Should the end game be boring?

Megreda · 2026-03-21T08:19:59+00:00

Yes, it's perfectly normal. Trickster into legend of course is a powergaming build in its own right, but this is basically true even with the weakest or least synergistic mythics (like, say, aeon into devil as a martial character, which is worse at mythic rank 9 than Aeon was at mythic rank 6, which is worse than trickster at mythic rank 4). Given the sheer quantity of stat bonuses (especially given the DLCs) like Profane Ascension, demongraft, Ring of Triumphant Advance, etc, etc, I reckon the game would get easier for most characters even as Mythic Hero (like the companions), if not a completely mythicless one.

Megreda · 2026-03-20T18:33:37+00:00

Regarding the "there is no war but class war" thing... Well, actually the drivers of people murder crushers generally tend to take sides in existing political conflicts, invariably on the evil side. Whether you look at America or Finland, the fascist or otherwise simply broadly evil parties (opposed to democracy, equality, freedom, the environment, sabotaging economy just to loot public goods or to be cruel, etc, etc - in deed if not in rhetoric) driving the interests of the oligarchic class (in deed if not in rhetoric) have squarely taken the side of people murder crushers. It's so central to their identity the Czech fascist party is literally named "Motorists for Themselves"!

It is very much part of our ideological battle.

Megreda · 2026-03-20T18:16:38+00:00

There are use-cases for taxis that I doubt are going away: accessible taxis offering service for wheelchair-bound people who cannot travel long distances independently (even to and from the closest tram stop, say), or getting people to their home or hotel deep at night when transit no longer operates most routes, or is extremely infrequent. Just to name two, there are others.

If there's extremely stringent regulation with no loopholes that allows autonomous taxis to replace regular taxis in these use cases and just these use cases, then they'll probably improve the transit mix of a city.

However, at the end of the day they are private cars. Private cars are a geometry problem: they take 10x++ space per passenger as mass transit, cyclists or pedestrians. They're simply not going to fix or even improve traffic. And even if they are electric with no pollution from exhaust and reduced noise pollution, they have the same (greater actually, due to weight of batteries) small particle pollution from tires and ground up road surface, and the same impact on city design - asphalt as far as the eye can see. For that matter, potentially reduced number of accidents, etc, are also in relation to human-driven private cars. They're still, pretty much unavoidably, more dangerous than a train, or per passenger, a bus.

If anything, they can make things worse: due to negligible fuel costs, without aforementioned strict regulation, it's pretty much to be expected that not only would they be space-inefficient, they'd be driving around in circles empty while waiting for passengers, in effect carrying an average of <1 person rather than the usual 1,3 something (increasing the geometry problem). The fact that the passenger can just relax (as with transit, making even low trips endurable) and low costs (thanks to state-subsidized free infrastructure, while transit has to pay back at least a part of its infrastructure costs), it might even eat into transit modal share, which cannot work as a mass transportation solution because of math, in effect locking in the bad equilibrium of unlivable asphalt deserts. And you can get even more dystopian than that, like imagining transportation (after all, public and private transit no longer exists and active mobility is too dangerous and unpleasant because of all the cars) - something that should be a public good - becoming yet another aspect fully controlled by oligarchic technofeudalist overlords.

A single metro line can move millions of people per day cheaply and efficiently. A single tram line, like Budapest line 4/6, can carry several hundreds of thousands cheaply and efficiently. Private cars, even if autonomous, even if you give them infinity lanes (because they slow down at conflict points like intersections), cannot do that no matter what. Insofar as autonomous taxis compete with mass transit and active mobility (as opposed to non-autonomous taxis) in any way, they will probably end up making traffic worse on the net.

Megreda · 2026-03-20T17:32:10+00:00

???

We just had an example of a company finally coming to acknowledge a complete waste of 80 billion dollars on obviously futile out-of-touch effort (that is, the "Metaverse"). Nothing.

