For Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous players, this guide is a basic combat guide, which provides three main tip about the combat, let’s check them out.
SECTION 1 MAGIC!
Combat magic sucks early mid game actually all game. why? cuz the casting animation take too long, every single magic attack has 2 type Cool Down. the one displayed with the number counting down on the spell itself and the casting animations, so don’t be fool by the numbers 2 second CD is really 3 second or 4 second because of the casting animations has to be played. no there are no animation canceling because if you give another command before the animation is finish playing, the spell is canceled you have to recast again. There are builds in game that does alow combat magic to be very effective early on, but since we are talking about noobs here we are only going over the basic you can look at other people’s guide if you want some “super amazing fire ball casting” magic users like you can in skyrim.
They are only good for 2 buffs and CC, don’t bother with damage. unlike skyrim where you can cast your fire ball to do tons of damage or casting healing while swinging your sword to give yourself unlimited heal, in here you gotta plan ahead, enemies in this game don’t agro you unless you move too close to them, so you can see where the enemies are but they won’t aggro you unless you get too close, this mean that you can get in range of spell casting CC abilities without triggering the combat, so if you see tough enemies ahead throw down cc magic as opening attack. ANOTHER IMPORTANT NOTE IS PAUSE THE GAME SO YOU CAN HAVE MULTIPLE PEOPLE SET UP MORE THAN ONE THING WHILE DON’T TRIGGER COMBAT AGGRO!
Magic is also really good at giving buffs, don’t worry about what buffs does what, because as long as you have them on they are bound to do something postive, so even if you are completely un aware of what any of the buff means, just throw them down on your team, cuz if they don’t work, no harms come to it and if they do well congratulations, LIke for example i don’t know what heroism does, or bit of luck but they don’t sound like they are harmful to my units and they have no negative effects on your characters so just throw them on. protection against evil? what are evil enemies? you don’t know? well no harm done by just stacking it on your units anyway. also AOE debuff spells is also pretty good, if you see an icon on spells that show a circle and only red enem icon in it, then just cast them whenever you have a chance because it can only harm enemies, even if they don’t do anything to the right type of enemies they still don’t do any damage to your teammate, so cast them away. they are bound to do SOMETHING.
Another great tip about magic is summoning if you see your teammate has summon ability throw them down, strength in numbers, most enemies go down quick when you have like 24 units attack them and even if they don’t do much damage the still good fodders.
Now i do want to touch on the subject of how do you use spells when coombat broke out, most of the time your combat spell like a fire ball deal damage to enemies and friendly, unless you know what you doing or you see enemies got hard cced far away from your friendly units, don’t use them, don’t cast cc spells like color spray or damage based magic when your teammates are engaged in melee just give them heals. because there IS FRIENDLY FIRE! MOST AOE CC or DAMAGE ABILITY HAS FRIENDLY FIRE! it’s danger close! and sometime you can screw yourself over by accidentally cc your own teammates instead of the enemies so don’t cast CC while your melee units already engaged. Time your heal! your friendly units are engaged in melee you see they take hit and half of HP is gone. start your healing don’t wait unitll they are down to 1/3 of HP because remember how long it take to cast any magic? yeah so start casting heal earlier than later. also heal is RNG based so you really don’t want to waste another 5 to 8 second for another heal just to heal like 2 hp when your ally is close to getting knocked out.
SECTION 2 NOT MAGIC
These classes are super easy, you just auto attack,there are some class that has some ability to self boost their auto attack but the essential is just let them basic attack.
Always has a front line unit, if you suspect there are going to be a trap or a ambush attck, sent your buffed up melee dude in first, because the game trigger ambush is any unit that pass through, say you see a path a head you don’t see any enemies, let the melee people go ahead of your formations because sometime games will surprise you by suddenly drop a few enemies down, now the game doesn’t care who trigger the ambush but just as long as your unit trigger it so having a melee tank units walking ahead of the magic character is a good idea to prevent ambush!
Now there are non magic basic attacker these are like archers and non tank damage dealer, so they don’t have a lot of tankiess but they are pretty needed to deal damges, you get the idea try to put archer type ally out of melee way generally stick these type of units with your magic casters, plus most of the time magic caster will be using a ranged weapon like crossbow anyway so you should be able to easily figure this one out. then there are the not super tanky melee units, they generally should go in second after your tank. there are engagement where you can win easily by allowing your melee damage dealer go in first by using the “charge” ability for melee clases, this give them a attack boosts and mutiple melee attacks in round and usually enough to at least kill 1 enemy, without them counter attacking. this is really situational, if you don’t think your melee guys can quickly defeat the enemies then don’t use it let the tank go in get the aggro first.
SECTION 3 a TEMPLATE OF FORMATION! and OTHER INFO
This is only use as an example of how to handel most situations, you don’t have to have your teammate in this exact formation and you can have more than one tanks etc. just a frame of reference
It’s generally recommended to turn OFF AI for melee units because they have the habit of rush into enemy when combat broke out, so in a more general encounter where you have time to prep up a fight, turn OFF the melee unit ai. Cast down CC and let your melee frontline unit stand right at the edge of that cc, because most CC ability also affect friendly units. by positioning your dudes right at the edge of the AOE CC like webbing or grease, the enemies will have to fight on the CCed area while your units won’t, other wise you will have the awkward situations where your melee units rush into your own AOE CC effects and get CCed themselves. WEB AND GREASE ARE THE EASIEST CC ABILITY TO HAVE AND MOST EFFECTIVE AT CHOCK POINT ENEMY!
You can also kite enemies with single unit agro to a chock point, this tactic is not workable in Turn based, hence the superiority of real time combat, you can sent a single unit to agro a strong mob, and kite them back to your main party were you can set up a chock point like a door way or narrow passage, and now you can blast the enemis with offensive magic because they will be stuck at the door way or chock point.
Related Posts:
- Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous Attacks of Opportunity Explained
- Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous Basic Crusade Strategies Guide
- Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous All Restored Crusader Relics Guide
- Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous Companions Guide
- Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous Character Creation Guide