his furious ramblings against the former as something the player can discover scrawled against a wall in Areshkagal's lair, and him counting the latter as one of his official nemeses in-lore, and his most notable ally among the other demon lords is his mother.
  • Hulrun Shappok is clearly meant to be a less-than-ideal character, but exactly how un-ideal is a subject of significant debate among players. He's a legitimate badass as a combatant against the demons, but as the chief law enforcer of Kenabres he leaves much to be desired: Judge, Jury, and Executioner in the city's martial law regime, he's prone to having people burned at the stake on the mere suspicion of contact with demons, including infamously Ember and her Disappeared Dad. On the other hand, he is correct about the presence of demon cults in Kenabres (even if he wasn't as good at ferreting them out as he thought he was) and that the festival at the start of the game was endangering the city. Players are divided on whether he's a Necessarily Evil Well-Intentioned Extremist, an example of He Who Fights Monsters, or a Lawful Stupid Tautological Templar who should have lost access to his class features years ago for falling to Lawful Evilinvoked (violating the one-step Character Alignment limit from his Lawful Good patron goddess Iomedae) and whose ends-justify-the-means attitude makes the demons look attractive by comparison.
  • Exactly how innocent was Areelu Vorlesh's child. While Areelu's description plays heavily into a Children Are Innocent viewpoint, Pharasma sending said child's soul to the Abyss heavily suggests Areelu's view is warped and biased on her part, which is understandable given she feels regret for not being able to be a better mother based on her description of the day they died. If Areelu is even marginally right, it suggests that her child died due to ignorance and not being evil, which would call into question their fate, but said child's seemingly willing involvement in her experiments and being sent to the Abyss heavily suggests Areelu is biased about the fate of her child.
• Author's Saving Throw: In July 2023, Owlcat added a customer data-gathering package to the game via patch, only to reverse the change less than 24 hours later after a nasty Internet Counterattack. Comments from the developers on the game's subreddit boil down to "Point taken, sorry about that."
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Nenio. She's either an amusing Plucky Comic Relief character or she's hated for feeling out of place due to her introduction. Her Insufferable Genius and No Social Skills tendencies only divides players further to those who find it charming and those who find it extremely annoying. Other players get tired of her due to her being a Flat Character who is initially funny but quickly gets old because the joke never changes. Not helping is the fact that she's the party's only dedicated Wizard, meaning any player who doesn't have a magic-oriented PC, doesn't want to create a merc, and doesn't want to experiment with moving their other party members in to arcane magic will likely be stuck with her.
  • You either adore Regill for his extremely pragmatic villainy and cold uncaring logic, that manages to fit into the story without becoming comically evil, or you hate him because he's kind of a bossy asshole with no qualms about lying to you to send you on a Secret Test of Character, on top of his evil mindset being hard to justify for a good aligned player, whose brutality makes him little better than the demons he opposes. Some also find his design unintentionally hilarious, with him pulling the hardass Pragmatic Evil military commander while being basically 3 feet tall, and the fact his in-game character model looks like a Troll Dolls cosplaying as Sauron, or Rumpelstiltskin from Shrek Forever After in his Angry Wig, while others like that Regil plays with the expectations of a gnome by being serious and pragmatic, and appreciate that his design is unique compared to the rest of the cast.
  • Camellia, you either like her because you like the character arc of her being a living moral dilemma for the commander and find the revelation of her being an unrepentant serial killer all along that won't move on from her nature even if she develops an romantic attachment to the PC in her romance route a compelling and genius subversion of expectations on Owlcat's part, or you can't stand her for sticking out as a sore thumb as an unambiguously evil Serial Killer and find it really hard to engage with her character in a good or neutral-ish playthrough due to how unrepentantly psychotic she is and how she does not get along with more good aligned characters such as Ember, as well as how many red flags there were regarding her true nature even before the reveal that ultimately undermined the twist.
  • Arueshalae. You either find her story (and by extension, her romance) to be absolutely heartwarming and the perfect example of a romance themed around Love Redeems in an RPG, or you find her Shrinking Violet personality to be childish and irritating to put up with. Her voicework, and specifically how it's directed, helps or doesn't help in either direction, your views depending.
  • Halaseliax is either a wise, benevolent healer or Stupid Good in its purest form. The issue mostly stems from his introduction, where you find six Baphomet cultists who then proceed to attack you. He interrupts the fight after you kill five of them and pleads with you to spare the sixth one (while calling you out on killing the other five even though they attacked you) even though that sixth one proudly declares he's going to keep serving Baphomet. After that, Hal will freely admit he tends to mostly heal the forces of evil because the forces of good have their own healers. The problem comes from the fact that he isn't shown doing anything to help the people he heals find redemption, expecting it to happen by itself, while other characters like Ember and Arueshalae put in quite a bit of work and persistence into their redemption tales (and it's strongly implied Ember is getting supernatural help redeeming others). It's not until Act 5 that you get another chance to interact with him, where he's shown to be right about basically everything, which either convinces people to look at him with more nuance or hate him even more.
  • Similar to the two characters above, Ember. While generally popular and often treated by players as their precious adopted child in a manner similar to Aivu, she nevertheless has enough detractors who find her use of Talking the Monster to Death to redeem demons gratuitously overpowered, hard to believe, or overly naive.
  • Lann. Particularly in regards to his romance. Players who are gunning for a romance with him will find it very charming and touching as the Commander helps him work through his insecurities. However, players who don’t want to get into a romance with him as a female character might find it forced and manipulative, as he has two unavoidable romance dialogues, and in both of them there really is no way to turn him down gently as all the “friendly” dialogue options will only continue the romance. In the first dialogue with him in the war camp, the only dialogue option that stops the romance in its tracks is to tell him that it would be inappropriate for a subordinate and a commander to start anything together, which A) implies that the only reason that a female character wouldn’t want to be with him is because of protocol and B) makes the Player Character out to be a massive Hypocrite if she romances literally anyone else (all of your other companions are also similarly subordinate and Galfrey is the Commander’s queen and direct superior). In the second one, he’ll ask you a "friendly spar", if you accept, the game will now assume that you are “dating”, regardless of the outcome of that event, even if the Commander doesn’t agree to anything or even if she expresses annoyance at having been all but tricked into spending what was essentially a romantic outing with him.
• Best Boss Ever: The fight against Areshkagal is pretty exciting. She has a unique mechanic where the room is split up into 4 squares, and one at a time, the squares will be charged with a type of energy, forcing the party to keep rotating around the room. And the fight is rather involved as you initially fight the boss, then you fight her minions, then 4 elemental clones of boss, then finally get to finish her off once and for all (though she presumably just respawns in her domain as all Demon Lords do). It's rather satisfying considering the Enigma can be considered That One Level due to the abundance of puzzles. The only truly annoying part is that two of her minions in the second phase love to cast Rift of Ruin which is frustrating enough when your allies get dragged in, but can be extremely frustrating when the ENEMIES get dragged in, forcing you to sit around and wait until either they manage to escape or the duration of the spell ends. It's probably the only fight against a demon lord that does any credit to how powerful and dangerous they really are.
• Broken Base:
  • The Trickster path's story causes a good bit of division because what's funny to one person isn't funny to another. Either the Trickster is a welcome injection of humor and lighthearted goofing off into a serious story or they're trying too hard to be funny in a lolrandom way that shatters immersion. Making it worse is the Trickster's tendency towards invoking Laser-Guided Karma in ways that some players will consider well-deserved and others consider Karmic Overkill. There's also a frequent complain that compared to other starter mythic path, Trickster has much less interactions and special dialogue.
  • The game's difficulty has been a recurring topic of discussion and division since launch. On one hand, there's those who find the game's difficulty to be fine (especially those who enjoy crafting "optimal" character builds), and who point out the game contains very detailed and expensive difficulty tuning options for the players. On the other hand there's those who point out that even with those difficulty options, many of the boss encounters in the game are so overtuned that these battles remain hard even on difficulties that are ostensibly supposed to be easier (Enemies with Armor class over 60 are not rare even on normal difficulty). There's also some that point out that the monsters often ludicrously high spell resistances, saves and AC make several builds suboptimal to the point of non-usability and that the game's difficulty thus gets in the way of its own vastly expansive customization options and the need for party optimization gets in the way of roleplay.
