History YMMV / PathfinderWrathOfTheRighteous

* ThatOneSidequest: The Secrets of Creation. It's a rather long and drawn on quest that involves obnoxious puzzles. To start, you have to explore 5 seemingly unrelated zones without much prompting (though if your knowledge stats are high enough, you can get hints on where to go in meetings with a mysterious ghost) to find various slabs. One of these zones contains a mandatory Vavakia Vanguard (see ThatOneBoss). Once you have all of those slabs, then you have to complete 5 puzzles in a row (see ThatOnePuzzle). And the quest is mandatory if you want to finish the Storyteller's questline (as the first 4 puzzles give you Elven Pages among other things) and [[spoiler:the aforementioned mysterious ghost is Kiny, the Storyteller's old friend. Speaking of which, you better hope you progressed the Storyteller's story enough to learn about Kiny before freeing him or else you are locked out of the Storyteller's best ending]]. On the bright side, you gain an extremely powerful mask for completing it (though it'll actually debuff you if used in the Enigma ([[RunningGag see]] ThatOneLevel), but that's only one level at least.) As an extra bit of insult [[spoiler:picking up the aforementioned very powerful mask adds an ending slide implying your character falls under the influence of the demon lord Areshkagal in the future]].

** '''The alignment system.''' Just like in the last game, it's not very well-liked. Owlcat attempted to address concerns from [[YMMV/PathfinderKingmaker the last game]] that alignment-affecting dialogue options were too restrictive because each one was tied to both the Law/Chaos and Good/Evil axes by making it so that alignment-related choices in this game only affected one axis. [[MortonsFork Players don't like this either,]] in large part due to the reason stated below. Some part of this can be blamed on Owlcat continuing to track alignment on a circle rather than the square grid used by predecessors like [[Creator/{{Interplay}} Interplay's]] [[VideoGame/BaldursGate many]] [[VideoGame/PlanescapeTorment famous]] [[VideoGame/IcewindDale titles]] and [[Creator/BioWare [=BioWare's=]]] [[VideoGame/NeverwinterNights series]], since the circular nature of it ''still'' means every choice is a two-axis choice, they're all just Lawful Neutral, Chaotic Neutral, Neutral Good, or Neutral Evil. This makes it possible to lose classes tied to a 'corner' alignment like Paladin (Lawful Good) by siding too much with one half of that alignment (becoming either Neutral Good or Lawful Neutral), something not possible in conventional grid-based alignment systems. To top it all off, Evil choices get the shaft akin to Chaotic Evil ones in the prior game, as most of the time that you see the tag for an evil choice, it tends to be [[StupidEvil killing someone, often who you have no reason to kill and either get nothing out of killing them, or are worse off if you kill them]].
** Related to the above, the Lawful dialogue options have received a lot of flak. While they should tend towards the rule of law, a lot of them seem to veer into AllCrimesAreEqual where execution is brought up as the sole punishment for basically any crime even light ones. Some options are just nonsensical too (A lawful dialogue option will encourage Sosiel to kill a prisoner he's taken even as he's just brought up that doing so would violate his oath to Shelyn, meaning the "lawful" option is to encourage oathbreaking). Because of the aforementioned issue with corner alignment, it can be particularly hard for Paladins to find in-character lawful options to balance their NeutralGood choices.

* MemeticMutation: Arueshalae very literally locking herself in horny jail after a certain part of her romance route.

* SpecialEffectsFailure: One of the random events in Drezen is the arrival of a Children's Crusade - but the "children" are obviously adult character models shrunk down.

*** Blackwater's reputation is not helped by the fact that it was created as part of a Kickstarter backer's tier bonus, a level to their design and specifications; veterans of ''VideoGame/PathfinderKingmaker'' might have little fondness for backer content after their encounters with Darven and the Hellknights in that game. What IS helpful is that Blackwater is actually completely optional.

*** In Sosiel's case, he's focused in Medium armor but he doesn't have anything approaching the Dexterity bonus to take advantage of medium armor, which is wasteful and means he doesn't have the armor class to stand up in melee despite being melee cleric. It's hard to do a cleric ''wrong'' in the Pathfinder rules but the general opinion is that he could be a lot better than he is. The ''Enhanced Edition'' shifted this a bit to give him access to heavy armor when you get him.

* SpecialEffectsFailure: One of the random events in Drezen is the arrival of a Children's Crusade - but the "children" are obviously adult models shrunk down.

