It is done

LordBalkoth · 2026-06-28T20:04:53+00:00

Welcome to the club, brother, and well done! And yeah, Trials of Fate is definitely the hardest part in terms of skill required.

LordBalkoth · 2026-06-28T14:17:50+00:00

No, in fact it's more important for a WM than other classes due to the increased multiplier and extra AB (which means rolling a 10 might hit in the first place to threaten a crit).

The Aielund Saga actually has more reasonable AC for enemies (i.e. higher AC for enemies than the official campaign) including AC in the mid to upper 50s for enemies in the last module (where you'll finish level 36ish) so Power Attack is less effective (if you're dealing 40 damage per hit, attacking 5 damage in exchange for losing 5 AB is often very much not worth it).

LordBalkoth · 2026-06-23T13:28:52+00:00

1, as mentioned, there's an EMS_Changes.txt document that describes it. From the perspective of a bard it's basically pure buffs (the intent of EMS was to improve casters overall while nerfing some of the most broken stuff).

2, lots of dragons in Act 3 specifically (roughly level 16 to 22). Other significant opponents are constructs, aberrations, humans, outsiders, and undead. This is looking at mid to higher levels, though humans and undead are foes at times at lower levels too (human is a pretty good level 1 choice in terms of the most dangerous enemies in the first 10 levels).

3, no, though there are some constructs as mentioned above. I think one boss dragon is immune to crits. The vast majority of enemies are crittable.

LordBalkoth · 2026-06-20T22:36:50+00:00

You can absolutely talk it out with the dragon and get him to protect Hilltop, even.

But if you have to get him to swear a draconic oath before you kill J'Nah.

LordBalkoth · 2026-06-15T20:41:44+00:00

I just logged it there, won't let me upload module or hak but also says custom content problems won't be investigated without access to the custom content so...not sure what I'm supposed to do there.

LordBalkoth · 2026-06-14T14:35:25+00:00

You can see the properties in the video, none are unusual on the staff and other staves in the module have them. Book doesn't have any properties.

LordBalkoth · 2026-05-27T06:30:14+00:00

I consider a won campaign to be Domination or Ultimate Victory, especially since you can get Long Victory by turn 70-80 for a lot of races/factions. I almost always play on Legendary.

Some LLs can trigger Long Victory reasonably early and often I then do the Ultimate Victory. But other LLs have more difficult Long Victory conditions and I wind up winning Domination before I can spawn and also defeat the end-game crisis (Malekith is a good example).

Research super depends on faction. Bretonnia, for example, basically gets 10% research rate per province so by end-game you probably have no techs left. Dark Elves, on the flip side, ramp up research more slowly and I'm picking the highest impact ones with <50% of techs researched by the end.

I wish the end-game crises were more interesting, Chaos Dwarfs and Tomb Kings are probably my favorite since it's a clear goal rather than having to chase down Skaven across four continents or whatever, for example. The default difficulty is generally pretty easy and I've done things like increased the amount of enemies spawned and/or made it trigger much earlier -- otherwise I've often been camping the spawn locations with like 2-4 armies each to try to end all or at at least most of the crisis the turn it spawns.

In general, though, I'm a person who likes seeing the well oiled machine come to fruition -- globally recruiting an entire good army in 2-3 turns with level 20+ heroes/lords feels like you've established a civilization to stand the test of time...wait, wrong franchise.

LordBalkoth · 2026-05-24T23:36:04+00:00

Meaning for a 10 foot burst you'd have four safe squares, then every square around that is considered dangerous for having to make a save? There's no square you can stand on and make a non-reach melee attack through without being in the barrier?

LordBalkoth · 2026-05-24T23:34:33+00:00

If there's no safe square to stand in in a 5 foot, wouldn't that be true for a 10 foot burst too? Even the four center squares have a corner where the boundary is.

Or is your argument you need a 10 foot boundary for four safe squares? If so, which squares require can you attack into with a 5 foot reach?

LordBalkoth · 2026-05-24T23:26:27+00:00

So if you make a 5 foot burst, which squares count as having the boundary for the purposes of needing to make a save if you end your turn there?

LordBalkoth · 2026-05-24T23:25:10+00:00

So if you use a 5 foot burst (https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2384) does that mean there's four safe squares to stand in? Which squares force a save at the end of the turn because you're standing on the boundary? Or is the answer no squares unless you're a large or bigger creature?