  • Beyond the stat bloat there's some who question the game's entire encounter design. Some enjoy the varying levels of difficult encounters as it keeps players on their toes and encourages strategic rationing of spells and resources throughout environments. Detractors argue that this instead results in an incredibly inconsistent difficulty curve that can lead to arbitrarily grueling fights that punish the player for not preparing for encounters they could not reasonably anticipate. ^note  Level 1 characters have a mandatory fight (literally the third encounter in the game) with a monitor lizard, which in any difficulty where enemies have access to all their abilities, has a poison attack that'll deal ability damage. There is no way at this point in the game to deal with ability damage short of the Angelkin Aasimar racial lesser restoration power, which means that encounter is entirely RNG based and anything short of perfection is basically a mandatory reload. Which means that the third encounter in the game has the potential to end your game right here and there or require inordinate save scumming to complete. And it occurs so early in the game the player has no chance to tune their equipment, party composition or their build beyond the literal first level. Another oft cited example is the boss at the end of Act 2; a Balor. The party by this point is most likely to be level 8, give or take a level. A Balor is a CR 20 monster. Though this is at least mitigated by the fact the player doesn't have to kill the Balor, just fight it long enough for an NPC to interrupt the fight and force it to flee.. There's also an argument that, far from encouraging versatility and resource management, this instead encourages players to simply follow the pre-buff meta for every encounter ^note  The practice of applying all your most powerful buffs before an encounter in an effort to give your party every advantage possible in a fight., which slows the game down significantly and discourages roleplaying in favor of optimal builds.
• Camera Screw: Maps with a lot of elevation changes like the Lost Chapel can wreak havoc with camera placement in turn-based mode.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Your party can potentially be built with all active characters^note Ember comes premade with it, while Camellia and a Shaman or Witch PC can learn it as can any number of Shaman or Witch custom pathfinder mercenaries able to use the ever-popular Slumber hex without multiclassing. This makes many encounters significantly easier, especially in the early game when enemies' Will saves are lower.
  • The Crusade battle mechanic heavily favors Glass Cannon units due to most enemies having damage reduction and the player being able to quickly, easily, and cheaply heal away casualties. Expect to see a lot of players with Marksmen and Champions supported by tankier Clerics. Most players also ensure every General has Cure Wounds and Master of Maneuver to allow for better healing and more unit stacks in an army.
  • While the loading screen warns to not sleep on debuffs (and hexes like Slumber above are useful as such because they ignore SR), the majority of debuffing spells are unlikely to bypass powerful enemy SR or saves. Thus the best thing to do is to instead layer as many buffs on your party as you can before every major encounter. Debuffing spells can work but they depend heavily on speccing into Spell Penetration feats, items, and mythic abilities.
  • Most players will likely grab Mythic Enduring Spell and Greater Enduring Spell to give buffs that last for 24 hours a day, which in essence means permanently. Angel Commanders in particular greatly benefit from this set up as they have many powerful buffs to give the party, most of which are naturally longer than five minutes even without extend metamagic.
  • Last Stand is regarded as a required mythic ability for all melee characters. It makes you unkillable for 2 turns if you'd go down. With the heavy stat bloat of many bosses, it's practically a requirement as it can be extremely hard to get an AC high enough to tank for some of them.
  • Most people advise having at least one party member specialized in touch attacks and another party member going down the Dazzling Display/Shatter Defenses feat tree. Because of how high armor class values can get in the later acts (Seeing an AC of 72 on Casual isn't unheard of) every party needs some way to either attack a lower AC value (like Touch AC) or flat-foot the enemy (Shatter Defenses).
  • Mage Generals in Crusade Mode are very popular. They have tons of powerful abilities they can use while requiring relatively little effort or planning to utilize them effectively. Why spend a lot of time setting up traps or finding optimal battle formations when you can literally blast whatever effect you want into existence? Combined with the high initiative of the Marksmen units above, a mage general can blast a huge chunk of the enemy army in the first round of combat on a consistent basis.
  • Azata Mythic Path runs are pretty popular, partly because the alignment system's wonky implementation encourages Good-aligned characters to hew to Neutral Good or Chaotic Good rather than Lawful Good (which is locked out from taking Azata because it requires the PC to be within one step of CG; CG characters are conversely locked out of the Angel Mythic Path), but also in large part because it gives the PC a young havoc dragon companion. This means additional carrying capacity and another set of actions per turn to throw at the enemy—and since, child or not, Aivu is still very much a dragon, it's a very lethal set of actions (among other things, her breath weapon does sonic damage, which almost nothing has resistance to). It's also considered the best choice for Last Azlanti due to Life-Bonding Friendship, which when combined with Last Stand allows a lot more room to recover from bad luck or mistakes.
  • The game has companions that have different strengths and weaknesses, but most players tend to stick with the characters you get during the first chapter, because of the way the respeecing system works discouraging later characters, whose builds are not adjustable in comparison to those you get closer to level 1. This often makes Seelah, Ember, and Daeran mainstays in most parties as a result.
• Complete Monster:
  • Deskari, the Lord of Locusts, is the leader of the demonic hordes spilling out of the Worldwound. Seeking to consume all life and assimilate what remains into his Locust Horde, Deskari emerges with the opening of the Worldwound, destroying the city of Iz and turning it into a locust-infested hellscape. When the First Crusade is launched, Deskari deliberately sent out a weak and disorganized force to feign weakness and prevent the rest of Golarion from taking the demonic threat seriously, while his followers spread out across Golarion to corrupt others into his ranks. This strategy results in the defeats of successive crusades and the corruption of the area around the Worldwound into a demon-infested wasteland. At the start of the Fifth Crusade, Deskari would destroy the city of Kenebraes, killing the Silver Dragon Terendelev and raising her as a Ravener. When confronted by the Commander in Iz, Deskari boasts that his victory over Golarion was almost complete and that there was nothing Iomede nor her followers could do to stop him. If not killed permanently by the end of the game, Deskari would continue to plot his return to Golarion, subjecting his followers to horrific torture for their failures to stop the Commander.
  • The Demon Lord Baphomet is a close ally of Deskari in the demonic invasion of the Material Plane. Imprisoned by the Devil Asmodeus ages past, Baphomet escapes from his prison and convert it into his own personal realm of torture and suffering for his enemies. Throughout the Crusades, Baphomet sent his followers to corrupt mortals and destroy the ranks of the Crusaders from within; one of the victims of said corruption being Staunton Vhane. Espousing a philosophy of survival of the fittest, Baphomet brutalizes his own followers and offspring for failure, with Minagho having her strength sapped with the Mark of Baphomet for her multiple failures in killing the Commander, and his own daughter Hepzamirah killed for simply calling on his support in fighting the Commander as Baphomet saw that as an insult. After capturing the Hand of the Inheritor, Baphomet rips out his heart and subjects him to horrific tortures in his realm, ultimately reducing the Hand to a hollowed-out husk whose only purpose is to open portals for the demonic armies.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Plagued Smilodons in Act II. They get the Pounce special rule which lets them make their full 5 attacks even after moving, and they have enough strength for these attacks to easily cut through any levels of AC or hitpoint buffer you can realistically have at that point in the game. Their one weakness is a relatively low AC but they have enough hitpoints that it's still difficult to take them out in one turn before they start butchering your party. Your best hope is generally to throw a disposable summon their way and hope it keeps them occupied. Oh, and in Act II they're all over the place, including in random encounters. As a final cherry on top, their attacks transmit permanent Demon Plague, at a point in the game where your divine casters are most likely going to be too low-level to know the Remove Disease spell yet, and you might not have brought any potions or scrolls for it because relatively few enemies carry diseases.
  • In the assault on Drezen, Shadow Votaries. If the party focuses them down immediately they aren't too bad, the problem is if they get a turn. Their first turn always consists of some combination of Quickened Mirror Image (a spell that makes up to 7 attacks that would hit miss instead) and Phantasmal Web or Phantasmal Putrefaction (both AOE crowd control spells). Later turns consist of plenty of Fireballs, reapplications of Mirror Image, and possibly Displacement (a swift action spell that gives them 50% concealment). The game also likes to hide them around corners and behind unopened gates so that the player is more likely to walk into them without pre-buffing. They make a return in the Ivory Sanctum.