** But none of these compare to the Swarm Path. Consumed by hatred and hunger, it dosen't matter what path the Commander was before. If they commit to being a Swarm, their phyiscal body is destroyed and reformed as a crawling disgusing mass of insects, which is enough to scare away literally every party member, even those who would otherwise be okay with following a Lich or Demon. If you save Ciar and the other mercenary leaders at the City of Iz, you get the option at Drezen to systematically devour every one of your followers. You get a graphic description of each and every one of their deaths at the clawing ravenous mouths of your vescavores. The ending is arguably the scariest one of all, because the Worldwound is still open, and now the Swarm Commander is simply feeding off the endless armies of the Abyss, growing larger and larger until nothing will ever be able to stop it...

** Ember's childlike AllLovingHero writing and tragic backstory have a way of evoking VideoGameCaringPotential even among people roleplaying Evil characters.

** Yaker is a minor Hellknight character who basically exists to get you to your first encounter with Regill, and whom the player can later convince Regill not to punish for deserting his post to go get the Commander. He's otherwise a bit of a dork for a Hellknight. He's proven popular enough for people to make a mod to make him romanceable, and fan art of him exists. This got even bigger when people noticed that Yaker's in game are stats higher than most end game [=PCs=] (His lowest attribute is a 24 in int/wis!), making a bit of a meme of the idea that Regill would think he can have Yaker whipped for desertion when Yaker severely outclasses his level 6 boss.

* DeathByIrony: Not necessarily his final death, but if you kill Deskari while playing as a gold dragon- something only made possible by using the shed scales of a silver dragon he killed- he contributed to putting the player on the path which led to his own demise.

** Related to the above, the LawfulNeutral dialogue options have received a lot of flak. While they should tend towards the rule of law, a lot of them seem to veer into AllCrimesAreEqual where execution is brought up as the sole punishment for basically any crime even light ones. Some options are just nonsensical too (A lawful dialogue option will encourage Sosiel to kill a prisoner he's taken even as he's just brought up that doing so would violate his oath to Shelyn, meaning the "lawful" option is to encourage oathbreaking). Because of the aforementioned issue with corner alignment, it can be particularly hard for Paladins to find in-character lawful options to balance their NeutralGood choices.

* TierInducedScrappy:
** Sosiel and [[spoiler:Staunton]] both get a bit of this for the same reason - their builds are bad and include unnecessary or useless things you can't remove. Later patches have made this a ''bit'' better, but they can still struggle.
*** In Sosiel's case, he's focused in Medium armor but he doesn't have anything approaching the Dexterity bonus to take advantage of medium armor, which is wasteful and means he doesn't have the armor class to stand up in melee despite being melee cleric. It's hard to do a cleric ''wrong'' in the Pathfinder rules but the general opinion is that he could be a lot better than he is. The ''Enhanced Edition'' shifted this a bit to give him access to heavy armor when you get him.
*** As for [[spoiler: Staunton]] they suffer because their build is ''all over the place.'' They have tower shield proficiency with a two-handed weapon, which requires a feat that isn't in the game to work, have 18 Dexterity yet wear full plate, have Dazzling Display but no Persuasion to use it with, and have a feat that specializes in enabling combat maneuvers despite not having any maneuvers to perform. It's a hot mess of a build that nobody quite knows what to do with.
** Regill also has a case of this. Being the 2nd to last non path specific companion that can be recruited, he comes with a whooping 6 levels already stated. And they are in two fairly bad classes. He has 5 levels of Armiger fighter, considered one of the worse fighter subclasses due to losing feats (the main point of being a fighter), and 1 level of Hellknight, which is a strictly worse Paladin. Compounding this, Regill is built around dex (He in fact starts with a higher Dex than Lann, the party archer, does), and two weapon fighting with the gnome hook hammer. This makes him ill suited for the Hellknight's main draw, reducing the penalties of heavier armor (a benefit which for added irony, Regill is too low level to even qualify for), when Regill's best used with light armor or unarmored using the archmage armor mythic power (See above). So you're left with only 14 levels to try and salvage some use out of Regill by making him pick any other class he could be passable at rather than waste further precious levels on Hellknight. There's a certain humor that the character whose entire schtick is being the consumate professional Hellknight should avoid taking levels in the class by all means.
*** Funnily enough, the game ''itself'' compensates to a degree by making his gear selection earlier on incredibly good; he begins play with Adamantine Full Plate +2, which is better than anything you likely have when meeting him, there's a good ring of deflection in his recruitment area, and a little exploring of Lost Chapel provides you with an ''excellent'' Axiomatic hooked hammer, which gives him tremendous bonuses against chaotic enemies (and guess what 80%+ of the enemies in this game are). All this together actually keeps him competitive and even quite good for the climax of chapter 2 and much of chapter 3; it's only really chapter 4 and beyond that a doggedly "canon" Regill will start to really feel the pinch of his undertuned classes.
** A rare deliberate example with [[spoiler: Trever.]] He is only recruitable [[LateCharacterSyndrome in Act IV, well past the midway point of the game]]. This means the player is unlikely to have any niche for him to fill that isn't covered by other party members, and with too few levels left to put him in one even if they didn't. He's also [[spoiler: taken five levels in the Paladin and Hellknight classes, which [[GameplayAndStoryIntergration accurately reflects his backstory]]...as does his alignment shift to Chaotic Neutral, which renders him unable to use any of the abilities from either class]]. Suffice to say his suboptimal levelling and lack of growth potential will leave him on the back bench for any player who did go to the effort of saving him.