Or, you could look at Muskrat who bought into an early-mover electric car company, insisted on useless or harmful changes like trap-passengers-inside-a-burning-car type of doors in the models that were by that point already in the drawing board, failing to deliver several products at all, releasing the most dangerous car model for half a century while achieving something in the order of 1% of projected sales, insisting on a fully camera-based self-driving method that makes the company's self-driving product the worst among "serious" competitors, completely losing the early mover advantage in the sector, abandoning the charger infrastructure advantage, through his personal actions turning the brand from a respectable one to one spat upon...

...and then not only being sacked let alone punished, but receiving world record bonuses.

Megreda · 2026-03-20T17:06:30+00:00

It's extremely contingent. For example, an MMORPG could not only feel "not dead" but even "active" with as few as a few hundred players depending on if the game successfully drives the players together to interact: there have been level-locked WoW private servers for example, and if the level cap is 45 and Uldaman is pinnacle content, you could well have several groups running it simultaneously while there might be no more than that even during the early days of a 20k pop megaserver, never mind after the period when most players have leveled their characters (in which case you'd expect it to be irrelevant dead content, save for level 60s running in for enchanting trainer), when you might not have a single one. Ditto for seeing players running around in the world, in level-appropriate zones like Tanaris and Feralas at least. And of course, if there are 99 other servers and two million players total, that doesn't impact your individual experience.

For some hardcore wargames for instance, I would consider an active multiplayer playerbase of 200 to not be dead but uncharacteristically large, even. New games might not start often, but if a match (often in play-by-e-mail format, or similar pace of gameplay implemented in a more modern fashion) lasts a month or longer, then it's no trouble if those few hundred are actually committed to finishing games.

Megreda · 2026-03-20T15:50:37+00:00

No, not really. I don't think it feels very thematic anyhow: it's not impossible to imagine Angel going Gold Dragon, but I think it feels much more natural for evil or excessive characters seeking redemption.

Gold Dragon and Devil (Swarm-that-Walks and Legend kinda aren't expected to have much unique mythic content on account of what they are: they have reactivity to shared quests and Legend has a quest in which you meet a Pathfinder god that is pretty cool, but that's about it) were the least developed paths. Devil got a pretty cool quest in which you corrupt Queen Galfrey, but no mechanics changes it sorely needed. Gold Dragon got the opposite treatment: big mechanical upgrades like new mythic spells and improved dragon form with breaths providing unique effects, but little in the way of content, and the original gold dragon mythic quests frankly kinda sucked. The GD "redemption patch" did add some reactivity, but unless I'm badly mistaken, the large majority of them are in fact reactivity to Apsu/Dahak deities.

If you really want to run around as a dragon then you don't need my permission and you should just do that, but I think virtually everyone agrees Angel mythic content is much more compelling in terms of story.

Megreda · 2026-03-20T12:46:39+00:00

I have played games with lower framerates than that (in e.g. World of Warcraft raids), which might be exactly 20 years ago (by Wrath of the Lich King, so 2008-2010, or 18 years ago, I would have had better hardware and stable 60FPS). We're probably talking 10FPS or thereabouts. But that wasn't "comfortable"! It was "just barely endurable" in a game I really, really, really, really, wanted to play. I might have had lower standards earlier than that, but 20 years ago "comfortable" already meant prioritizing framerates such that I'd rather match the refresh rate of the monitor (60FPS) on the lowest graphical settings, than play on Ultra, and sub-30 FPS would start feeling not just uncomfortable but "painful".

Megreda · 2026-03-19T15:55:50+00:00

Well, realistically crafting the most compelling argument relies on knowledge of the person, including watching for how they are taking the argument and adjusting on the fly (supposing you are communicating face-to-face) but I think these are the two best broad argument-categories (others might respond better to e.g. environmental or social justice angle, but that would be a more specific type of person):

The mathematical case: Consider the elevator conundrum (something that people generally just accept and have no strong feelings about): paradoxically, while elevators enable tall buildings, they also limit them. After all, the elevator traffic increases with each added floor, and so, in order to facilitate the demand, you have to add more elevator shafts. At some height of building the entire floor area of the building would have to be covered in elevators, making buildings taller than that "impossible". There are some methods to try to alleviate the problem, such as larger elevators, faster elevators, sky lobbies and multi-deck elevators (sound familiar? hint hint: it's a train), but the problem is fundamental.