  • Some enemies in Drezen or the Lost Chapel may have a chance to cast Blasphemy, and extremely powerful spell that stuns or paralyzes low-level Good or Neutral characters. This is generally only supposed to be available to high-level casters and can be resisted by high-level characters, but when your party is only at level eight or nine this spell can stun Good characters for up to ten minutes. If your party is all neutral or good this spell can instantly condemn you to watching the enemy stun your whole group and then slowly chip away at their health.
  • Dretches in Crusade Mode. They're resistant to damage, often come in large groups, and have two casts of Stinking Cloud which can potentially disable every unit in a 3x3 square for multiple turns unless they move out of it. Unless you kill every single Dretch before their turn comes up - nearly impossible with their damage reduction and large numbers - they will cast it at least once.
  • Replacing Dretches as the late-game Crusade Mode threat are Lilitu, who combine an innate cast of Dominate with one of the game's highest Initiatives, all but guaranteeing they'll go first and, with how hard it is to raise the saving throws of Crusade units, Dominate one of your heavy-hitters.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • Prelate Hulrun is quite popular among large chunks of the fanbase who downplay his extreme paranoia, fondness for burning witches both guilty and innocent, penchant for employing the Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique, and near-total inability to accept fault or blame and play up his noble but misguided nature, seeing him as someone who does what has to be done no matter how much other people hate it to keep his people safe.
  • Camellia is popular as well, despite being a depraved murderer with no redeeming qualities as a person, likely due to combination of having excellent voice acting and being attractive and rather helpful in almost any party composition.
  • Regill gets a lot of players who claim that he’s actually Lawful Neutral rather than his In-Universe Lawful Evil requirement and dismiss every evil action he does as logical and correct. A common justification is that because he engages in Pragmatic Villainy he’s an Anti-Hero at his worst despite openly approving of slavery, idolizing Hell, and committing war crimes from his first scene onward. His self-sacrificing gambit during Act 5 only endears him to players more despite the fact that he did it for logical reasons rather than any care for the Commander.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: The Crusader mode aspect of the game is commonly viewed as interesting story wise, but at best boring, worst-case awful, gameplay wise. The multiple different options a player can chose, the writing for your advisors, and how much each choice has some form of impact on your crusade, make it one of the best moments writing wise, and players love the interactions characters have during them. On the gameplay side though, the mode has a number of annoying mechanics and systems that sour the experience for the average player, and either use the auto settings to ignore it (which comes with issues), or use mods just to make the gameplay as painless as possible to get to the story moments quicker.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Hand of the Inheritor is well-liked by almost everyone for being the Only Sane Man of the Crusades. Most of the Crusader leaders you encounter - Hulrun, Konomi, Harmattan, Galfrey, even Iomedae - are too concerned with either following the rules, ignoring the bigger picture to obsess over minor things, Wangsting, or pursuing their own agendas and vendettas to really get anything done with the Crusade, but the Hand of the Inheritor doesn't do any of those usually and is willing to work with just about any PC that isn't being a puppy-kicking Jerkass Supervillain. Even his one Idiot Ball moment is over something that would, logically, spook the heaven right out of him and provoke an immediate and not entirely rational response that leads to other problems.
  • Yaker is a minor Hellknight character who basically exists to get you to your first encounter with Regill, and whom the player can later convince Regill not to punish for deserting his post to go get the Commander. He's otherwise a bit of a dork for a Hellknight. He's proven popular enough for people to make a mod to make him romanceable, and fan art of him exists. This got even bigger when people noticed that Yaker in-game has 15 class levels, making a bit of a meme of the idea that Regill would think he can have Yaker whipped for desertion when Yaker severely outclasses his level 6 boss.
• Even Better Sequel: Kingmaker was well received, but most felt it was a good but flawed starting point by Owlcat due to some issues and design choices that held back the game back from being better. Wrath of the Righteous by contrast is widely agreed to be a significant improvement and a better game, going on to be critically higher rated, and being often suggested first instead of Kingmaker.
• Evil Is Cool:
  • Regill Derenge has gotten a lot of positive feedback from the fandom for being a stoic, pragmatically evil Hellknight who wholly averts Lawful Stupid and can more than back up his actions with cold logic and reason.
  • Daeran Arendae's villainy is more petty in nature but players also like him for his use as an Oracle, his numerous Hidden Depths and his undeniable charisma despite being a bastard. That he freely admits he's a jerkass and is nice to Ember probably helps.
  • The Lich and Swarm-That-Walks paths. The Lich path is all about forming your own undead army to crush your enemies, with additional quests to form your own legion of undead servants - including Staunton and Galfrey - whether they want to serve or not. Swarm-That-Walks is a path of ultimate evil, meaning that everyone - companions, advisors, generals, becomes disgusted and abandons you, and your ultimate goal after is to eat and devour everything in sight. divided opinions aside, these paths specifically are cited as some of the most fun examples of evil roleplaying in an RPG.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Wenduag's is "Wendy", "Wendu", or "Spiderkitten".
  • Chaotic Neutral/Good Arueshalae is "Arue".
  • Chaotic Evil Arueshalae is "Evilrue".
  • The Hand of the Inheritor is "Inheribro".
  • Areelu Vorlesh is "Mommy"
• Friendly Fandoms: A lot of Wrath Of The Righteous players also get along with the Overlord (2012) fandom, thanks in no small part to the Lich path as well as frequent shared jokes about the numerous buffs that are featured and used in both universes.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Marksmen in Crusade battles. They're fragile and expensive but phenomenally powerful, and if you recruited Regill you can upgrade all of your archers to Marksmen and recruit them directly from Drezen. Their incredibly high base damage lets them punch through nearly any kind of Damage Reduction and they have very high initiative, so having them in your army almost guarantees that your general can act first in a turn. Their only downside is their fragility leaves them vulnerable to spellcasting enemy generals, but almost everything is vulnerable to those. Fast/Teleporting/Flying units can also move adjacent to them (unless you've surrounded them with your own) to force them into melee mode, where their damage output is negligible, forcing them to waste a turn relocating or be slaughtered in melee.
  • The merged spellbooks for specific classes and mythic paths (angel for divine and lich for arcane) combined with abundant casting. Merged spellbooks mean that the Commander's caster level is combined from both their character level and mythic level, allowing them to access level 8 or 9 spells far earlier than normal. This can lead to a cleric or oracle being able to access the extremely powerful bolt of justice spell and its AOE variant, which does massive damage on all enemies, and having abundant spell slots to keep the damage piled up. This is so prominent that one of the game's most popular mods on PC is devoted to making spellbook merging work for a far wider number of class and archetype combinations, including the seven-spell-level mythics, simply for the purpose of trying to even out the power gain curve between the various mythic paths!
  • Alternatively you can stack the merged spellbook with Enduring Spell and Greater Enduring Spell, which makes every buff you have that lasts longer than five minutes permanent, then take Extend Spell which lets you double a spell's duration and Favorite Metamagic Extended so that extending a spell doesn't raise it to a higher level. When you reach a Caster Level of 25 (most easily achieved by merging spellbooks) then any spell with a rounds-per-level duration that you Extend lasts 50 rounds, which is five minutes. Congratulations, every buff you have with a rounds-per-level duration now lasts all day. Further, since the game keeps track of buff timers in real time, you can cast all your 24-hour buffs then change your spell loadout and rest; since resting only takes 9 hours you'll still have 15 hours of buffs left.
  • Like in Kingmaker, though not noted in the description, the game considers Tower Shields to leave a hand free, meaning they stack with things that require a free hand like the Crane Wing edge.
  • The Archmage Armor mythic feat adds your mythic rank (1 to 10) to the AC from Mage Armor (4). That's 14 AC by the end game - same as a full plate +5, with no armor penalty, no encumbrance, no speed reduction, nor any limit on Dex bonus. Stack some monk features so you can add wisdom or charisma to your AC while unarmored on top of that, you can get truly bonkers level of AC while wearing absolutely nothing. The kicker, Archmage Armor doesn't require you to know how to cast the spell (or even be capable of casting spells). So long as you're applying it to yourself. Potions, Scrolls, Wands, or the Arcanist's "Armored Mask" power all qualify. On top of that because it's a buff and not a piece of equipment, it still applies even when things would normally deny you your armor, like being polymorphed.