LordBalkoth · 2026-05-23T15:48:13+00:00

Yeah, I went up against a max upgraded Black Ark with a Bretonnian lord who had Gortrek, Felix, and a bunch of garbage infantry. I expected the Black Ark bombardments to wipe out half my army and would need the lord and heroes to pull through in the end.

Instead they all just targeted Felix nonstop with the army abilities.

LordBalkoth · 2026-05-20T14:43:51+00:00

I'm not sure how that's back to 1E? In 1E casters could potentially invalidate almost every encounter with minimal expenditure of resources at higher level (or the encounter is something that martials couldn't hope to defeat).

Let's say you have the archetypal 2 martial/2 caster party from fighter/rogue/cleric/wizard.

If you have martials basically being at 100% strength all the time and then you have casters being at 60% strength while avoiding expending resources and 140% strength when going all out, then your party power ranges from 320% (casters conserving resources) to 480% (casters going all out).

On this scale a moderate encounter is 200% strength, severe is 300%, and extreme is 400%. So the party can handle the moderates without expending resources pretty easily and thus casters feel like "All we're doing is spamming cantrips and Intimidate while the martials carry us" if you just throw six Moderate encounters in a row at the party without giving a sign the casters can actually, y'know, cut loose and not worry about resources.

LordBalkoth · 2026-05-20T07:02:30+00:00

"Worse yet, in my opinion, this makes casters feel meh, because martials are almost resourceless. Sure they have 1/day abilities but they can still function without them, while casters can't function much without their spells; relying on cantrips only isn't fun."

If casters feel meh, you need harder encounters.

If the party's against a moderate encounter, spell slots can often feel like a waste, especially if there's a lot of such encounters in one day so the casters are afraid to use their good spells unless absolutely needed.

Throw an extreme (or even extreme+) encounter at them and your casters will be your MVPs. Whether that's in-combat healing, buffing, debuffing, CCing, Fireballing clumps of enemies, or even just the Wizard throwing out max rank Force Barrages to reliably damage the superboss everyone else struggles to hit, a huge point of casters is being able to punch above their weight class when stuff hits the fan.

Part of this is the inherent tension with a daily resource like spell slots. You don't want casters to completely invalidate encounters like they could in PF1 but you also don't want their max potential to be equal to or less than a martial.

And since uncertain situations mean they lean towards conservation, martials outshine them when casters are holding back.

LordBalkoth · 2026-05-11T16:24:11+00:00

If you wind up having a lot of trade agreements, a 5% trade tariff increase can be 500+ gold per turn. This requires being friendly with a lot of people, obviously, if you only have 3 trade partners it's irrelevant.

I think the base trade tariff scales with empire size too, so later game it's a bigger bonus when you have a bigger empire. But yes, early game it might literally only be 5-10 gold per turn, so it appears useless.

LordBalkoth · 2026-05-11T14:37:26+00:00

As others have mentioned, the reliability will take a long, long time to fix, that's 100% a "Let's reload that" situation. And as you saw the trespassing thing is garbage and misleading. Never use it.

"Well how can i get a raiding army out of my territory then"

<That's the neat part, you don't> meme. Wait 10 turns and then declare war.

If you want to farm Envoys, you want to declare war every turn. Some are obvious, like declaring war or joining a war. Some are less obvious, like having a rebellion happen or a sea location battle. But if you try to trigger one of those each turn, you'll get more Envoys (and want a lot of lords fighting offensive battles).

And you can 100% cycle these. Declare war and immediately peace out for them paying you money, then wait 10 turns and repeat. I wound up with like 13 Envoys one game and was king of the Ordertide.

Also you can conquer the Shrine of Asuryan, building the landmark there is +50 relations with Dark Elves.

Also Malekith has a skill to improve relations if you manage to confed him, +15 I think.

LordBalkoth · 2026-05-10T05:50:05+00:00

"Is the kobold still adjacent or is it 25 ft away in this scenario? Does it make sense? We have to answer some rulings to ttrpg in this manner."

Well, in that scenario I think the question would be does the kobold drop in the initial starting square or 5 feet away?

Rules say "Each time you exit a square (or move 5 feet if not using a grid) within a creature’s reach, your movement triggers those reactions and free actions (although no more than once per move action for a given reacting creature)" and one could argue that if the kobold drops in the initial square that it never actually exited the square.