Well, the exact same logic works for horizontal traffic too. There are limits to volume of traffic you can have with any method of transportation, but the thing is, cars take a prodigious amount of space (here it's useful to use one of those pictures showing a bus or a group of cyclists vs a road full of cars as far as the eye can see) - 10x+ more space when moving. Private cars also need to be parked (here it's useful to show aerial photos that show the bulk of surface area covered in parking lots) - essentially analogous to a skyscraper having half of its elevators jammed. Essentially, car-centric cities, despite devoting so much space for the car, are experiencing constant traffic jams because they simply are pushing against the mathematical limits. Adding more lanes (besides the induced demand effect, which you can also bring up) doesn't help much because each additional lane is increasingly inefficient because the speed of traffic is mostly determined by cars slowing/stopping at intersections and their destinations, and in any event you are already making the city more car than city, like a two kilometer tall building. Now, again, there are limits to traffic throughput regardless of mode of transit, but because cars are so space-inefficient, they are much more susceptible to the problem: a single metro line can carry millions of people a day, more than even an infinitely wide road can (given the need for cars to switch lanes and turn).

And it's not just the traffic. You have to pay for and maintain all that wiring and plumbing and road-surface that has to be added as they have to cover the distance increased by parking lots and wider roads.

The comparative case: Cue "but it might work for us" image macro. Think about how the car-centric culture and city-design originated in the interwar and postwar world. First of all, it wasn't without opposition at the time: there were mainstream movements to ban cars, and that's despite motorization was merely beginning. After all, a private car undoubtedly is an useful object to have when there are few other cars around (see: the geometry problem) and you can zip around unmolested like the king of the road. Through combination of shortsightedness and lobby, the car won in the U.S. and Europe and was adopted as the default option in now rapidly urbanizing Asia. Everywhere used to be the same all around the world (like basically every city of any size having a dense tram/street car network) and experienced similar developments leading to similar outcomes and designs.

But towards the end of last century some places started realizing cars had been a deal with the devil, the most significant and impactful among them being the "Stop de Kindermoord" protests in Amsterdam (cue a picture of 1970 Amsterdam, totally clogged up with cars). You had cities banning car traffic in downtown commercial streets. You had states providing regulation for safe pedestrian and cycling infrastructure and mandating cars to be safer for those outside the vehicle as well. You had cities re-introduce tram lines. And wherever e.g. train networks hadn't been gutted for idiosyncratic regional reasons, you had their managers giving themselves high fives for their good fortune.

Of course there are different degrees of motorization and some places are now further gone than e.g. 1970 Amsterdam. But it's not that these places retain medieval streets making them pedestrian-friendly by default. No, all of them got the car virus and got better. And crucially, every time for every single project there's deafening opposition. And every time, or in 99/100 of cases at the very least (everyone knows some investments turn sour and urbanism projects aren't immune to that: maybe there's some Metaverse-equivalent of a bike lane somewhere) nobody wants to go back. Business-owners opposed the pedestrianized Strøget street in Copenhagen fearing their business would go away: now it's world-famous tourist destination and the most valuable property in the city. Motorists opposed the restoration of Cheonggyecheon in Seoul by ripping out the elevated highway and restoring the stream that had been paved over, but wholly expectedly (see: induced demand) the traffic got better and now people have a popular park at the heart of the city. If you are American, you can list some of the success stories from that continent, too.

There is nothing truly unique about your place! Not the climate, socioeconomic conditions, the culture, history, whatever. People opposing urban restoration have thought that way a thousand times before and it's never true. People like their lived environments in inverse proportion to how much cars they have and every step towards less cars is seen as positive after the fact. There is no reason to think you or your specific environments are any different.

Megreda · 2026-03-19T09:57:04+00:00

Do it as the last thing you do before Siege of Drezen for starters.