  • One under-appreciated aspect of mounted combat is because the way the game simplifies flanking (basically any two characters adjacent to an enemy are considered to be flanking that enemy), if a rider and their mount both have a teamwork feat, that feat is always giving its bonus because rider and mount will always be considered to flank anyone they are adjacent too due to sharing the same space, so long as rider stays on their mount. This is especially good for Outflank (permanent flanking bonus of +4 on all attacks) and Back-To-Back (effectively denying enemies the ability to flank you).
  • The Last Stand mythic ability is a must-have for melee characters, especially during boss battles, especially on higher difficulty. With the high stat bloat bosses have, it's very likely they may hit your tanks enough to kill them. Last Stand makes your tank become unkillable for 2 rounds once a day, immune to any damage that would knock them unconscious. It's basically a requirement for frontline characters. use it to buy two more rounds of tanking, or to pull back your injured tank to top off and be replaced by a backup tank.
  • It's possible for a Trickster with the Bashing Finish shield to instantly kill anything in the game they can get close to. One Trickster ability lets them roll nothing but 20s for several rounds. The Bashing Finish shield gives a free shield bash whenever you land a critical hit, including with itself. Since a 20 to hit always hits and is always a critical threat and a 20 to confirm always confirms, every hit is a critical hit, causing Bashing Finish to activate, which is also a critical hit, creating an infinite loop of critical hits that fire as fast as the game can process them and only ends when the target dies or the ability expires.
  • Kitsune in human form count as shapeshifted, for the purpose of Mythic Shapeshifter, meaning it gives them a +4 mythic bonus to all physical attributes permanently, that stacks with any other stat boost. This effectively makes the Kitsune the best race in the game as the bonus offsets the penalty to one stat Kitsune get, and you get two more +4s out of this. For comparison, being in Gold Dragon form doesn't count for Mythic Shapeshifter.
  • And then there's the Azata path. Good lord, the Azata path. All of the paths get to do some truly powerful things, but the right application of Azata Nonsense™ allows you to properly snap the game over your knee.
    • To kick things off, the Azata's "Life-Bonding Friendship" superpower grants the benefit of all teamwork feats they possess to every ally in a 50-foot radius, and grants one such feat when you get it and another at the next rank up. Inquisitors, or any other class/archetype that gets bonus teamwork feats anyway, can go absolutely bonkers with this and free up tons of space in companions' builds for other needful things. Even just by itself, though, it's an incredibly easy way to give, say, Outflank and Precise Strike to your whole team, and you can pick it up the base superpower itself and the first feat as early as getting the first half of the Lexicon of Paradox from the Old Lab. And of course, even minimal feat investment in your own build can pay dividends, if you so choose.
    • But this isn't even the end of LBF insanity. The way it works, you see, is that per-combat (not per-day, mind you, this effect resets after combat), your companions can remain active even after taking knockout or fatal damage for a number of hits equal to your charisma modifier (so five hits at CHA 20, for example). This is, if you'll remember, a stat you can buff and/or get equipment for. It's not too terribly difficult to arrange things so that your friends can remain standing for ten hits or more even after they're supposed to be dead. Moreover, this stacks with the Last Stand power: first, your buddies will go below 0 but get two turns of invincibility, and then they'll stay up until they exhaust their hit count. Because oh yeah, did we mention this effect only ends at the end of combat? The number of hits your CHA can tank is the only limiting factor. And you can even still heal people in this state with things like Breath of Life to get them back into a "normal" state! The end result is that it can be amazingly hard to kill Azata parties if they're set up right, which makes the path a perennial favorite of folks challenging Last Azlanti mode. Angel might have more defensive buffs, but Azata provides that critical defense against the status effect of "freakin' dead". The only drawback to all this is that, if your buddies are in the "dead zone" of HP when combat ends, they will immediately keel over dead once the fight's done. And if everyone but you is in this state (or gets put down through your CHA bonus), you'll die too.
    • Some of the spells can also be dramatic in their effect. Second Breath, Joy of Life and Heroes Never Surrender are the really famous ones: these restore companion abilities to their max, spells up to fifth level for companions, and the last is both abilities and spells up to seventh level for companions. The power of spell restoration in the field is fairly obvious (it makes Nenio, Camellia, Daeran and Ember potentially lethal, for one thing), but the ability restoration can be just as dramatic - this is things like Smites or Camellia's sword buffing. For Seelah and Regill, this can in fact be absolutely transformational - Smites are a bit infamous as a "neat, but you always feel like you should save it for Something Important and end up not using it much" ability, but getting even a single "reload" of them turns Smites into something you'll use constantly against anything reasonably big and reasonably evil or chaotic. Adding upwards of twenty flat damage and buffed Charisma modifier to hit to every meaningful attack Regill does, for example, does a whole lot to make Hellknight more worth it than it otherwise is (as described further down), and Seelah of course turns from just a tank to an offensive powerhouse when she can be a lot more liberal with Smites. The big one, though, is that it restores any kind of non-spell ability... including Cleric domain abilities like Guarded Hearth. GH is absolutely infamous for being one of the most powerful non-spell abilities available to players in Pathfinder, period, and getting Impossible Domain: Community for Sosiel first thing is nearly memetic advice for anyone trying to use him. Even at just one use per rest, having his massive Wisdom provide a huge Sacred-type buff (so it stacks with a number of other buffs) to your attack rolls and saving throws is enormously helpful. Being able to do so multiple times per rest (upwards of seven times, at the higher mythic ranks) transforms the party into a warded rolling death ball for any truly significant fight and makes the high ACs of many enemies far more manageable. These spells completely transform the way you play the game and have a massive impact on how a number of characters play, and set up right, some of them can absolutely start obliterating things if you play your cards right.
    • Speaking of spells, the "Favorable Magic" superpower is also fairly nuts. With it, any time a spell forces the enemy to make a defensive check, the enemy has to roll twice and take the worse result. This can make the humble Grease spell even more silly - anything vulnerable to it has to roll twice and hope it doesn't come up low. Applied to higher level spells, though, it gets even more frightening - how about rolling twice for the hard disable that is Phantasmal Web? Phantasmal Putrefaction? Acid Pit or Rift of Ruin? Weird? Forcing the enemy to roll twice on every save can lead to some truly hilarious results and leave even major bosses unable to retaliate. And the cherry on top? You get to roll every check to overcome the ever-annoying spell resistance stat, and you take the better result!
  • The Paladin's unique to this game Mark of Justice is an absurdly broken skill. Smite Evil already is a good skill for Paladin's, letting them deal extra damage to evil enemies, which is a lot of options given the nature of the game, but it only works for the Paladin, and Paladin's tend to be more defense than offensive. Mark of Justice uses two charges of Smite Evil's to give nearby allies the effects of Smite Evil towards a specific target though, allowing the Paladin to give a flat bonus to allies, and make many end game fights a joke as a result. While it using two charges of Smite Evil may make it seem slightly impractical, taking Mythic Feats to give the Paladin more uses makes it something the player will have a readily available supply of.
• Goddamned Bats: Random encounters can eat up a surprising amount of time due to the multiple loading screens you have to sit through each encounter. They're a good source of XP and potentially gold in the early game, but are also harder to avoid if you don't want to fight them and just want to get where you're going. Heading to the more far-flung areas like Blackwater can easily see 5-6 random encounters on the way. The traveling merchant can be the same way, as he's treated as a random encounter.
• Good Bad Bugs: Less a bug and more an oversight, but normally if the player tries to romance more than one character, the characters involved will confront you about it and make you chose who you want to be committed to. Due to an oversight with Galfrey, who is romanceable but only becomes a party member on specific Mythic Paths at the final dungeon, the player can end up romancing Galfrey and someone else because the interaction where you would need to pick isn't triggered, which some find funny and don't have an issue with.
• Improved Second Attempt: The original Wrath of the Righteous Adventure Path was infamous for the meeting with Iomedae being jarringly out of character, and being annoying to handle because she basically would hurt the player characters if they spoke to her in a way she didn't like, souring a lot of people's perceptions of her as a character. Owlcat went out of their way to have the meeting with Iomedae be significantly more aligned with how she is written in the broader Pathfinder lore, while still having her be slightly at odds with the Commander to maintain the spirit of the original meeting, making her better received thanks to the changes.
