In Pathfinder 2 I am so beautiful that
Playing the new Pathfinder DLC was a wild experience. For almost all the enemies burst into flames at the mere sight of my countenance.
They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This is especially true when a person only makes an impact on certain people and everyone else shrugs their shoulders unblinkingly at the sight of them. In Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous I am apparently (also) beautiful, but only to those who can’t stand me.
Because since playing the new DLC Inevitable Excess, most of my enemies react unusually to my arrival. They simply blow themselves up or fall lifelessly to the ground without any outside interference. Death by beauty. Because the trigger for this strange behaviour is the high Charisma value of my legendary Trickster.
This is not meant to be another text about the quality of the new expansion. If that’s what you’re looking for, I’ll elegantly direct you to my review article of Inevitable Excess. In this text, I simply want to tell you in detail about one of the most absurd gaming experiences of my life and how I was able to bring every demon, no matter how powerful, to its knees with pure charisma.
Table of Contents
Phase 1: What a Strange Feature
Inevitable Excess is a strange DLC. A strange DLC in an even stranger world. After all, an ominous, semi-divine golem makes an appearance here right at the beginning, more reminiscent of a T800 than a character from a fantasy universe. The steel colossus then starts rambling, talking about anomalies, integrity, magic and legendary powers. Yada yada yada. After 180 hours of Pathfinder, that kind of talk can’t do anything for me!
I’m already half a god myself with a maximum legend rank and I’ve already pulled the ears of quite a few other beings. Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. I’m more confused by the stiff demons right at the beginning, which crumble to dust at the mere touch. All right, I think to myself. It’s just a strange parallel dimension.
That’s why I’m surprised but no longer amazed when the first fights against the anomaly demons, so powerfully announced in advance, are quite short: A few glaring Babaus, Succubi or Kalavkuse come my way, nothing out of the ordinary. At least until they all perish in turn untouched in a deep red cloud of blood. Strange DLC feature – I still think to myself.
Phase 2: This must be a bug!
For now, I play on without a care in the world. The world conveys to me with every further step that something is wrong here. NPCs appear that I have actually already beaten up. And one of them even wants to found a new settlement in the middle of the demonically infested ruined city of Iz. What’s going on? Has everyone here lost their mind?!
And on and on it goes. A huge snake lizard flies towards me, slavering: and plop – it has burst. From the left an enemy, from the right one, from the front even three. Plopp. Plopp. Plop. I stand there untouched and feel like John Travolta.
At the latest, however, when a big-heralded lap dragon also evaporates into a cloud of blood, I do feel made fun of. Surely that can’t be intentional? Yes, something here is supposed to seem as if everything is wrong, but do bursting bosses really belong in this concept? Didn’t Owlcat grandly announce that the enemies in this DLC would present even pros with a new challenge? My battle singer, whose blade is still clean after one and a half hours in the DLC, feels nothing of this.
That can only be a bug, is my next thought. Although there are enemies like the Coloxus demons (those annoying blowflies), not a single one of which bursts into flames unprovoked, it still remains strange.
No way is this intentional. A look at the combat log at least reveals to me that every opponent has self-inflicted this damage. What the trigger for this is, however, escapes me. So I do what any sensible philistine would do: I complain to those responsible.
Phase 3: A curious coincidence
The people at Owlcat can’t solve the problem – but they know what it is. You see, my trickster is a rather charismatic charmbolc. An angel-tongued devil with a voice like thunder. If I want to persuade someone, I persuade them. I might even convince Gollum to give me his little ring.
And I’m just a legendary trickster. A trickster who can do such wonderful things as summon a useless fat bear or misuse fish as projectiles. What I completely forgot in all of this is that my trickster has the mythic Persuade skill at rank 3. And I quote at this point:
You are so good at demoralising your enemies that they lose their will to live. Enemies whose saving throw fails against your demoralising ability must spend their first turn performing a coup de grace against themselves
I could do this even before the new DLC, only this effect occurred quite rarely. Mainly because the coup de grace only leads to instant death in rare cases. In Inevitable Excess, however, the enemies are all so strong that they permanently fail their own tests. This makes the Trickster’s Convince build a legendary leveller that not even bosses can resist. No really. I laid the DLC boss in two seconds. Or rather – he did himself.
Phase 4: It’s wrong, but feels so right
Now, of course, you can still say: Yo, actually, this is total crap and definitely not intended this way. A curious bug, or rather a catastrophic balancing problem. By the way, I also chalked it up as such in the DLC test. Especially since the community already knew that convincing on rank 3 was a very strong strategy. But I’ll be honest with you: I found the whole situation absolutely great precisely because of its absurdity.
Especially after I found out that it was kind of my own fault. There was just a lot that came together that made my trickster rise to a veritable demigod. I unabashedly played through the DLC in this way.
It may sound crazy, but I love PC role-playing games for these situations. And yes, objectively such an effect is bad. Someone should have noticed that during testing. But knowing that a whole lot of individual mechanics worked here and that I became the perfect weapon without any evil ulterior motives fills me more simply with a thieving joy.
Another immortal memory that Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (unintentionally) gave me. I’ll still be telling this story 20 years from now.
s my enemies just explode
