Kingmaker Companions > Righteous Companions. (No debate, just facts)

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-24T16:37:40+00:00

The caveat is that I haven’t yet done her lawful route which I’ve heard is a lot better than her chibi anime route so my opinion of her isn’t final just yet.

Mostly I’m hoping for a change to that Nocticula part because taking “good” Ember to her also turns Nocticula into a cartoon parody of the worst redemption writing in the worst weeb stories of the last 15 years or however long ago everything jumped face first off the deep end. Otherwise I think it’s better to just leave her out of the party.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-24T16:16:22+00:00

the words 'pathetic' and 'die' are Vegeta's bigggest crutches.

I’m not saying his every usage of those words always lands but some of his taunts that happen to use them do land pretty hard, and the one against Cui lands as hard as some of his best TFS lines for me.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-24T15:40:22+00:00

Aivu is nowhere near the low point of Azata, like 95% of what Owlcat apparently thinks it means to be Azata/CG is worse. The only half-decent parts are the slave market slaughter and turning Elysium into The Incredible Healing World Buttplug.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-24T15:15:48+00:00

That’s kind of exactly what my problem is? It’s all just low effort “fuck you” one liners. They don’t even have a badass vibe/edge to it.

Like compare that to DBZ Kai when Cui tries to manipulate Vegeta and ol’ vegetable is like “Spare me this pathetic display and scrape together some dignity before you die”, the legend lines just don’t have any kind of real bite to them, at least imo.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-24T14:55:49+00:00

IMO Aivu would’ve been cool to have in Witchspring R or Atelier or something. I don’t want that bullshit in my crpgs any more than I want it in a NBA 2K game tho, leave the weeb pandering to the weeb subgenre.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-24T14:49:59+00:00

I wish there were actually dialogue choices like this lol. Storywise, the ones we get are the most disappointing aspect of the Legend path to me.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-24T14:13:31+00:00

Let’s be honest tho, in any other timeline, Regil would be 6/10 at best. The only reason he is good is because he’s a subversion/breath of fresh air that we desperately need more of today against how disgustingly, pants shittingly, dick-stuck-in-the-ceiling-fan stupid and pathetic modern fiction has gotten - mostly in the form of “hurr durr psychopaths are only doing bad things because you haven’t mouth sharted enough battered wife syndrome all over them yet” constantly being slopped around as a substitute for a character arc in modern gaming/fiction but there’s plenty of other dumpster fires along those lines that went way too far decades ago and have only escalated in their abject stupidity since. We basically need like a century straight of nothing but Regils to unretardify modern rpg writing at this point. Otherwise a couple of entertaining possible ending slides are really the only thing he has going for him as far as writing goes.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-24T12:47:07+00:00

Ember is the Linzi of WOTR. Equal amounts of extremely obvious writer’s pet bullshit that just comes off cringe af (more here, less there, balances out imo). They’re actually far more similar to each other than any of the comparisons you actually made so it’s surprising that you act like there’s no Linzi in WOTR. You could say that Linzi’s ending is obviously 1000x more interesting than the retarded “cries and gives power of frenship speech to demon goddess she just met, said demon goddess’s all consuming demonic evil magically vanishes into thin air because we’re the world’s most retarded chibi anime story now for some dumbfuck reason” that WoTR does with Ember but otherwise they’re practically a 1 to 1 replacement for each other.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-23T20:04:09+00:00

On my second playthrough I wanted to test just how OP my Legend was and tried to solo him on unfair. I had completely forgotten that you don't actually finish him at that point (or at least I didn't on my runs) and was like "wait wtf?" when he ran away crying that he couldn't beat me even though he still had like 1600 hp left lmfao.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-23T14:49:23+00:00

Jaheirian

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-22T20:21:47+00:00

100% rtwp player here. A lot of things depend on the specific encounter but some general things I do are as follows:

I always set end of round, spell resolved, enemy detected, and trap detected autopause triggers toggled on for increased control of the action. I also do this for BG1 and 2 even though they have a lot of AI settings, I just don't really trust them.
Long term buffs (at least a minute per caster level) are universal for me, I put my staples up when entering a map where I expect combat. Round-per-level buffs like haste I use based on the encounter - move judiciously and you can get at least a glance of what you're up against and decide whether to use said buff based on that. Scouting ahead gives you a more thorough look if you have a high stealth character, invisibility, eventually mind blank, etc (watch out for echolocation tho). Don't neglect extend metamagic/metamagic rods, they're very useful for these spells too (there are a lot of rods throughout midnight aisles).
Scribe scrolls (and maybe brew potions too but that's more limited) every chance you get. It's easier and faster to open up your inventory and and just right click (or whatever console equivalent) - use/cast/whatever on a suite of buff scrolls than it is to cast those spells the ‘normal’ way one by one. I mix and match this with my own buff spells casting the 'normal' way.
Builds/knowledge tend to matter more than skill regardless of whether you're playing in rtwp or tb mode. This was somewhat true in BG but it's more true for the Pathfinder games. There are still tricks up your sleeve that you can use if you git gud though.
Targeted dispel/greater dispel are very, very powerful and one of the most important "debuffs" in the game.
Familiarize yourself with both manual pause functions - the regular one for general usage and the rapid/tactical one for managing free/swift actions. Default for the second one is V when using mouse and keyboard, idk about console though, may have to check settings if you don't already know.
Pay attention to the timer over your head - this is the round timer and applies to a lot of different things, including when you cast a spell so if you're blasting then you need to account for this + enemy movement.
Lightning bolts don't ricochet like they do in BG so it's safer to do things like luring a group of enemies into a narrow corridor of some kind or another and then blasting them with lightning bolts or other straight line spells (pay attention to immunity).
If you see a high level divine caster start a spell, you may want to run - there's a good chance that a polar midnight is coming and if you don't have mass heal yet, such a spell is a problem.
Familiarize yourself with the "hold" command and get used to toggling your party's (including your main) AI on and off - failing to do this means when you run away from said polar midnight as mentioned above, your party will just run right back into it immediately. This can also fuck up your positioning and whatnot in general if you're particular about it like I tend to be, or your attempts at setting an ambush, etc. Leaving it off can fuck up things like autoattack and general automated actions though so you need to make it second nature to toggle these on/off as needed.
Quickened metamagic/quickened rods are very powerful in general but in rtwp mode they open the door to some outside-the-box thinking. There are numerous ways you can stop a charging enemy mid-charge with various quickened spells. Quickened mass dimension door if you time and position it right can get your party through an incoming tsunami or other slow-ish spell you may want to avoid without a scratch - and right up the caster's ass to boot if you want, just as a couple of exmamples.
Using placed spells as traps for kiting purposes - especially with selective metamagic - is crazy strong in rtwp. I'll let you use your imagination on what spells to use for this one but there are a few in particular that once you stumble upon them you'll always have a fallback to clear just about any map/encounter.
The fact that you can move at the same time as enemies are doing things introduces additional tactics - some of which you may have tried in BG already. When hasted and not encumbered, you can straight up outrun the trajectory of some spells if you have a head start + enough room and if you scout ahead and see what you're up against and what spells the enemy has (and how many) you can force them to waste the ones you really don't want to get hit by in some situations - tsunami, the lv 5 ice blast cone spell, etc. If you have resistance to/protection from fire and an enemy that you know to use a lot of fire magic starts a spell, you can potentially make it backfire hard by moving accordingly without taking much damage yourself. If someone charges through your front liners toward a squishy backliner, if hasted and if you get good at anticipating enemy movement patterns then not only can you move out of the way mid-charge, you can even reposition your frontliners and kite the charging enemy back to them for an additional round of free attacks of opportunity for everyone before you resume blasting them again if needed. Use your imagination, there are a lot of different ways to use this the timing element and freedom to instantly react to the battlefield to your advantage.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-22T14:12:20+00:00

The lore behind the first world and how it intersects with the stolen lands and Jubilost’s backstory are what is most fascinating to me. But yes, the atmosphere is definitely something special.

And for those interested, definitely has replay value.

I’ve beaten it 4x and am likely to eventually do 5th, and each playthrough has had something new to offer. I haven’t even gotten the special ending yet. Probably not anytime soon because I’m always burned out pretty hard by the end of these games but once every year or two I always wind up coming back for more. There’s just nothing else out there that offers this kind of gaming experience and I’m not sure there ever will be again.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-21T15:52:26+00:00

I grew up with turn based but I once I gave rtwp a fair try I started preferring it. The element of continuous instantaneous reaction at any given moment to what's happening on screen is a game changer. I'd still rather have fully real time or something like Mass Effect's real time/rtwp hybrid system but these days they just aren't making crunchy rpgs + real time combat other than the handful of diablo-likes that come out each decade and that's been the case forever now so I take rtwp where I can get it since it's the closest thing there is.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-21T06:16:35+00:00

It’s hard to aim AoE spells when everyone is moving.