• Informed Wrongness: Iomedae in Act 5, if you do not take the Legend Mythic Path, is treated as wrong for asking the Commander to give up their mythic powers, with some of your party going so far as to call her a hypocrite for asking you to do so depending on your Mythic Path and choices, and a good aligned Commander can call her out on her request. However, Iomedae's reasoning comes across as fairly understandable in context: she doesn't quite know the full nature of your powers, but knows they are demonic in origin, making the Commander a potential time-bomb that could become a huge threat to the world if not checked. Thus she asks you to give it up so not only the Commander is safe, but the world doesn't have another major threat after the Crusade ends. Her request is also firmly that: a request, and she accepts your choice without much problems unless you pick the Swarm that Walks for obvious reasons. In addition, characters calling her a hypocrite comes across as unfair towards her; Iomedae became a god of her own choice and hard work, whereas the Commander had their power forced onto them, and are not fully sure of the control they have. Not helping is that, even on something like Angel or Azata, Nocticula and Areelu are obviously (and admit to it) still using you to further their goals, making Iomedae's concern understandable. While she should have spoken up sooner and not lied through omission about the Commander being her chosen warrior (which characters can rightfully call her out on), everything else about her request is pretty understandable, but she's treated as wrong no matter what dialogue options you chose if you want to keep your mythic powers.
• Love to Hate: Lady Konomi, Mendev's diplomatic counsel. She's not evil, but she is a smug, condescending jerk who assembled a council of advisors only to expect you to ignore all of them and do what she says because she thinks you're her subordinate rather than the other way around. She's also Queen Galfrey's chosen representative, and Galfrey herself is quite divisive. Her advice is generally good but many players enjoy defying her simply to get on her nerves and remind her who's really in charge.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Sosiel and Staunton both get a bit of this for the same reason - their builds are bad and include unnecessary or useless things you can't remove. Later patches have made this a bit better, but they can still struggle.
    • In Sosiel's case, he's focused in Medium armor but he doesn't have anything approaching the Dexterity bonus to take advantage of medium armor, which is wasteful and means he doesn't have the armor class to stand up in melee despite being melee cleric. It's hard to do a cleric wrong in the Pathfinder rules but the general opinion is that he could be a lot better than he is. The Enhanced Edition shifted this a bit to give him access to heavy armor when you get him, but because he is so much higher level compared to the characters you get before him, he still starts off with issues that can't be fixed and make using him a potential hindrance.
    • As for Staunton they suffer because their build is all over the place. They have tower shield proficiency with a two-handed weapon, which requires a feat that isn't in the game to work, have 18 Dexterity yet wear full plate, have Dazzling Display but no Persuasion to use it with, and have a feat that specializes in enabling combat maneuvers despite not having any maneuvers to perform. It's a hot mess of a build that nobody quite knows what to do with.
  • Regill also has a case of this. Being the 2nd to last non path specific companion that can be recruited, he comes with a whooping 6 levels already stated. And they are in two fairly bad classes. He has 5 levels of Armiger fighter, considered one of the worse fighter subclasses due to losing feats (the main point of being a fighter), and 1 level of Hellknight, which is a strictly worse Paladin. Compounding this, Regill is built around dex (He in fact starts with a higher Dex than Lann, the party archer, does), and two weapon fighting with the gnome hook hammer. This makes him ill suited for the Hellknight's main draw, reducing the penalties of heavier armor (a benefit which for added irony, Regill is too low level to even qualify for), when Regill's best used with light armor or unarmored using the archmage armor mythic power (See above). So you're left with only 14 levels to try and salvage some use out of Regill by making him pick any other class he could be passable at rather than waste further precious levels on Hellknight. There's a certain humor that the character whose entire schtick is being the consumate professional Hellknight should avoid taking levels in the class by all means. Funnily enough, the game itself compensates to a degree by making his gear selection earlier on incredibly good; he begins play with Adamantine Full Plate +2, which is better than anything you likely have when meeting him, there's a good ring of deflection in his recruitment area, and a little exploring of Lost Chapel provides you with an excellent Axiomatic hooked hammer, which gives him tremendous bonuses against chaotic enemies (and guess what 80%+ of the enemies in this game are). All this together actually keeps him competitive and even quite good for the climax of chapter 2 and much of chapter 3; it's only really chapter 4 and beyond that a doggedly "canon" Regill will start to really feel the pinch of his undertuned classes.
  • A rare deliberate example with Trever. He is only recruitable in Act IV, well past the midway point of the game. This means the player is unlikely to have any niche for him to fill that isn't covered by other party members, and with too few levels left to put him in one even if they didn't. He's also taken five levels in the Paladin and Hellknight classes, which accurately reflects his backstory...as does his alignment shift to Chaotic Neutral, which renders him unable to use any of the abilities from either class. Suffice to say his suboptimal levelling and lack of growth potential will leave him on the back bench for any player who did go to the effort of saving him.
  • Greybor is generally looked at as being the worst non-Mythic path specific party member, due to a combination of design choices that make it hard to tell what he's meant to be. He's one of the last characters you get, specializes in dual-wielding the rare and hard to find dwarven waraxes, and being a dwarf means he has less movement, which as a Slayer means getting into combat is difficult. If a player really wants to use him, you have to basically ignore his primary weapon type, and try to get him ways of getting into battle quickly, when the player already will have characters who can do a similar role better.
• Magnificent Bastard: Regill Derenge is the Paralictor of a unit of Hellknights of the order of the Godclaw, sent to establish an outpost in the Wounded Lands. During the Fifth Crusade, Regill employs ruthless yet effective military strategies to fight the demonic invasion such as executing wounded soldiers to ensure that Gargoyles would not convert them into undead. If allowed to join forces with the Commander, Regill will test the Commander to see if they have the character to lead through various underhanded means such as warning the Commander of a demonic siege on a Hellknight Outpost despite him evacuating his men safely beforehand; said attack being used as a pretext to test how the Commander responds to a succubus' temptations. Towards the end of the Fifth Crusade, Regill, aware of brewing conflict between the Crusaders and the Hellknights, organizes a tribunal to allow the Hellknights to judge the Commander. During the tribunal, Regill subtly leads the judges to side with the Commander through his machinations, and then challenges the Commander to a duel after publicly disagreeing with their verdict which he fully intends to lose in order to strengthen the Commander's influence in the Hellknights. Despite this move stripping him of his rank, Regill sees it as a worthy sacrifice given his Bleaching condition.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Ember tends to be treated as the second most powerful person on the planet due to her sheer Talking the Monster to Death nature, and how she can convince Always Chaotic Evil beings to try to redeem themselves.
  • Setsuna Shy, one of the generals the player can hire in Crusade mode. Due to being a Mage General he can trivialize just about any battle he fights in and it’s not uncommon for him to annihilate whole armies with one spell. Players claim he’s the true hero of the Crusade who’s stronger than even the most minmaxed Commander.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Arueshalae very literally locking herself in horny jail after a certain part of her romance route has become such a meme, that there are a lot of jokes about her being the horny police among the party.
  • "Thanks, Lann! You're so awesome, Lann!"^note One of Lann's voice lines has him sarcastically saying "Thanks Lann" when performing an action. Due to his voice actor's funny and charming delivery of the line, and how Lann is a fairly often used party member, a lot of players tend to say it when Lann does or says anything during the story. Notably; when the Owlcat youtube channel posts anything featuring him, there are usually comments just quoting said line.
  • Camellia's "I am helpful, am I not?" voice line quickly became a meme amongst players due to how often she says it when doing anything. Given she's the second party member the player gets, has good magic support, and can be a reliable trap disarmer, she's considered helpful gameplay wise, making the voice line funnier as a result.
• Nightmare Fuel: There's a LOT of messed up stuff that happens in this game, to the point where you could probably place it in the Action-Horror category if it was first-person.
  • The mongrels being forced to commit cannibalism against their will in the Shield Maze is accompanied by disgustingly gruesome sound effects, along with bloody squishing and splashing on screen. Later, Wenduag is all too happy to tell how she gleefully eats her fellow mongrels for demonic power and lures others to force them to do the same.
  • The Lich Path is not for the faint of heart. Unlike the more chaotic Demon Path, a Lich Commander's quest is about gradually losing their humanity and all sense of compassion, becoming a cold-hearted tyrant over time. This involves performing some truly cruel actions, not the least of which is condemning some truly virtuous souls to an eternity of pain and servitude, essentially turning them into slaves.