*** Blackwater's reputation is not helped by the fact that it was created as part of a Kickstarter backer's tier bonus, a level to their design and specifications; veterans of ''VideoGame/PathfinderKingmaker'' might have little fondness for backer content after their encounters with Darven and the Hellknights in that game.

** Derrazand, the balor in front of the Drezen citadel at the climax of chapter 2. He's not particularly hard to beat, and that's the problem: his battle is scripted to run for six rounds, at which point Greybor appears and tries and fails to stab him InTheBack; cue VillainExitStageLeft. It's completely possible to knock him down to zero HP before that but still have him be up and about merrily slaughtering the [=NPCs=] for a couple rounds longer.

** But none of these compare to the Swarm Path, the game's KillEmAll route. Consumed by hatred and hunger, it dosen't matter what path the Commander was before. If they commit to being a Swarm, their phyiscal body is destroyed and reformed as a crawling disgusing mass of insects, which is enough to scare away literally every party member, even those who would otherwise be okay with following a Lich or Demon. If you save Ciar and the other mercenary leaders at the City of Iz, you get the option at Drezen to systematically devour every one of your followers. You get a graphic description of each and every one of their deaths at the clawing ravenous mouths of your vescavores. The ending is arguably the scariest one of all, because the Worldwound is still open, and now the Swarm Commander is simply feeding off the endless armies of the Abyss, growing larger and larger until nothing will ever be able to stop it...

*** Some of the spells can also be dramatic in their effect. Second Breath, Joy of Life and Heroes Never Surrender are the really famous ones: these restore companion abilities to their max, spells up to fifth level for companions, and the last is both abilities '''and''' spells up to seventh level for companions. The power of spell restoration in the field is fairly obvious (it makes Nenio, Camellia, Daeran and Ember potentially lethal, for one thing), but the ability restoration can be just as dramatic - this is things like Smites or Camellia's sword buffing. For Seelah and Regill, this can in fact be absolutely transformational - Smites are a bit infamous as a "neat, but you always feel like you should save it for Something Important and end up not using it much" ability, but getting even a single "reload" of them turns Smites into something you'll use constantly against anything reasonably big and reasonably evil or chaotic. Adding upwards of twenty flat damage and buffed Charisma modifier to hit to every meaningful attack Regill does, for example, does a ''whole'' lot to make Hellknight more worth it than it otherwise is (as described further down), and Seelah of course turns from just a tank to an offensive powerhouse when she can be a lot more liberal with Smites. The big one, though, is that it restores any kind of non-spell ability... '''''including Cleric domain abilities like Guarded Hearth'''''. GH is absolutely infamous for being one of the most powerful non-spell abilities available to players in ''Pathfinder'', period, and getting Impossible Domain: Community for Sosiel first thing is nearly memetic advice for anyone trying to use him. Even at just one use per rest, having his massive Wisdom provide a huge Sacred-type buff (so it stacks with a number of other buffs) to your attack rolls and saving throws is enormously helpful. Being able to do so ''multiple times'' per rest (upwards of seven times, at the higher mythic ranks) transforms the party into a warded rolling death ball for any truly significant fight and makes the high ACs of many enemies ''far'' more manageable. These spells completely transform the way you play the game and have a massive impact on how a number of characters play, and set up right, some of them can absolutely start obliterating things if you play your cards right.

