YMMV / Solasta: Crown of the Magister

• Alternative Character Interpretation: In Palace of Ice, Captain Ashenwood wants you to overthrow General Blunt who stubbornly refuses to see the Sorak/Demon threat as more urgent than the war with Gallivan. Does Ashenwood genuinely believes that the Sorak/Demon threat is real and take priority over the war with Gallivan? Or was Ashenwood saw this as an excuse to overthrow General Blunt and take her place?
• Demonic Spiders
  • Veterans are a humanoid enemy that appears very early on in the campaign as random encounters and when they first appear each one gets three attacks per round when your characters all just get one each. They have good Armor Class and decent health as well. At higher levels they become somewhat more manageable as your own health pool grows, but they're never not a threat. Your own characters won't get a third attack in the same way the Veterans do until they are 11th level, and even then that is only for Fighter class party members. Your other warrior classes like Paladin, Ranger and Barbarian will only ever have two attacks.
  • Most Soraks falls under this. They can cling to walls, become invisible, heal in the dark, are immune to poison and several crowd control effects. On the offense, they can cast spells, detect invisibility, snuff-out all light sources, deal poison or necrotic damage and attack many times per round. They also come in large numbers.
• Event-Obscuring Camera: The game has a full rotation camera and obstacles will fade when you want a full view of the action. Still, there will be instances when this will fail and you'll get something blocking your sights.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Damage-dealing area denial spells, such as Spike Growth, Wall of Fire, and Insect Plague. Melee enemies will happily walk through them as long as there isn't an immediately convenient way around them, and even ranged enemies will walk through them if that's what it takes to get line of sight on you. If you have multiple casters in your party you can stack multiple such effects in the same area for some truly ridiculous damage.
  • High AC characters. The game is heavily biased towards physical attackers, both melee and ranged. What few casters there are tend to be easily sniped, and bias towards debuffs rather than nukes. Most enemies have attack bonuses of less than 10, and while the game has a level cap, it also has a fairly extensive suite of gear that makes it easy to make characters with ACs in the mid to high 20s. Such characters become basically nigh impossible for the enemies to target outside of the occasional crit, just soaking up attacks. Stick in a Paladin for their saving throw boosting aura and you have a party that's nigh unassailable.
  • The Greater Invisibility spell allows you to attack while remaining unseen. As along as your concentration holds up and no one can detect you, you're free to wreck havoc in the enemy ranks without opposition.
  • With the twin spell metamagic , sorcerers can deliver two times the pain in a single attack. Or you can also cast defensive spells on yourself and your party member all during the same round.
  • The Swift Blade ranger's subclass is very broken. The battle focus ability allows him to increase damage as a free action. Combine it with Hunter's mark debuff as a bonus attack for further damage increase. Most rangers fight with two weapons meaning you can give a devastating beating in a single turn.
  • The Maul of the Destroyer can not only deal massive damage, but also inflict a stunning effect if the enemy fails his save. It even works on bosses.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • For a creature of their challenge level, Pilgrims aren't all that dangerous by themselves. However, they can burrow up from underneath your character to knock them to a different square, they can inflict the Pheremone Stink debuff which penalizes their social skills, and they can inflict the Burned By Acid debuff which does a small amount of damage at the beginning of their next three turns. The damage itself usually isn't enough to be concerned about, but for a character concentrating on a spell, it means they'll wind up having to make a total of FOUR Concentration checks for just ONE attack (one for the attack that triggered the debuff and three from the debuff itself). Lady Luck help you if the spell you're concentrating on is something like Conjure Elemental.
  • The same goes for all those Flying Snakes variants. They are weak, but when they fly out of reach, you're melee characters have to switch to bow and crossbow unless they can cast spells.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • You can raise reputation faction with the Tower of Knowledge by just complimenting Maddy over and over. This make it easy to access all of her items for sale without giving her any relics in return. Sadly, it has now been patched.
  • The main campaign is capped at level 12 even though you can still accumulate XP, you just couldn't level-up. This has an unforeseen side-effect in the Palace of Ice DLC. You could import your characters from the previous campaign and those extra XP can allow you to start at a much higher level than intended. This has now been patched: you always start at level 12 regardless of your previously accumulated XP.
• Narm: Wearing a plate armor makes you look cool as it comes with a cool looking helm. However, depending on your character's 3D model, the nose guard of the helm can hide a portion of your eyes, making you look like you're suffering from a severe case of strabismus.
• Obvious Beta: Sadly, the main campaign loses its quality after the first gemstone quest, and there are only four gemstone quests instead of eight. Possibly due to time constraints. The newly announced "Palace of Ice" DLC will rectify this.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The game only has 50 saved game slots. That includes the main campaign, the Lost Valley DLC and any campaign mods you may have.
  • Scribing spells is this. It cost many hundreds of gold and eat up a lot of time. This wouldn't be problem if you're ultra rich, but your party's income is pretty low in this game.
• Special Effect Failure: Whenever you sneak attack someone from behind, the enemy will always turn around to face you even if you're invisible and he's not suppose to know you're there.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • To The Temple of Elemental Evil. Both games are turned-based and follow the pen-and-paper rules very closely. In both games you create a whole party from scratch.
  • It also resembles Neverwinter Nights, with its built-in dungeon building tools allowing players to try their hand at making modules. The story also is similar to NN's first campaign in the broad strokes, involving a conspiracy by ancient Lizard Folk to take over the world.
  • There's also parallels between it and the Icewind Dale duology, especially with the recent release of Baldur's Gate III. Like the Icewind Dale games, and unlike the Baldur's Gate games, Solasta lets you create your entire party by hand, rather than having various companions you can recruit. With them, you follow a scripted storyline that casts your party as eager young adventurers who end up saving the world by sealing a portal to another dimension that the antagonists opened. The main difference is that in one, the portal lets demons in, while in the other, it lets the Soraks in instead.
• That One Attack:
  • Whenever an enemy uses counterspell to cancel your spell and losing a precious spell slot, you'll be raging outloud. The only consolation is that you can do the same to them, and that they sometimes waste their precious counterspells on your unlimited cantrips.
  • Fire creatures can apply burning which is damage over time. Unless you can shrug off the fire, you'll have to waste an entire turn to put it out.
• That One Boss: Sessroth, the very Final Boss of the Palace of Ice is one unfair and frustrating boss. Teleport Spam? Check. Flying away so your melee characters can't hit him? Check. Surrounded with mooks? Check. Devastating area effect spells? Check. Immune to many attacks? Check. Legendary actions? As always, check. Legendary resistances that allow him to turn a failed save into a success? ARGH! Check. Not only you have to put up with that, he has to be fought three times with no long rests allowed in between and with severe penalties to your characters stats.
• That One Level: The Palace of Ice is one scrappy dungeon. You're permanently afflicted with penalties to your saving throws, action bonus, armor class and movement speed. You can't leave the place until you finish the game and long resting isn't allowed. On top of that, you have to fight the Final Boss three times which happen to be a very annoying and unfair boss. That third time is with his little friend who happens to be another frustrating boss.
• That One Sidequest: Saving Reya from city guards isn't a difficult task. However, if your initiative rolls are bad compared to the guards, then Reya risk of receiving tons of damage making it impossible to save her in time. If she's knocked down, you might as well reload your game.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Spy background gives you access to a spy codebook. However, it's hardly of any use in the game.

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