  • But none of these compare to the Swarm Path. Consumed by hatred and hunger, it doesn't matter what path the Commander was before. If they commit to being a Swarm, their phyiscal body is destroyed and reformed as a crawling disgusing mass of insects, which is enough to scare away literally every party member, even those who would otherwise be okay with following a Lich or Demon. If you save Ciar and the other mercenary leaders at the City of Iz, you get the option at Drezen to systematically devour every one of your followers. You get a graphic description of each and every one of their deaths at the clawing ravenous mouths of your vescavores. The ending is arguably the scariest one of all, because the Worldwound is still open, and now the Swarm Commander is simply feeding off the endless armies of the Abyss, growing larger and larger until nothing will ever be able to stop it...
• Obvious Beta: The game, despite a public beta, had a rather infamously rocky launch (much like its predecessor). With a lot of strange bugs, including some that just made the game impossible to finish for some of the Mythic paths. Many abilities either not working as advertised or working in strange unexplainable ways, alongside crashes or various other ways to make the game lock or be unwinnable. The game was aggressively patched in the first few weeks to address the most severe issues, and by the time of the Enhanced Edition, is very much fine and polished.
• Obvious Judas:
  • Nurah, who keeps turning up after acts of sabotage that clearly come from your own camp, is suspiciously holding an incendiary when the camp has been set on fire during an attack (and the enemies don't have fire), has Scrolls of Protection from Good, etc. Even if you don't spot the stuff she carries, the game doesn't really offer any suitable other suspects; Irabeth is your second in command, regularly fights alongside you up to that point, and gets kidnapped and nearly killed, ruling her out. Anevia's married to Irabeth and been alongside the player since the early game, making her too unlikely to justifiably be a mole. Horgus Gwerm is bankrolling the crusade so there's no reason he'd sabotage his own investment, especially if the player has Camellia, who he loves and would be putting in danger if he was. The quartermaster guy actually repeatedly engages the commander to go the extra mile to provide for the troops. Daeran your advisor is both a party member and gets kidnapped by the gargoyles too, and despite his alignment, is firmly against the enemies forces. Nurah meanwhile is the only one that's around not serving any actual role in the camp (ostensibly she's chronicling the crusade but will never ask you about what's going on or accompany you anywhere), but she is never once directly in danger during situations where your other advisors or officers are, making it really easy to tell she's the culprit.
  • Wenduag is introduced in Chapter 1 by luring the party into a death trap under false pretenses with the intent of killing off either them or the leader of the demonic cult she belongs to, and regularly boasts that her loyalty is only to the strongest side. It shouldn't be much of a surprise then when she betrays the party later on, barring the player completing her Chapter 3 personal quest and selecting the right dialogue options.
• Popular with Furries: Probably invoked: the Kickstarter poll race options were kitsune, catfolk, and ratfolk. Gets a bit of Take That, Audience! from Nenio, who gets this line in one Party Banter moment:
  "Hypothesis: the party's sexual interest in me surged when it became known that I am a kitsune. I am going to survey my comrades. Aasimar boy, what is it about foxes you find sexually appealing? Be precise."
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The alignment system, like in the last game, it's not very well-liked. Owlcat attempted to address concerns from the last game that alignment-affecting dialogue options were too restrictive because each one was tied to both the Law/Chaos and Good/Evil axes by making it so that alignment-related choices in this game only affected one axis. Players don't like this either, because each option now has to be neutral enough that it doesn't conflict with other alignments; alignments like Good and Evil have be written without having Lawful or Chaotic options, while Lawful and Chaotic options have to be lacking signs of Good or Evil. Some part of this can be blamed on Owlcat continuing to track alignment on a circle rather than the square grid used by predecessors like Interplay's many famous titles and BioWare's series, since the circular nature of it still means every choice is a two-axis choice, they're all just Lawful Neutral, Chaotic Neutral, Neutral Good, or Neutral Evil. To top it all off, Evil choices get the shaft akin to Chaotic Evil ones in the prior game, as most of the time that you see the tag for an evil choice, it tends to be killing someone, often who you have no reason to kill and either get nothing out of killing them, or are worse off if you kill them, instead of doing something selfish or pragmatic. This has the additional problem of making Good options borderline the correct option in every case, because the other options don't have the same consistency.
  • Related to the alignment system, but the changes to the alignment system make alignment based classes frustrating to play. Due to the changes, it's possible to lose classes tied to a 'corner' alignment like Paladin (Lawful Good) by siding too much with one half of that alignment (becoming either Neutral Good or Lawful Neutral), something not possible in conventional grid-based alignment systems.
  • Related to the above, the Lawful dialogue options have received a lot of flak. While they should tend towards the rule of law or upholding values of society, the majority seem to veer into All Crimes Are Equal or Obstructive Code of Conduct logic, where execution is brought up as the sole punishment for basically any crime, even light ones, or they are too over focused on one aspect of the prompt, and ignore the rest of the topic, such as praising evil actions because they were done per some vague notion of order. Some options are just nonsensical too, ^*A lawful dialogue option will encourage Sosiel to kill a prisoner he's taken even as he's just brought up that doing so would violate his oath to Shelyn, meaning the "lawful" option is to encourage oathbreaking, when it seems the Lawful option should be reminding him of the oath he swore and being firm about following it, but instead the Good option is the one that does that., making it seem like Lawful choices seem at odds with what they should be for. Because of the aforementioned issue with corner alignment, it can be particularly hard for Paladins to find in-character lawful options to balance their Neutral Good choices, and makes trying to play a Lawful character unappealing, since Lawful options have no Good or Evil influence. Finally, Lawful alignment in the tabletop game often means "sworn to uphold a specific code of action or values", rather than simply obeying all laws everywhere just because they are the local laws. A paladin would not be honor-bound to obey the laws of the Abyss when there^*one might in fact argue that, quite the opposite, they would be compelled to subvert its systems at every opportunity. Even the in-universe law-and-order-obsessed Hellknights follow this convention, openly stating they are free to break any nation's laws, just not those of their own code. However, because the game cannot track potentially dozens of different oaths a character may be sworn to, Lawful player characters are restricted to generically supporting the abstract concept of order devoid of further context, which is a very narrow form of the alignment and may be too close to Principles Zealot for many.
  • As the flagship feature of the game, Mythic Paths have been very heavily scrutinized and, in some areas, found wanting. While the game makes a big deal out of Mythic Paths and the impact they have on the game not all of them are equally well-written or implemented. The Evil options, which were especially touted in prerelease advertisement, suffer the most due to the Adventure Path the game is based on being primarily designed to function for Good-aligned (or at least Neutral) characters, with Evil ones being forced into an Evil Versus Oblivion scenario and ultimately feeling somewhat tacked on. Evil options also cause you to permanently lose some companions^*Seelah will abandon a Lich PC due to her paladin oaths and everyone abandons a Swarm-That-Walks PC because they die and begin working for Deskari while Good and Neutral paths generally^*Camellia will abandon an Aeon path PC give you choices to keep opposed characters around, even if those options would be extremely out of character for the PC. There's also plenty of criticism that the 'second tier' Mythic Paths (Devil, Gold Dragon, Legend, and Swarm-That-Walks) appear too late in the campaign to have a meaningful impact on the story since it's mostly over by then. Swarm and Devil in particular suffer even more as they are unlocked deep into Act 5, while Gold Dragon and Legend are at least unlocked near the start of Act 5 (and Legend is at least a bit better integrated into the story conceptually as an obvious solution to a problem the Commander faces).
    • The second tier paths also suffer from a narrative hurdle as the story never really brings up how your character just abandoned their previous mythic path. The commander will just behave like the new Mythic path was always the one they were on, despite having used another for most of the story. Legend is, again, a bit better about this because you abandoning your previous path is an event that occurs in-story with a questline and the rest of the Legend quest acknowledges what you gave up, but it ends up being slightly awkward that the rest of the game just kind of dodges what mythic you used to be on that path. With one exception. Due to the process of going Legend, you have earned Vorlesh's infinite ire and your final discussion with her proceeds significantly differently, and in such a way that hard-locks you out of the secret ending.