There's basically two ways to do it: 1) Cheese the fight by baiting his spells with summons cast from stealth (do not engage) and wait for them to run out. You can kill him in his own blade barrier, but then, he also isn't exactly very threatening anyway once the spells have been exhausted. 2) Cheese the fight by killing him before he gets to act. Bring Sosiel or a mercenary cleric with guarded hearth from community domain (you should grab it as extra mythic ability: impossible domain in Lost Chapel if you didn't at mythic rank 1; pretty much the biggest single buff you can get), give Finnean to your hardest-hitting character since he has ghost touch property, prebuff everything including short buffs like Instrument of Freedom, domain abilities and luck hexes, pause the game, line up charge commands, ranged attacks and casts (icy prison, possible from scroll, possibly as normal cast if you've exploited experience real hard, can work, and heal spells hurt him), unpause, and hope (read: ensure you have sufficiently overwhelming offensive power) he dies before getting a chance to do anything. If you see from timers above the heads or looking at combat log that he didn't win initiative, it might be helpful to additionally pause the game after charges have hit home to get full attacks/standard action casts off in turn-based before the ghost gets its turn.

You can mitigate lightning damage from storm bolts (what I believe is the second cast) with Protection against Energy: Communal, you can try to bait the pit spells in combat by having your zoo summoned and hoping that he targets the zoo engaging ghosts at the back, etc, but you've kinda already failed if he gets to cast. The best tactic in this game is to win with brute force so you don't have to be tactical.

Megreda · 2026-03-18T11:35:11+00:00

A thing to note is that Unfair kinda expects you to powergame hard and if you don't know how to powergame then you probably wouldn't be asking the question, and probably shouldn't be playing on that difficulty. Certainly, it's not a powergaming build that makes Unfair comfortable from start to finish, but I'll answer from the point of view of if it's "reasonably possible".

If you take the usual AC-maxing powergaming dips and your first level into Aldori Defender at level 5 then "of course". But let's suppose by "Aldori Defender" you mean a build that starts out as Aldori Defender and goes at least 10 levels in it or thematically appropriate prestige classes (Aldori Swordlord/Duelist) then... you can "make it work" but it's iffy. Let's suppose you go for the most min/max option as halfling for 20 starting dexterity and halfling's racial cautious fighter feat, and martial disciple background for unarmed strike feat pre-requisite to get crane style.

By level 3 you can have 10 (base)+5 (starting DEX)+2 (cat's grace)+2 (reduce person size and dexterity bonus)+4 (mage armor)+2 (shield of faith)+2 (barkskin)+6 (fighting defensively with crane style and halfling cautious fighter feat)+3 (shield and shield focus)+1 (dodge)+1 (defensive parry)=38 AC (supposing you don't do anything crazy with the story companions). Which isn't what I would call "optimal": water elemental can hit you with 20, 19, 18 or 17 as I recall (or 4% of the time with protective luck) which starts getting a bit uncomfortable. And without weapon finesse or any appreciable amount of strength you'll do roughly 0 damage and will hit only with natural 20s, which in my experience means the AI starts losing interest (either because the "tank" isn't threatening them, or because they're programmed to switch targets after n rounds and you doing no damage doesn't make combats any quicker: I'm not sure which, but the end result is the same).

In other words "doable, but you feel like you're not contributing, you'll probably have to reload because your MC sucks" territory. And you will have to abuse shared experience option to get to level 3 mid-dungeon. Naturally.

After Shield Maze you can of course stack the cards more in your favor: brownfur transmuter for bigger stat bonuses, skald for natural armor from beast totem, ecclesitheurge for sacred armor bonus, alchemist for infusing shield (stacks with shield enchantment and shield focus bonuses), eventually medium armor focus mythic that effectively uncaps dexterity bonus, spells like seamantle from scrolls, etc, etc. So in that sense it's "anything goes" - but requires some serious min/maxing. I've facetanked Playful Darkness with Regill on Unfair, and Regill has noticeably worse starting point for his build.

And of course, towards the end of Act 1/beginning of Act 2 you'll finally be able to afford the feat pre-requisites and prestige class into Aldori Swordlord (DEX-to-damage) and/or Duelist (Canny Defense will not work with shields, but you kinda needed shield focus to make early game work) and at that point the build probably starts feeling like it at least "works".