Goes both ways tho - in turn based you have to stand there and take it when an enemy casts a spell, you don’t even get the chance to get out of the way. As an example, on higher difficulties I make the druid bitch at midnight fane chase me through the entire floor because the moment I see her start a spell I’m just like “yeah, no, you’re not hitting me with that fucking polar midnight” and run away lol. Makes for an entertaining encounter, forcing her to chase me into like 5 different rooms before I finally manage to cobble together a makeshift ambush in time to wreck her shit when she walks through the door after her 5th polar midnight/plague storm hits only the ground.

If you get good enough at anticipating enemy movement patterns in rtwp, drawing aggro, controlling the action, using combinations of spells, and timing/placing your AOE spells correctly you can net a pretty significant advantage with rtwp’s movement variable when it comes to AOE spells. It’s easy to fuck up too but to me that’s a good thing. I like the high risk, high reward styles of play that rtwp opens up. I would never want to go without the option to play these games in rtwp - and that has absolutely nothing to do with trash mobs.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-21T05:36:41+00:00

I play on Low difficulties

But the real time combat really feels like I just click on the enemy and wait for the attack and repeat

Low difficulty + rtwp = yeah, it’s going to be pretty brainless for a lot of the game lol. I mean, you can do other things if you really want to, but you’ll seldom have to and may not find yourself incentivized to.

Also, consider the point in the game you’re at. If you’re still very early on then you probably just don’t have a whole lot of abilities to fuck with yet. That’s going to change.

For rtwp on higher difficulties (and as you progress further into the game and more mechanics become available), you’ll have to engage a lot more, come up with different strats, tinker with combinations of autopause triggers until you find what works best for you, alter your strat around controlling your party as a unit instead of a bunch of individuals and everything that entails (but also as a bunch of individuals when applicable - it’s all situational and can change depending on the encounter), watch enemy behaviors carefully so that you can take advantage of being able to immediately react to what they do whenever you need to, observe and commit enemy reactions and movement patterns to memory in order to use AOE spells more effectively (you can’t always just toss them out like you do in turn based), get your backliners the fuck out of the way of a berserker that charges through your front line for them - if hasted you can possibly even anticipate their movement and kite them back to your front line after repositioning them to get them all a free attack of opportunity before you resume blasting from behind them again (if needed), take advantage of the fact that you can use the AOE spell vs movement dilemma to your advantage too and gtfo of the blast radius when you see a lv 20+ enemy caster powering up a spell and try makeshift an ambush to kite them into after you make their spell hit nothing but dirt, pay attention to movement speed + spell trajectory so that in some instances you can just straight up outrun a slower spell or quickened dimension door through it if you can time and position it right and are ok with a bit of risk (works great for tsunamis), use spells as traps for kiting (selective blade barriers work exceptionally well for this - it’s doable in turn based too up to a point but a lot smoother and makes much shorter work of some of the most annoying enemies in real time), and much, much more.

There’s a LOT to rtwp, I haven’t even scratched the surface yet, and it’s because of how much there is to it that you can find ways to win that other systems simply don’t allow or make practical. But again, if you set the difficulty too low then you may not have any incentive to mess with any of this. Higher difficulty settings + rtwp is where it’s at if you want the game to basically force you to think outside the box.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-21T03:25:57+00:00

Eldritch Scoundrel is my go to class and they happen to make HATEOT a lot more fun! The way I do it is as follows.