  • One carried over from the tabletop, but level 0 spells, or cantrips, have no scaling damage wise, and do only a d3 amount of damage. While this was true for Kingmaker, because this game came out after Second Edition, which made cantrips better damage wise, some players feel that the strict adherence to First Edition's rules in this case is an annoying mechanic that makes spellcasters harder to manage in combat. It doesn't help that compared to Kingmaker, this game is more combat heavy, so resource management is very important, and how most spellcasters are designed around not using ranged weapons, yet the game seems to expect that the player would have their casters use ranged weapons instead of cantrips. Daeran for instance has low enough strength that giving him a crossbow puts him at risk of being over encumbered, and his chance to hit as well as damage with it is awful. One of the more popular mods for the game gives cantrips better scaling damage wise while not making them overpowered, highlighting the issue.
  • The crusade system catches its share of flak just like its Kingdom Management predecessor.
    • Auto Crusade, for those who don't want to have to deal with Crusade mechanics at all, will choose research projects randomly. This can potentially lock you out of certain Mythic Paths that require specific projects to be completed before a certain time. You also miss out on some of the nice customizable loot from Crusade battles, which is also enchanted via projects.
    • The way the various Crusade unit stats (AC, AB, DR, damage, etc) interact is not very well-explained and there are potentially dozens of different units you can recruit, which results in a lot of Trial-and-Error Gameplay as players try to figure out which units are good and which units aren't.
    • You will receive a lot of Crusade units from various decisions and plot choices that are too small to be useful in combat yet can't be sacrificed without losing Morale. There's no way to disband them (although fortunately you don't have to pay any upkeep costs for your army).
    • Crusade mode is very slow. Reinforcements are only available on a weekly refresh, meaning you're likely to just skip a ton of days to get them, and it takes several weeks to acquire meaningful numbers of them, especially in early Act 5 where the demon armies are larger and stronger and the map is largest necessitating many armies to play defense and lead offenses, And all your act 3 armies are gone. Reinforcements also only spawn from a single point, meaning they need several days to meet your armies in the front to merge with them. A number of players have admitted to using mods that let them boost the amount of units they have at the moment just to let them progress because of how much hassle it brings.
    • Act 2 and early Act 3 Crusade mode suffer from Early Game Hell where your units available are weak and ill prepared to fight all but the weakest demons. Enemy armies are not so limited and many with even low tier demons have powerful abilities that will ruin your already weak forces. You actually can wreck shop in Act 2, but you really need to know what you're doing with your generals specifically - your units are largely garbage tier and you'll rely on general abilities to keep them healthy and/or just blast the enemy to bits.
    • Mentioned above, but still deserves it's own mention, in Act 5 you start with NONE of the army that you had exiting Act 3. You have to rebuild it nearly from scratch. And you don't even have the resources you ended Act 3 with, you have to regain those too. You at least keep your generals, your recruitment rates, and your forts, but otherwise you are essentially starting over from scratch. Worst still, there was a bug that persisted for several weeks on launch where moving to the world map at the start of Act 5 could result in a huge demon army immediately marching from the edge of the map to Drezen in one turn, slaughtering what few reinforcements you may have been given before you even have a chance to organize them in to an army.
    • Crusade mode tends to feel very flat, tactics-wise. There's no attacks of opportunity which means enemies are generally hard to lock down (Larger enemies can be denied from moving somewhere by not having free room). Late game enemies frequently teleport or fly meaning they are even harder to lock down. There's wonkiness statistically where units stats don't behave how one would expect them to (Clerics, for example, have a will save of +2 when you'd think clerics would have much higher will save). There maps are all functionally the same (Square, obstruction towards the middle top). Flanking only provides a minor attack bonus which you might not even notice (As armies cannot miss attacks, but lower attack rolls means less individuals in that army do damage). Because your armies have limited slots for units, you are discouraged from using more rare and unique units (Especially the ones you can't build yourself and only get limited number of them as reward, as mentioned above). In the end the best approach is simply to spend a ton of weeks to build the largest deathball of units you can manage and stomp everything in your way by massively outnumbering the opposition.
  • Stealth. Regardless of difficulty setting, enemies have very high perception ratings and will often spot you sneaking around, even from a distance and even if you left your party behind. If you don't get spotted then and there, they also appear to have an automatic instant detection radius once you are close enough. While that isn't a big deal for stealth archers, melee stealth characters, like the traditional dagger-wielding rogue, are almost entirely blocked from initiating combat with their iconic Back Stab because of this. It's even worse on turn-based mode, where attempting to attack will lead the game to run initiative checks and set up the turn order immediately, meaning your character's attempt at a stealthy first strike will be cancelled out completely unless they're first by regular turn order.
    • Compounding this is that most enemies's "aggro radius" is not immediate vision range. While this is nice in that you aren't typically jumped the instant anything sees you, non-patrolling enemies thus become total ambush fodder for archers naturally. This makes melee stealth even more worthless, because why bother trying to stealth if most encounters are going to begin with you having a bonus round anyway?
  • As with other video game properties based on the D&D ruleset, Weapon Focus and its associated feats are sometimes criticized for requiring foreknowledge of how the game designers chose to distribute the loot, and how many high-quality weapons of a given type even exist. Without it, you may end up having to use an inferior weapon for a long time because there's just no better alternative of the type you're specialized in available. Exotic weapons have it especially rough as you have to guess which ones are even going to be in the game since you can only pick proficiency in one exotic weapon at a time. Worsened by the fact that the Commander should logically be able to have equipment custom-made for them, given their position. A popular Game Mod exists as a workaround which makes focus apply to weapon families rather than individual weapon types. The talking weapon Finnean is also in the game by default to ameliorate the problem, but as described above, he has his own issues and permanently becomes a longsword if the good end to his questline is chosen.
  • Party members cannot be respeeced past the starting level they join you at. This is fine for characters who join early on, since they join low enough that missing one or two levels that you can adjust isn't a big deal, but later party members join high enough that the player can't adjust them to better fit the party they want, making later characters significantly less viable as the game goes on. A good comparison is Seelah and Sosiel; functionally both are similar (melee fighters with Positive Energy spells), but because Seelah joins you at the very start of the game, the player can build her to be a powerful character who can be adjusted to fit the situation easily, whereas Sosiel, who joins hours later at a higher level, is going to be stuck having to be built around the already set levels he has, preventing him from being as viable due to that.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Compared to both Kingmaker and the tabletop campaign WotR was adapted from. Most enemies in the game after chapter 1 have a lot of extra hit dice, spell resistance, and save values. Arguably this was intended to rebalance the game compared to the original AP (there's six party member slots absent animal companions and summons, and players of the AP criticized its easy combat due to the Game-Breaker Mythic Paths), but it renders a lot of spells completely useless after chapter 1 (including anything relying on hit dice to determine effects, like Color Spray) and often verges on Nintendo Hard even at middle difficulty settings. This was almost inevitable compared to the Adventure Path the game is based on, however, which is considered one of the easiest Adventure Paths Paizo has ever published.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • Since cutscenes take place in the same engine and systems as combat, cutscenes where someone is attacked and killed tend to flow poorly, as characters will sometimes stand around and not do anything while they are attacked, seemingly because the script is using the combat mechanics.
  • One of the random events in Drezen is the arrival of a Children's Crusade - but the "children" are obviously adult character models shrunk down.
• That One Boss:
  • Darrazand, the balor in front of the Drezen citadel at the climax of chapter 2. He's not particularly hard to beat, and that's the problem: for a long time, his battle was scripted to run for six rounds, at which point Greybor appears and tries (and fails) to stab him In the Back; cue Villain: Exit, Stage Left. It's completely possible to knock him down to zero HP before that, but still have him be up and about merrily slaughtering the NPCs (and then moving on to your team) for a couple rounds longer. The event was eventually patched so that, once Darrazand passes a certain HP threshold, Greybor moves in early to conclude the encounter.
  • In Crusade Mode, any general that casts direct-damage spells. They will always use their biggest, most-damaging spell, they will use it every single turn, and they can hit any unit on the map with it, just like your own generals. Due to a bug, however, they can't run out of energy, much unlike your generals. What's worse, these spells sometimes do more damage than their entire army combined.