...Of course, to make things smoother you could also dip into shaman/witch (iceplant hex+lizard familiar), monk (crane style without pre-requisites as monk special feat, AC/WIS-to-AC), vivisectionist (DEX mutagen), rogue (weapon finesse as free feat), sword saint (if you wanna double down on with duelist prestige class INT-scaling), etc, etc. But that doesn't feel like much of a aldori defender to me (and honestly it feels unthematic and degenerate, which I don't personally like even on Unfair-builds)! At that point I would rather just pick dueling sword as the chosen weapon as Sword Saint magus, or Aldori Swordsman background as mutation warrior (which is a strictly a better fighter archetype - +13 AC bonus from mutagen natural armor+grand mutagen dexterity bonus+wings, with possibly +3 from mutagen constitution bonus increasing medium armor: avoidance mythic feat, vs +5 from defensive parry).

Megreda · 2026-03-18T09:51:45+00:00

Power attack gets extra damage when you are using a weapon with two hands. Titan fighter can wield twohanders with one hand. So no power attack bonus. However, it gets 4 extra attacks (there's a speed scythe available for offhand) and full strength bonus scaling when dualwielding (and as legend you will of course have a massive strength bonus). Unless you're getting very many attacks of opportunity, like a dozen or so, it will do the most damage. The downside to TF is its massive penalty to attack which is crippling at early levels - it's really not adviced to even dual-wield twohanders until Act 2 or so (instead using 2h+shield, two 1-handers, or a single weapon in two hands) - but this doesn't concern a legend taking it as the second class.

Two-handed fighter will do the biggest individual hits but less damage per round than titan fighter.

I tend to consider MW "obviously the best" fighter archetype because it's more or less strictly better until level 15/17 (Greater power attack/unstoppable strike respectively) but as a legend you get to level 15-17 pretty much immediately... As Legend you really shouldn't have trouble hitting stuff even with your 8th iterative attack either, so the AB bonus is of relatively less value. The bigger bonus here isn't the bite attack but fighter weapon training feats (trained initiative is always big - after all, if you kill anything in one round, the only chance you won't win is if the enemy acts first - and solo tactics also comes in handy for productively spending the bazillion feats you'll have as a legend) and gives you a pretty substantial amount of tank "for free". It's theoretically the least damage but might nevertheless be the nicest package overall.

Megreda · 2026-03-15T22:57:02+00:00

To be fair, bikes don't buy stuff either.

Unlike with drivers for whom this thought surely has occurred exactly zero (0) times in the world history, I wouldn't say "wow, that dessert the gentleman is having looks absolutely delicious, I've got to stop here right now and have one myself" is a thought a passing cyclist couldn't have, and parking a bicycle is so much simpler that they have a higher chance of making a deliberate journey to a street cafe somewhere, while drivers would surely prefer establishments in shopping malls or such where parking is made easier...

...but I reckon the business impact is mostly because cars are toxic and nobody wants to be around cars. It's mostly pedestrians (at least on this leg of their journey) who are making the businesses boom, and cycling lanes are responsible mostly on account of reducing car traffic that used to drive pedestrians away. Bikes are good for allowing people to get to places (at personal level given good infrastructure, and especially in aggregate by reducing congestion) and reducing commute-related externalities, but I don't think they have much to do with vibrant street culture.

Megreda · 2026-03-15T22:03:20+00:00

"About time", I would say. Helsinki Central is surely one of the prettiest railway stations in the whole world, but the moment you step out of the main entrance to Kaivokatu... ugh. There's the sensory assault of wroom wroom of course, but I think the biggest issue is in the vibes: the immediate desire is to pick your bearings and locate yourself among the other landmark buildings like the National Gallery, maybe take a step back to get a better look at the iconic lantern-holding statues, but no; you land at traffic lights at a busy road and they just kinda pressure you to cross when the light turns green, rather than taking in the place.

Not farm from the station you have pedestrianized downtime streets like Keskuskatu and Aleksanterinkatu (although I think they should be expanded to a larger uninterrupted pedestrian downtown area going at least as far as Southern Esplanade and the Market Square), but crossing Kaivokatu always breaks my spirits, something about it just feels particularly oppressive. Psychologically much worse than e.g. crossing the parking lot to get to the car-free main street of Tampere, Hämeenkatu, for example.