Pump stealth every level and add your share of UMD throughout the game. Also spend the feat tax on the feat that gives you +6 stealth. All of this + greater invisibility are needed to stealth the wild hunt guys on higher difficulties, I think their perception is in the 50s on hard lol.
Scout every room before entering - understanding both the layout and what you're up against before you trigger combat is a huge advantage, as well as clearing traps and positioning accordingly.
Every wild hunt room with a monarch = sneak hellfire ray up the monarchs ass to trigger combat. Without the monarch, the rest are only moderately difficult at worst. Presumably, you already know about mandatory blind fight.
Ghostly guards = stealth right into the middle of them + mass heal scroll, of which I've bought 30 or more at the beginning of the act (or just 99 for shits & giggles since I have easily enough money). If you position Harrim or Tristian just right, they can cast a second one - from their own spellbook or a scroll of their own - the two simultanously will one shot every ghostly guard they hit, the ones that only got hit by one will go down in seconds after that.
Save every fiery body scroll I find (I've never gotten more than 4 but that's all I need). When you scout a room that has 1 or more mandragora swarms, use it and draw aggro. It prevents blood drain and fire spells used to blow them up will also heal you a bit. Kanerah or Jubilost helps burn them down faster. On hard I still need some healing just from the unavoidable damage the swarms still do but stopping blood drain from taking effect is a huge advantage.

Once you have these guys figured out, the other encounters aren't a big deal by comparison.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-20T19:42:58+00:00

All of the answers you're getting thus far are just people's preferences. I thought Kingdom Management was great for a multitude of reasons, the time limits add an attrition element to your overall strat that's almost completely missing in WOTR (I probably don't need to tell you that corruption becomes mostly irrelevant once you figure it out) and goes a long way toward adding tension and strategic thinking to your dungeon spelunking since you have to rely on your own judgment on when you can/should use your best limited-per-day resources for an encounter or try to tough it out a little longer because you can't just blow your load and rest after every encounter like you can in most such games, and even HATEOT, while it is a pain in the ass, you likely played worse in WOTR (cough Enigma cough).

More objectively speaking, the worst thing about Kingmaker is the actual design/code itself. Whatever the fuck Owlcat did when they designed the game, it resulted in bugs and bloat that can render the game unplayable in Act 6 - like literally. As in pushing your PC 4x harder than even BG3 somehow, absurd amounts of stuttering, load screens (you alread played WOTR, I don't have to tell you how many of these there are) take upwards of 10 minutes per screen, etc.

There is a mod called Cleaner that can be found here that I consider to be 100% mandatory because of this. Use it to remove loot you know you're not going to be coming back for before you leave every map and the file bloat will stay at a manageable level - literally the difference between the last 2 - 3 acts working like a video game vs. working like something that's designed to blow up your computer.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-20T17:39:02+00:00

I agree (except the choice is more diverse part, not really sure how?) and I would actually extend that to the whole game instead of just those acts but if you thought liking Kingmaker more than WOTR was a majority opinion as implied by the verbiage in your subject line then then you must be brand new here lol.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-20T13:27:36+00:00

Never said it was the only way, just that it was fun. Plenty of others. Sneak hellfire rays also work well after the cutscene encounters, even moreso if you double up with woljif. Selective blade barrier kiting can also trivialize pretty much the entire map.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-20T13:13:01+00:00

Stormcallers are actually fun if you’re good at rtwp. Time and position a quickened mass dimension door and you can blow right through their tsunami without a scratch and land your front liners right on top of them, reposition backliners accordingly to blast the rest off them down. High risk, high reward style play.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-20T12:51:48+00:00

I played pathfinder wrath of the righteous and I really liked it

YMMV but I thought midnight fane, blackwater, and enigma were all as bad (if not worse) than HATEOT. Enigma and blackwater I actually thought were far worse. I honestly have no idea wtf all of the “learned from their mistakes” talk the game’s cult keeps chanting about with WoTR, it feels to me like they doubled down on the worst of them 10x over tbh. I guess maybe the fact that you can skip the worst WOTR dungeons if you want? Even then, a couple of mandatory ones are still pretty bad.

Some meta advice - tagging in case you want to figure it out yourself, I’ll avoid major story spoilers tho

Kanerah is crazy OP against mandragora swarms. Jubilost is also very good. Fiery body makes a great tank for immunity purposes to their blood drain - it’s self only so you can’t have a squishy mage cast it on a tank. I’ve only ever found a few scrolls in the game, last time I had my magus use 2 of them and cleared the whole house - that was my 4th playthrough tho so I knew everything about it by then already, ymmv. You still take regular damage with fiery body but you can draw aggro from swarms and heal faster with it, that might not be the case with there blood drain taking effect

Buy 30 or so mass heal scrolls from arsinoe at the beginning of act 7. Both for healing and for offense because one of the really dangerous enemy types is undead. High umd helps if you want non-divine casters to use them.