  • Vavakia Vanguards. There are two of them in the game and you will remember both fights for how annoying they are. They have all the traits of the game's Superbosses (high health, massive AC, high spell resistance, immunities, self-resurrection, etc) but one has to be fought to complete Secrets of Creation and the other has to be fought in Act 6 to complete the main story. What makes them a nightmare, though, is their Dazzling Display. They perform Mythic Dazzling Display every other round or so, which leads to all your characters in a huge radius that ignores line-of-sight being Shaken, then Frightened, meaning you can't control them. All your characters, because this ignores immunity to Fear, even that granted by such traits as being Mindless (swarms) or Undead (a lich Commander and their companions). The only way around this is to use Remove Fear, which doesn't actually stop the status effects from applying or remove them once they're there but does let you bypass the control lockout on a Frightened character. Unfortunately you probably don't have immediate access to this spell at this point in the game because why would you take a spell to mitigate an effect you're supposed to be immune to?
• That One Level:
  • The tavern defense in Act 1. Your main goal is to defeat several waves of cultist arsonists before they can burn down the tavern, but the problem is that they're backed up by a lot of infinitely respawning minions that just love to gang up on you and waste your time while the arsonists make their way to the tavern. And if you manage to take down all the arsonists, you still have to do one last fight...against a level 5 half-fiend Minotaur. And then there's some who, while not finding the mission hard, find the mission long. If you like playing turn based rather than real time with pause (Pathfinder IS a turn based game after all, and if you're playing casters, Turn Based is much easier for them since enemies can't move out of the ways of spells), the mission can feature +15 enemies at once, 15+ allies ^note Even those who skip their turn eat 1 or 2 seconds as the camera pans over to each one of them, and the entire party. The battle itself can take upwards of 25 rounds. The single battle can easily eat an entire hour or more if played in turn based mode. It's almost worse if it's easy for you as instead of 90 minutes of nail biting action you get 90 minutes of utter boredom.
  • Blackwater has quickly become an extremely infamous area in act 3. Aside from being a sudden swerve into science fiction with the enemies all being cyborgs which is quite jarring for anyone unfamiliar with the nearby nation of Numeria and all the alien technology there, all the enemies are unusual in that they are more durable than your average humans, they passively heal every turn, and they do not die like normal. If you deplete all their health, they simply fall to the floor and begin regenerating unless you A:strike them with lightning element in some way, B:strike them with an adamantium weapon (which is rare, especially at that point), or C:finish them with a Coup de Grace, an ability that all characters possess but the player may have easily forgotten existed. And just as you begin getting used to that, the zone starts throwing demons with the same mechanics but with the added wrinkle that they are immune to Coup de Graces, meaning you need to have another method to keep them down. It's a taxing level to say the least. The game does make this easier as literally every enemy in the area drops a shock weapon, and wands of call lightning are found by the entrance.
  • Act 4 in general. While the city of Alushinyrra is creative visually, it's extremely tedious to traverse. Buildings slide in and out of paths, bridges will fly away and much of the locations are linked by portals who all share the same names. Several buildings are not marked on the Map, and the map itself changes form. This is furthermore all tied to camera rotation, but this might not be obvious to the player if they skipped or turned off tutorials (which, considering that by this point you're more than 20h into the game, and the game likes to repeat tutorials it already offered, you're practically encouraged to do). Lastly, fast travel requires specific items to unlock for each fast travel point. Several pieces of loot are only reachable using Dimension Door, which is prone to glitching and either sending your characters across the map or getting them irreversibly stuck in the level geometry, necessitating a reload.
  • The Enigma, encountered on Nenio's personal quest. It's one Moon Logic Puzzle after another (and a few memory puzzles which are easy enough) with about a dozen puzzles in total, most of which need to be solved to finish the dungeon itself, which is also a giant puzzle. Most players consider it the longest part of Act 5 by a significant margin and its only saving grace is the sheer amount of gold you can kick out of the place if you're willing to spend several hours clearing it. At least you get to kick Areshkagal's ass at the end, getting some revenge for her putting you through all those puzzles. To top it all off, because it is a companion quest, you have to take Nenio with you the whole way, which could potentially mess up the party composition while going through one of the most challenging dungeons in the game, including a really hard boss at the end.
• That One Puzzle: Any of them related to the Enigma could count, but probably the most frustrating puzzles are tied to the quest The Secrets of Creation. You have to complete 4 puzzles involving placing slabs with like symbols down against each other until the entire grid is filled. The problem is that to tell which slab you are placing down, you have to squint at the small icons representing the slabs in your inventory as it doesn't let you see a larger image of what you are placing until you set it down. And the way you put the slab down can be confusing (you have two buttons per slab slot to press, and the one you press affects the slab's orientation when placed). Then to wrap it up, you have to do a final puzzle involving containers of varying fullness to be placed down in the right configuration. As an extra bit of annoyance, the slab puzzle basically functions like a game of dominos. But you are never told this, so it's entirely up to the player the first time to even guess what the actual goal they are supposed to work forward even is, as no context is given.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Players wanting to romance Queen Galfrey have to deal with an extremely tedious process in order to do so, having to pick dialogue options that direct her to do certain things such as going incognito and joining the fight, or having to pick dialogue that balances being serious, and making time for levity when speaking to her. You also have to have certain alignments and Mythic Paths to do so, and you have to lead the Crusade as optimally as possible. Combine that with many of the story moments that can affect interactions with her, and a player wanting to romance her may fail 'extremely' early in the game without knowing it, or fail to get it due to being just short of the game's hidden systems.
  • The Secrets of Creation. It's a rather long and drawn on quest that involves obnoxious puzzles. To start, you have to explore 5 seemingly unrelated zones without much prompting (though if your knowledge stats are high enough, you can get hints on where to go in meetings with a mysterious ghost) to find various slabs. One of these zones contains a mandatory Vavakia Vanguard (see That One Boss). Once you have all of those slabs, then you have to complete 5 puzzles in a row (see That One Puzzle). And the quest is mandatory if you want to finish the Storyteller's questline (as the first 4 puzzles give you Elven Pages among other things) and the aforementioned mysterious ghost is Kiny, the Storyteller's old friend. Speaking of which, you better hope you progressed the Storyteller's story enough to learn about Kiny before freeing him or else you are locked out of the Storyteller's best ending. On the bright side, you gain an extremely powerful mask for completing it (though it'll actually debuff you if used in the Enigma (see That One Level), but that's only one level at least.) As an extra bit of insult picking up the aforementioned very powerful mask adds an ending slide implying your character falls under the influence of the demon lord Areshkagal in the future.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Terendelev is introduced at the start of the game as a seemingly important character, who very clearly spots something off about the player characters situation and wants to help them. Then only a few minutes later, Deskari drops in and kills her with ease, preventing any exploration or interactions with her. While she gets more spotlight compared to her tabletop self, doing so highlights how underused she is.
  • Aravashnial, one of the most prominent NPCs in the early parts of the tabletop campaign, is Killed Offscreen before the player ever officially meets him.
  • Aron Kir, another prominent NPC from the tabletop campaign with a large role in Chapter 2, only makes a cameo during Sosiel's companion questline.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Depending on who you ask, between one and two thirds of the Mythic Parts feel underdeveloped, content-deprived and/or rushed. As a rule of thumb, this usually does not hit the Angel, Aeon, Azata and Legend paths, while Swarm-That-Walks, Gold Dragon and Devil, as late game paths, seem to get it the most. Opinions on the remaining three paths are more split.
  • This seems to be how the majority of players feel about the "Inevitable Excess" DLC. The DLC promised primarily two things, a sort of Playable Epilogue to round out the main adventure and the ability to really wreak havoc and take full advantage of your Purposefully Overpowered endgame status as a 10th-level Mythic being. While this is all there, From a Certain Point of View, the consensus is that the story potential of such a scenario was barely taken advantage of, with little recognition of your Mythic type or decisions, and very few impactful choices such a borderline divine creature should be able to make at this point, and instead a lot of puzzles, considered a Scrappy Mechanic for many.
• Tough Act to Follow: After the relatively niche appeal of Kingmaker, Wrath instead became a massive Sleeper Hit, featuring sophisticated gameplay mechanics, a great story and set of characters, and the extremely beloved Mythic Path system, adding enormous replay value and story branching. This suddenly catapulted Owlcat Games from obscurity to the forefront of developers in the RPG sphere. It's no surprise then that their later games, such as Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, would be compared unfavorably to the lightning in a bottle that was Wrath of the Righteous (particularly with Mythic Paths not being a concept easily transferable to other games).

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