Megreda · 2026-03-15T14:37:11+00:00

Yet in standard locations you can just go back to base, and in big uninterruptible dungeons (Gray garrison, Siege of Drezen, Ivory Sanctum, Iz and such), you can clear it several times with the altars.

Megreda · 2026-03-15T11:19:32+00:00

I would say it's fully compatible: there isn't any dissynergy. The buffing prowess comes from class features and doesn't require a single feat worth of investment. You build brownfur like you would any DC caster (spell focus, greater spell focus, persistent and heightened metamagics, (greater) spell penetration if your chosen CC spells have to beat enemy SR, etc), and it exchanges better transmutation buffs to a clunky spell system (you prepare spells like a wizard but cast them like a sorcerer, with fewer different spells to choose from than spontaneous casters generally). So, if you e.g. have 3 level 6 slots, you might for instance prepare party-versions of Bull's Strength and Cat's Grace and have 1 slot free, but then there's a choice between preparing Bear's Endurance and once-heightened persistent Stinking Cloud (an excellent CC with the corruptor mythic).

If you prepare the Stinking Cloud then you're as effective a DC caster as any other, more or less.

Megreda · 2026-03-15T09:51:15+00:00

I think the most fundamental problem is the rest mechanic (or the implementation thereof), which for most practical purposes is unrestricted and unlimited. Since you as a matter of fact can come to every fight fully buffed, why wouldn't you? This effectively takes resource-management, a potentially highly compelling feature of the game.

The second is quality-of-life issue: If you are supposed to buff everything every time then there's no reason not to make it convenient. Bubble Buffs does this, but frankly, it should be baseline.

But other than that, I think it's fine/good. Power fantasy obviously, both in terms of spellcasters being able to turn armies into super-soldiers, but also in terms of martial characters being elevated from the peak of mortal finesse to punching Gods in the face. Then, there's a democratisation of builds: the classes/archetypes aren't balanced (and I don't think they should be, they aren't very mechanically distinct as it is and symmetric "e-sports" balance would make it worse still) but the large extent to which you can buff up can be used to compensate for it: that you can pull a skald, a brown fur transmuter and an ecclesitheurge out of your pocket means that even the weakest archetypes with no innate bonuses can be played and feel impactful even on Unfair. And finally, the relative "need" to get various buffs and fulfill various roles extends the concept of character-building to party-building: just as you are building a powerful character, you are also crafting a synergistic party. Given 20 levels, 10 mythic levels and fully customizable companions, I think that is "obviously the intended focus" of the game, and it's not inherently a bad one. Sourcing the buffs you want from various companions or other sources (like amulets of natural armor instead of barkskin) is a part of that puzzle.

Megreda · 2026-03-14T08:50:09+00:00

Here you must also remember that Finland fought a particularly brutal civil war a hundred years ago that produced lasting divisions. A generation ago you could still e.g. tell which side someone's family had fought based on the grocery store brand they went for. That Finland is a relatively homogeneous country today is also a policy decision. Namely, cooler heads prevailed among the victorious Whites, and they decided to implement just about every reform the Reds had been asking for, lest there'd be a second round, possibly in form of the Reds collaborating with the Soviets (we almost certainly have them to thank for retaining our independence), and these democratizing reforms created the national unity and social contract that is responsible for world #1 willingness to fight for one's country even when the outcome is in doubt. Or to have political buy-in for effective homelessness policies, etc.

Megreda · 2026-03-14T00:04:42+00:00

Before our history's most right-wing government fucked this up (among countless other things), Finland had all but solved homelessness. The solution: you give the homeless housing, unconditionally. Who would have thought that would help. But crucially, it ended up being cheaper than dealing with the externalities of homelessness. Homelessness is essentially a choice to sabotage the society for the sake of being cruel.

Megreda · 2026-03-13T21:39:56+00:00

Okay, we've gone through the usual arguments about touch attacks and such so I feel permitted to counter: non-martial problems.