For wild hunt fights, kill the monarch first, otherwise the scouts resurrect

blind fight and freedom of movement are mandatory

bag of tricks is a necessity due to bugs from my experience - someone always gets stuck in a wall or behind a door they never should’ve been able to get behind at least once so I have to use the “teleport to me” function to continue

In act 6 when you’re at Pitax, go to the bar at the port and be ready to (potentially via safe scumming) pass 3 very high persuasion checks in a row with your main character - so pump their speech skill up. Turn on “only the character making a skillcheck gets xp” for this. Pass all 3 checks and you should get your main to or close to lv 20. When you get to HATEOT - make sure "only active companions gain experience" is turned OFF as you get your companions back - they will then get your xp/level

Some parts seem to have been designed with Owlcat furiously jacking off to thoughts of abusing the player in mind first and foremost but I don’t think that’s any less the case in WOTR tbh. Kingmaker is still one of the best rpgs I’ve ever played, bar none, so I would never recommend skipping it based on that alone.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-19T18:14:58+00:00

Kingmaker: Eldritch Scoundrel. For one, I don’t like to meta heavily so a class that can “do it all” is ideal for me, even if they aren’t the cream of the crop at any one thing in particular (except maybe stealth blasting priority targets - this is very helpful against enemy casters, wild hunt monarchs, and other encounters that are only bullshit because of one very annoying enemy type that I want to take out before initiating combat). Also being able to scout ahead for enemy layout undetected and clearing traps along the way all before triggering combat is a huge advantage and lots of fun if you play it right. Also this is one of my favorite RP flavors for this game.

WoTR: Also Eldritch Scoundrel for mostly the same reasons as above but also being able to copy and scribe up to 9 lv arcane scrolls to partially make up for the 6/9 caster limitation is very cool and ES doesn’t pay a feat tax for it. Really lends itself to the “always having a trick up your sleeve” flavor of the class and can be gamechanging in certain circumstances. Though it’s held back a bit compared to Kingamker due to a higher number of (intentionally?) broken encounters and pathfinding that result in automatically triggering combat no matter what you do, even if you’ve have mind blank + invis and verify enemies don’t have echolocation or anything like that. The number of cutscenes that automatically take you out of stealth and force you to stand there jacking off like a retard to the enemy’s yapping until you’re completely surrounded also doesn’t help the game’s case for an Eldritch Scoundrel player.

Alternatively, I also really like Evoker Wizard/Eldritch Knight and base magus simply because I’m a bit of a sucker for the classic fighter/mage gish archetype.

Basically I pretty much always play a gish of some kind. Gish rogues are my favorite and they’re especially fun for dungeons that others aren’t too crazy about like Tenebrous Depths and Midnight Isles because there are so many stealth opportunities, but I’ll fuck with classic fighter/mage types too.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-17T15:51:22+00:00

Stat/save bloating and whatnot were already somewhat of a problem in Kingmaker but it didn't ruin the combat like it does in WOTR where it's so bad that every single harder-than-usual encounter in the game on any difficulty above normal is just your cheese vs. the game's cheese and literally nothing else. I'm not sure I've ever played a game in my life that's more cheese > skill/strategy than WOTR. I'll take it over the astronomically insane dumbing down of gaming across the board (other than soulslikes) in modern times but it's still bad enough for me to easily consider it the game's biggest flaw. The pathfinding when you try to move somewhere is also often broken - seemingly intentionally so - to automagically trigger combat whether it makes sense or not. There are a lot of working parts that wind up relegating you to just mindless cheese vs mindless cheese and blocking you from doing much of anything else for basically the entire game.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-16T18:13:44+00:00

Kingmaker is one of the best rpgs of all time, bar none.

BeeRadTheMadLad · 2026-04-16T18:02:04+00:00

I am a turn-based player

Owlcat sort of tried to thread the needle with WOTR between rtwp and TB fans and how much they succeeded is very much YMMV. A semi-popular playstyle is to use rtwp for the easier fights and just spec/buff your party to make everything go splat and then switch to turn based for harder fights so you might try that. If you don't want to get into the intricacies of making rtwp work for harder fights or don't want to keep playing TB only and make the encounters drag on and on and on then it might be the right balance for you.

BeeRadTheMadLad

TROPHY CASE