*** But this isn't even the end of LBF insanity. The way it works, you see, is that per-combat, your companions can remain active even after taking knockout or ''fatal'' damage for a number of hits equal to your charisma modifier (so five hits at CHA 20, for example). This is, if you'll remember, a stat you can ''buff'' and/or get equipment for. It's not too terribly difficult to arrange things so that your friends can remain standing for ten hits or more even after they're supposed to be dead. Moreover, this ''stacks'' with the Last Stand power: first, your buddies will go below 0 but get two turns of invincibility, and then they'll stay up until they exhaust their hit count. Because oh yeah, did we mention this effect only ends at the end of combat? The number of hits your CHA can tank is the only limiting factor. And you can even still heal people in this state with things like Breath of Life to get them back into a "normal" state! The end result is that it can be amazingly hard to kill Azata parties if they're set up right, which makes the path a perennial favorite of folks challenging Last Azlanti mode. Angel might have more defensive buffs, but Azata provides that critical defense against the status effect of "freakin' dead".
*** Some of the spells can also be dramatic in their effect. Second Breath, Joy of Life and Heroes Never Surrender are the really famous ones: these restore companion abilities to their max, spells up to fifth level for companions, and the last is both abilities '''and''' spells up to seventh level for companions. The power of spell restoration in the field is fairly obvious, but the ability restoration can be just as dramatic - this is things like Smites or Camellia's sword buffing. For Seelah and Regill, this can in fact be absolutely transformational - Smites are a bit infamous as a "neat, but you always feel like you should save it for Something Important and end up not using it much" ability, but getting even a single "reload" of them turns Smites into something you'll use constantly against anything reasonably big and reasonably evil or chaotic. Adding upwards of twenty flat damage and buffed Charisma modifier to hit to every meaningful attack Regill does, for example, does a ''whole'' lot to make Hellknight more worth it than it otherwise is (as described further down), and Seelah of course turns from just a tank to an offensive powerhouse when she can be a lot more liberal with Smites. The big one, though, is that it restores any kind of non-spell ability... '''''including Cleric domain abilities like Guarded Hearth'''''. GH is absolutely infamous for being one of the most powerful non-spell abilities available to players in ''Pathfinder'', period, and getting Impossible Domain: Community for Sosiel first thing is nearly memetic advice for anyone trying to use him. Even at just one use per rest, having his massive Wisdom provide a huge Sacred-type buff (so it stacks with a number of other buffs) to your attack rolls and saving throws is enormously helpful. Being able to do so ''multiple times'' per rest transforms the party into a warded rolling death ball for any truly significant fight and makes the high ACs of many enemies ''far'' more manageable. These spells completely transform the way you play the game and have a massive impact on how a number of characters play, and set up right, some of them can absolutely start obliterating things if you play your cards right.

** Azatas' Life-Bonding Friendship superpower grants the benefit of all teamwork feats they possess to every ally in a 50-foot radius. Inquisitors benefit greatly from this, since they get bonus teamwork feats.

** The merged spellbooks for specific classes and Mythic paths (angel for divine and lich for arcane) combined with abundant casting. Merged spellbooks mean that the Commander's caster level is combined from both their character level and mythic level, allowing them to access level 8 or 9 spells far earlier than normal. This can lead to a cleric or oracle being able to access the extremely powerful bolt of justice spell and its AOE variant, which does massive damage on all enemies, and having abundant spell slots to keep the damage piled up.

** As the flagship feature of the game, Mythic Paths have been very heavily scrutinized and, in some areas, found wanting. While the game makes a big deal out of Mythic Paths and the impact they have on the game not all of them are equally well-written or implemented. The Evil options, which were especially touted in prerelease advertisement, suffer the most due to the Adventure Path the game is based on being primarily designed to function for Good-aligned (or at least Neutral) characters, with Evil ones being forced into an EvilVersusOblivion scenario and ultimately feeling somewhat tacked on. Evil options also cause you to permanently lose some companions[[labelnote:*]]Seelah will abandon a Lich PC due to her paladin oaths and ''everyone'' abandons a Swarm-That-Walks PC because they die and begin working for Deskari[[/labelnote]] while Good and Neutral paths generally[[labelnote:*]]Camellia will abandon an Aeon path PC[[/labelnote]] give you choices to keep opposed characters around, even if those options would be extremely out of character for the PC. There's also plenty of criticism that the 'second tier' Mythic Paths (Devil, Gold Dragon, Legend, and Swarm-That-Walks) appear too late in the campaign to have a meaningful impact on the story since it's mostly over by then. Swarm and Devil in particular suffer even more as they are unlocked ''deep'' into Act 5, while Gold Dragon and Legend are at least unlocked near the start of Act 5 (and Legend is at least a ''bit'' better integrated into the story conceptually as an obvious solution to a problem the Commander faces). The second tier paths also suffer from a narrative hurdle as the story never really brings up how your character just abandoned their previous mythic path. The commander will just behave like the new Mythic path was always the one they were on, despite having used another for most of the story.