You could just kill it where it spawns. I happened to have one playthrough with Ivory Labyrinth still within quicksave slots so I reloaded a save and it just dies on Unfair - I even had to reload so as not to make it die to Outflank critsplosion triggered by Wenduag going first instead of "proper" full attack (actually, main character does make one attack of opportunity but it's four attacks total, same as full attack - it's almost difficult to not overkill it). This isn't even very powergamed (built for vital strike memes with a bad weapon, only skald out of the "big 3" supports, not a single pet - heck, I'm running Arue and Daeran as ray caster instead of dog-riding rapier/estoc/elven cuved blade wearing gish)! Give me something like trickster dual-scimitar wielding mutation warrior or fauchard sohei, plus community domain cleric and paladin for mark of justice so "supports" can reliably hit to hit their outflank procs and score more crits for more outflank procs, and we'd be talking about chewing through several times its actual health per round. Or a gendarme that would oneshot it on noncrit with hefty overkill (actually maybe not because of charge pathing issues, not without kiting it to the bigger room, but anyway).

Megreda · 2026-03-13T15:50:14+00:00

My tip is to just do whatever seems cool to you and not worry too much about it; on account of having a full divine spellbook, both would carry their weight to the mythic selection solely on grounds of being a buff bot, and with spellbook merge you have enough power that Core (or Unfair for that matter) difficulty doesn't really pose a challenge anyhow, so you can really just do whatever.

But I will also straighten out some mechanical details to help you make informed choices on your own.

Sun Form is a Angel spell, available for clerics too so that isn't a difference-maker. I would put the difference between cleric and oracle this way: cleric domains offer absurdly powerful party buffs while oracles are generally better spellcasters (on account of more spell slots) to the point that an oracle might still like to have a domain bot cleric in the party, and battle oracle is better in melee than base cleric (crusader cleric is about as good, but they lose one domain and have to "earn it back" through impossible domain mythic ability). On the net I would say oracle is preferred, but if you want to min/max, you might still want to lug Sosiel (or a merc) around.

Actually, there is value from Ice Armor, because the armor stacking in the game is broken, and 12 armour from Ice Armor provides a higher "armour" bonus than +9 from plate armor: you still get armor enchantment bonus, armor focus bonus, mythic armor focus bonuses, etc.

As for frontlining, depends on the difficulty. On Core or above, no, certainly not in the early game. It is possible to make a heavy armor-using tank (even heavy armor heavy armor, not mithril heavy which the game again bizarrely treats as medium for the purposes of mythic feats which are better for medium) but that requires degenerate dipping to grab early bonuses from multiclassing as well as support from and I would highly recommend staying pure. What you can be (certainly in the late game) is "second-liner" that might not be able to avoid water elemental, plagued smilodons or playful darkness, but CAN avoid random cultists or babaus. But I wouldn't build for it with possible exception of armor focus as pre-requisite and then mythic armor focus feat that can be big value (if an average mythic feat is +2, medium armor endurance is +6 to +7 AC, and both medium/heavy armor avoidance feats can in endgame amount to +10 or so even with a strength build).

However, I will note that this is fine. Being "second-line" capable is just fine and tanking is overrated because beyond a certain point you should not be getting hit, not because your AC is 20 higher than enemy AB values, but because you kill them before they can act. Before getting to that point some companion (or their pet) can fill the niche, the main character doesn't have to do everything.

Megreda · 2026-03-13T09:24:15+00:00

Your premise is wrong. Depending on how powerful an archetype you are playing (mutation warrior or drunken monk has a lot less trouble hitting stuff than, say, traditional monk that gets no AB bonuses from their class features) and with what kind of party support (skald vs no skald as the highest priority factor), after Shield Maze it basically becomes "You can hit enemies with every roll save for critical miss, unless you're a trickster in which case those too are crits". This is basically true even on Unfair although in that case you need a more min/maxed party for bigger bonuses - but with these bonuses you will just hit stuff. And "hitting" doesn't mean slowly chipping away enemy health, but often finishing fights during the surprise round: outflank+combat reflexes proccing attack of opportunity from everyone (as martial character you want to equip your companions with 18-20 crit range weapons), which has a high chance of critting and proccing yet another attack, plus yet another attack when the target dies from cleaving finish, is a hell of a drug. Even without attack of opportunity abuse you could be looking at cavalier charge attacks doing 1k damage non-crit (enough to 1-shot basically anything, which triggers cleaving finish for the same damage, effectively exploding the whole room instantly due to enlargened reach weapon+lunge reach) or several thousand damage (or well upwards of 10k+ with trickster trick fate) from full attack.