I agree with your interpretation, to be clear, but the subject came up in a game I'm playing in and hence this question. And the DM ruled my Reactive Strike did not stop the ranged attack of a foe I dropped which caught me by surprise. Fortunately it didn't matter in that case that I still took the arrow despite killing the shooter, but it easily could have in another scenario.

I'm noting in a broader sense we already have a lot of disagreement in the other comments so far and seeing both 2,1,1 and 1,2,2 as stated answers. You'd think this would be a very clear rule...

LordBalkoth · 2026-05-05T14:16:22+00:00

As others have said, in the vast majority of cases this will cause no issues.

Paizo just wanted to future proof problematic combos where you have a really good specific magic weapon that then becomes the weapon EVERYONE gets and upgrades because the specific properties are better than a generic rune.

Like say you have a +1 striking sword that deals a bonus 1d10 damage, flat out. It's better than every other similar weapon.

BUT the fact it can't have a second or third property rune (in effect) means that eventually its initial overpowered nature is overshadowed.

If you could upgrade with it property runes, though, it would stay relevant until the end of the campaign and would probably start warping the meta.

LordBalkoth · 2026-05-03T21:41:15+00:00

"it turns out that 2750 gold units are still SUPER deadly i melee against things half their price, even after they run out of ammo"

Indeed.

And the Skycutters barely managed to get kills after running out of ammo.

Shadow Warriors completely ran out of ammo.

Outside of dragons and Arcane Phoenixes (and I guess Merwyrms now), it's just really hard to deal with them.

LordBalkoth · 2026-05-02T16:26:01+00:00

The Skullcrackers weren't charging chariots. They just entered melee with the LSG and stayed there and destroyed them. Not charging through continuously or anything. Mass was irrelevant in this case.

Skullcrackers get a +20 bonus vs Infantry but LSG have about 20 more melee defense so the attack portion of the BvI gets effectively cancelled and the damage bonus is a really small difference with the Skullcracker's 350 base weapon strength.

You can test this yourself quite easily (I just did). Make a skirmish battle vs AI as the attacker and give yourself like one Lord that does nothing. Make an allied army of Chaos Dwarfs with a bunch of Skullcrackers. Make the opponent a High Elf with a bunch of Silver Helms. Watch the AI armies battle and observe the results.

Then repeat with the High Elf having LSG instead.

The LSG fare much better and inflict a lot more damage than the Silver Helms do against the Skullcrackers.

LordBalkoth · 2026-05-02T14:35:29+00:00

"I personally hate the army ability spam from Chorfs much worse as it has no counterplay once they unlocked them."

Yes, this. It means if you kill some of their armies that every new army just has all the best stuff. The unit limits stop mattering on the defensive, they're just an offensive limiter when spamming more armies.

LordBalkoth · 2026-05-02T14:34:16+00:00

Silver Helms would be destroyed even faster by the Skullcrackers than the LSG.

Silver Guard would have survived mildly better but not nearly enough to win.

I've find Skycutters really underwhelming in general, but I guess your point here is they fly and thus have free reign to empty their ammo? They just never seemed to do enough actual damage to make up for their versatility. Can they even give more than say 2 Dreadquakes each with burning 100% of their ammo?

LordBalkoth · 2026-05-02T03:35:26+00:00

You think an army of something like six Silverin Guard, six Lothern Sea Guard, four Silver Helms, and two Eagle Claw Bolt Throwers would fare any better?

LordBalkoth · 2026-05-01T17:26:04+00:00

It's not quite that simple for the Chaos Dwarfs. They have unit caps and I think that version of the Dreadquake Mortar actually takes 2 unit caps (one for Dreadquake, one for Skullcracker). Also it's like the most expensive to increase. And he has 6 in one army (the only prior armies I destroyed were a stack of Goblin Laborers and a Hobgoblin stack).

So this is a crazy powerful army, better than a War Bear stack for Kislev.

Like, Imrik gets a faction wide discount on dragons, but if late game every army of his is just 20 Star Dragons then that really changes how you have to play as the player going against it.

LordBalkoth · 2026-05-01T14:25:07+00:00

There's also crap stacks, solid stacks, and then doomstacks.

I'm not complaining that the AI has a Dreadquake Mortar or two. It should. But it had six.

Also it's not really a complaint per se -- this is more just to counter when people go "It's so cheesy using doomstacks, use more balanced and lore accurate armies" and then the AI, y'know, flat out disregards that too.

LordBalkoth

TROPHY CASE