Also wizards are intelligence-based spell casters, so useful skill-monkeys. By contrast sorcerers are charisma-based casters, so useful as the party face.
Pen & paper I would lean towards wizards due to flexibility and utility. CRPGs tend to be the opposite - having somewhat fewer casts of a much more diverse spell book is less efficient than somewhat more casts of a much smaller, more focused one. But both are pretty effective either way. You can never really go wrong with an arcane spellcaster in D&D (or D&D adjacent settings).
Yeah, in most CRPGs I’ve played where spell casting is 99% of the time only used in combat the versatility of the wizard is mostly wasted and the sorcerer is usually more efficient. Both are great in any party though.
I picked it up with my carbon tax refund and spent an hour or so messing around (since saves won’t carry over.) It seems fantastic and it’s going to be a long wait until August 3rd. D&D rules got a lot more coherent since Baldur’s Gate back in 1997.
I’ve spent years (mostly) successfully ignoring spoilers, but as launch approaches it gets harder to filter out everything. And what I have seen looks good. Real good.
I’m very much looking forward to the (moved up to August 3!) launch.
My experience in Dungeons & Dragons Online was the opposite of this. I loved my instakilling pale master wizard, but only liked my warforged sorcerer. (I also loved my instakilling necro cleric. It’s just so satisfying to snap your fingers and an enemy drops.)
Wizards also generally have much better crowd control than sorcerers.
I’ve read there is 170 hours of cutscenes (twice the length of all of Game of Thrones) and three times the dialogue of all the Lord of the Rings novels.
Of course, no one will see/hear/read all of that in one play through (far from it) but it gives a sense of scope of this game.
It’s so satisfying to get the very last spell to complete your spellbook.
But more than that, I find it frustrating to be locked in with sorcerer. I preferred cold+electricity, but some enemies were resistant to both. Better than immune to both, but still annoying.
I remember one time in DDO I was running a high level heroic quest that was set in a lava cave and was all fire enemies. Fire elementals, fire mephits, plus I think maybe some will o the wisps and some demons. I was on my wizard, so of course before running the quest I had switched out my damage spells to cold versions. My pickup group filled up and we headed in. Once we get to the lava section it turns out that the sorcerer was pretty much only fire specced, with a touch of electricity. But of course the demons resisted electricity and the will o the wisps were immune. It was like, dude, seriously? Didn’t even have UMD to scroll heal us.
DDO is a blast, and with the changes they made to spell points over slots plus spell like abilities from the enhancement tree sorcs are actually really fun in the realtime MMO format. But yeah, when you go into a dungeon with the wrong sort of enemy, you better hope the sorc has Magic Missiles.
I played BG3 in EA when it first came out - one playthrough of the EA convinced me this was going to be the best game ever, and that I shouldn’t touch it till release so I don’t burn myself out on act 1.
But the pre-release hype has its grip on me now, and I wanted some CRPG to fill the time. So I’m playing PF: Wrath of the Righteous for the first time. There’s a game that’s challenging to a low level elemental caster! Everyone has Resist 10 to Fire, Acid, and Cold and immunity to Lightning. Not to mention spell resistance! What a nightmare.
Wrath of the righteous has been in my wish list for a while, and it was on a pretty deep discount during the summer sale. The only reason I didn’t pull the trigger on that (getting Valheim instead) is because I worried about how the combat would stack up to DDO. Is Pathfinder real-time or turn-based? I don’t think I could handle turn-based after the active combat of DDO.
Speaking of DDO, that was only third person view, which I played for years. But nowadays I can’t really handle third person, so I was greatly disappointed that Valheim does not support first person natively. Apparently there’s a mod, but you have to bail on the first person for a couple situations. Possibly combat if you use a shield, and I think sailing? So after a few minutes of tinkering in Valheim I switched to Grounded, which I was definitely getting no matter what. Yay first person!
EDIT: I was greatly tempted by Diablo 4, but the limited third person view is what ultimately turned me off.
It’s both. You can play in real-time with a pause button like Baldur’s Gate, or you can play in full turn-based mode like the table-top rules. You can swap between modes at any time, even in the middle off combat.
Yeah for spell-casters the mythic power Ascendant Element is an absolute must, but you can’t really get that until the end of chapter 1 (de facto the beginning of 2), so it’s a little bit of an issue low level as you note. Thankfully there are plenty of human cultists to deal with early on.
The one issue I have with Wrath in that regard and it’s a minor one (it’s really a very good CRPG), is the elements are a little unbalanced. Ascendant Element pushes you to specialize and equipment-wise (also spell-wise if you don’t adopt a way to convert elements) fire is just much better supported than any of the others.
I have Wrath of the Righteous and it’s extremely fun.
I play it on turn-based mode because I micromanage my whole party and you can’t control more than one person at a time in real time.
There’s an option to go full action and just play your main and let the AI run your companions, but the AI isn’t particularly smart.
You can also play solo and have no party but it’s extremely difficult, the game was balanced for a party. Plus I think you lose too much of the game by not having others to interact with as you adventure. Plus you are somewhat pigeonholed into a stealth role to even make it work, or you get massacred.
But it’s totally viable to play real time and allow for party AI, and you can also pause now and then to issue them commands, like ask someone to attack an enemy and let them do their attacks and spells on their own. (And you can customize AI for each character.)
It’s a fun game, I really love my halfling crusader riding around on a wolf to charge people using his polearm.
Wrath of the Righteous is probably my favorite game of the past five years, even though I’ve never finished it. The mind boggling amount of character choices is horrible for my restartitis.
For Pathfinder: Kingmaker, I think I’d go bonkers if I had to tell all of my characters, summoned monsters, animal companions, etc. what to do on a round by round basis. The “hit the nearest guy” AI is good enough for me, and then I can reserve my micro-management for my spellcasters.
Ain’t that the truth. I’ve only finished two games and I’ve probably started …hmmm…a whole, whole lot characters . The drop off in numbers between the intro and chapter 2 is very, very steep. Further big cliffs between 3 and 4 and then 4 and 5 (2 to 3 not so much, that’s usually a straight sprint).
I won’t play games that use old school BG-style combat, unless there’s an option to switch to turn based. I find real time in these sorts of games to be borderline unplayable.
. The drop off in numbers between the intro and chapter 2 is very, very steep. Further big cliffs between 3 and 4 and then 4 and 5 (2 to 3 not so much, that’s usually a straight sprint).