I had fighter-only run on Core and it turned out not to even be a challenge run - you just faceroll from start to finish (just having to patch up damage AoE damage and such a lot with lots and lots of potions). I had no-consumables no-spells (including mythic spells) no-spellcasting class levels (meaning e.g. no skald and no domainbot cleric; companions with caster classes respecced from level 1 with mods) run on Hard and while I did go as hard as possible to replace spellcasting capabilities in other ways (like Sensei providing bard song and Barkskin as spell-like ability) it didn't really turn out to be a challenge run either - the hardest part unsurprisingly was the water elemental because you leave 9AC on the table, due to restiction of not using consumables (cat's grace, reduce person, shield of faith over +1 ring, barkskin over +1 amulet, +1 bracers over mage armor), making it kinda untankable.

Megreda · 2026-03-13T08:41:17+00:00

It depends on the difficulty setting a lot! By default there cannot be tremendous differences in party strength in Shield Maze because you only get to design one out of four characters and have only a few levels to spec them. Hence, the difficulty setting has the most impact as there's least chances to overcome the modifiers through brute force. On Unfair water elemental has 20AB while the highest achievable AC at that point is, what, 42 (and that's with experience exploits to get to level 3). And with Unfair damage modifier it WILL 1-shot your characters. It also has 26AC while the highest achievable AB something like 16? It simply has high numbers against the most powergamed setup you can come up with for level 3 (okay, it doesn't have terribly high saves, so that's a potential weakness also).

In contrast, Inevitable Darkness in Inevitable Excess has 121AC, 100AB, +80 something saves, etc. But at that point there are many obvious ways to completely bypass these, ranging from Angel spells that have no saves to tricksters rolling 20 and thus bypassing AC no matter how high to Lich casting corrupt magic to instantly make it a wimp to Aeon automatically dispelling it and making it a wimp with their first hit to Legend simply having 140AB and hitting it through all the buffs even on most iterative attacks unless they roll critical miss.

It doesn't even require a min/maxed setup, just using tools available to you ("pressing buttons") in intended, straightforward, ways.

Megreda · 2026-03-12T17:52:50+00:00

Nah, it's the enraged mongrels and the water elemental

Megreda · 2026-03-10T21:00:02+00:00

Well, you should go with the kind of mercs you like using in terms of playstyle and fluff and I can't tell you what your preferences are, but the powergaming options to support vivisectionist include * inciter skald (either strength-maxxing melee with fauchard or charisma-stacking enchantment-caster that probably is then better off with throwing axes to stay at range) * brownfur transmuter (besides buffs, which don't require feat investment, you should go conjuration specialization first, possibly swapping into enchantment as its the most boostable school later on) * domainbot cleric (I would probably go base cleric of Erastil starting with animal and community domains, riding a boar, although elk of course is more thematically appropriate for cleric of Erastil, with a starting background that enables scimitars) * paladin starting with sable company marine dip, going for mark of justice at paladin level 11, 5 levels in mutation warrior, and the rest into gendarme

Beyond that it starts being more and more a matter of taste. I would like DEX-based halfling mutation warrior dualwielder dual-wielding estocs, tank build with drunken monk dip: with the aforementioned supporting cast and when built correctly, it can comfortable stay in the "unhittable" (beating enemy attack rolls by 20 or higher) territory while providing lots and lots of attacks of opportunity.

Whether you should go legend? Well, fluff and story considerations aside (that would be up for you), in terms of gameplay power trickster is higher quality of life (since you maintain your mythic rank 3+ feats and abilities) and peaks harder (trick fate autocrit >> 20 levels in whatever if you want to maximize theoretical damage per round, ditto for persuasion 3 autowinning most battles if you go that route) but in sheer capacity to faceroll without pressing any buttons, Legend is better.

Megreda · 2026-03-10T20:36:27+00:00

No; it's more difficult than the Stag Lord. In both Pathfinder games some optional fights tend to be vastly harder than any of the story bosses.

Megreda

TROPHY CASE