** Sosiel and [[spoiler: Staunton]] both get a bit of this for the same reason - Their builds are bad and include unnecessary or useless things you can't remove.
*** In Sosiel's case, he's focused in Medium armor but he doesn't have anything approaching the Dexterity bonus to take advantage of medium armor, which is wasteful and means he doesn't have the armor class to stand up in melee despite being melee cleric. It's hard to do a cleric ''wrong'' in the Pathfinder rules but the general opinion is that he could be a lot better than he is.

*** Mentioned above, but still deserves it's own mention, in Act 5 [[spoiler:you start with NONE of the army that you had exiting Act 3. You have to rebuild it nearly from scratch. And you don't even have the resources you ended Act 3 with, you have to regain those too. You at least keep your generals, your recruitment rates, and your forts, but otherwise you are essentially starting over from scratch. Worst still, there was a bug that persisted for several weeks on launch where moving to the world map at the start of Act 5 could result in a huge demon army immediately marching from the edge of the map to Drezen in one turn, slaughtering what few reinforcements you may of been given before you even have a chance to organize them in to an army.]]

** '''The alignment system.''' Just like in the last game, it's not very well-liked. Owlcat attempted to address concerns from [[YMMV/PathfinderKingmaker the last game]] that alignment-affecting dialogue options were too restrictive because each one was tied to both the Law/Chaos and Good/Evil axes by making it so that alignment-related choices in this game only affected one axis. [[MortonsFork Players don't like this either,]] in large part due to the reason stated below. Some part of this can be blamed on Owlcat continuing to track alignment on a circle rather than the square grid used by predecessors like [[Creator/{{Interplay}} Interplay's]] [[VideoGame/BaldursGate many]] [[VideoGame/PlanescapeTorment famous]] [[VideoGame/IcewindDale titles]] and [[Creator/BioWare [=BioWare's=]]] [[VideoGame/NeverwinterNights series]], since the circular nature of it ''still'' means every choice is a two-axis choice, they're all just Lawful Neutral, Chaotic Neutral, Neutral Good, or Neutral Evil. This makes it possible to lose classes tied to a 'corner' alignment like Paladin (Lawful Good) by siding too much with one half of that alignment (becoming either Neutral Good or Lawful Neutral), something not possible in conventional grid-based alignment systems.
** As the flagship feature of the game, Mythic Paths have been very heavily scrutinized and, in some areas, found wanting. While the game makes a big deal out of Mythic Paths and the impact they have on the game not all of them are equally well-written or implemented. The Evil options, which were especially touted in prerelease advertisement, suffer the most due to the Adventure Path the game is based on being primarily designed to function for Good-aligned (or at least Neutral) characters, with Evil ones being forced into an EvilVersusOblivion scenario and ultimately feeling somewhat tacked on. Evil options also cause you to permanently lose some companions[[labelnote:*]]Seelah will abandon a Lich PC due to her paladin oaths and ''everyone'' abandons a Swarm-That-Walks PC because they die and begin working for Deskari[[/labelnote]] while Good and Neutral paths generally[[labelnote:*]]Camellia will abandon an Aeon path PC[[/labelnote]] give you choices to keep opposed characters around, even if those options would be extremely out of character for the PC. There's also plenty of criticism that the 'second tier' Mythic Paths ([[spoiler: Devil, Gold Dragon, Legend, and Swarm-That-Walks]]) appear too late in the campaign to have a meaningful impact on the story since it's mostly over by then. Swarm and Devil in particular suffer even more as they are unlocked ''deep'' into Act 5, while Gold Dragon and Legend are at least unlocked near the start of Act 5 (and Legend is at least a ''bit'' better integrated into the story conceptually as an obvious solution to a problem the Commander faces). The second tier paths also suffer from a narrative hurdle as the story never really brings up how your character just abandoned their previous mythic path. The commander will just behave like the new Mythic path was always the one they were on, despite having used another for most of the story.

** As with other video game properties based on the D&D ruleset, Weapon Focus and its associated feats are sometimes criticized for requiring foreknowledge of how the game designers chose to distribute the loot, and how many high-quality weapons of a given type even exist. Without it, you may end up having to use an inferior weapon for a long time because there's just no better alternative of the type you're specialized in available. Exotic weapons have it especially rough as you have to guess which ones are even going to be in the game since you can only pick proficiency in one exotic weapon at a time. Worsened by the fact that the Commander should logically be able to have equipment custom-made for them, given their position. A popular GameMod exists as a workaround which makes focus apply to weapon families rather than individual weapon types. The talking weapon Finnean is also in the game by default to ameliorate the problem, but as described above, he has his own issues [[spoiler: and permanently becomes a longsword if the good end to his questline is chosen]].