WotR: Simple solution for underpowered foes?


Wrath of the Righteous


Hey there,

From what I understand, WotR is considered to easy from book 4 on by most people here.

I really like mythic and dm it nevertheless. What could be a quick and viable solution to make WotR an adequate challenge?

What do you think of this approach?

I'd just double each mythic foe's hp and it can spend 1 MP to use Arcane Surge (with its SLAs also) or to make an additional attack like the champions feature (don't know the right now).

Silver Crusade

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If you want a quick fix, I would suggest a combination of advanced simple template and the templates on page 224 of Mythic Adventures, particularly Invincible and Agile. Arcane and Divine can be a good choice, if you want then to have some sort of evasive ability (blink, mirror immage, fly, teleport...)

And remember that you can always just increase the mythic rank to give it another mythic ability (fortification is often quite good).

Liberty's Edge

The problem with the encounters as they are presented is the AP assumes a party of four 15-point build characters and doesn't appear to take their mythic tiers into account (for non-mythic encounters at least).
If you're playing with more than 4 characters, have above average point builds, and a number of experienced players at the table, you're going to face problems with creating sufficient challenge for the group and it will feel "too easy".
The key is knowing the experience level of your players, their play style and the power level of the party (build points, class/path selections, number of characters), and tweaking the encounters to suit their particular needs. It's often more nuanced than just adding templates to the existing monsters.
There are some excellent sources in the Paizo GM books on how to build or scale appropriate encounters for your group. A quick flip through those resources is time well spent.


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Okay. You want to know how to deal with Mythic encounters? Increase the number of foes they fight, while ensuring the CR rating doesn't grow too overpowered for the heroes. A Mythic Hero can still be overwhelmed by a large number of non-Mythic foes.

The drawback is that this will drag out the encounters because those extra bodies will all have actions of their own, need to be tracked, and so forth.

(The Mythic Agile template also helps by giving enemies two full actions a round. But I'd only suggest this for Mythic enemies or the boss-critter of non-Mythic groups of enemies.)


Another good thing to do is to combine existing encounters, especially in dungeon-like areas. Let the fights cascade in, with a couple of rooms worth of creatures joining the fight over a couple of rounds. This helps cut down on the repetitive, easy, grindy fights, makes the place seem a bit more alive & responsive, and they're not all on screen at once. Which means not only that you don't need to deal with a dozen monsters at once, but that they're not all eating the same fireball.


I'm running it now finishing book 3 and I'm finding the CRs aren't correct. Too many CR 8 fights for APL 14 Parties. If I'm following mythic adventures right the APL of a 4 level 12 character with 5 mythic tiers be average character level +2. Also the wealth in the game is almost double normal Wealth by level guideline for level 12 characters but is about right on for APL 14 party. Level 12 being 108,000 and level 14 being 185,000.

So it seem like the encounter design was set up for non mythic character. So I've increased the CR of most of the encounters in Book by 2-5 CR by adding the advanced template, adding extra monster, or adding addition levels to the bad guys.

Silver Crusade

voska66 wrote:

I'm running it now finishing book 3 and I'm finding the CRs aren't correct. Too many CR 8 fights for APL 14 Parties. If I'm following mythic adventures right the APL of a 4 level 12 character with 5 mythic tiers be average character level +2. Also the wealth in the game is almost double normal Wealth by level guideline for level 12 characters but is about right on for APL 14 party. Level 12 being 108,000 and level 14 being 185,000.

So it seem like the encounter design was set up for non mythic character. So I've increased the CR of most of the encounters in Book by 2-5 CR by adding the advanced template, adding extra monster, or adding addition levels to the bad guys.

Yeah some encounters are seriously under APL even if you discount the effect of mythic. I tend to skip those, and just present my players with fewer harder encounters. This is a current trend in the APs but since they are intended for a less optimized group, they could pose some threat.

Dark Archive

I think the under APL fights are on purpose. Mythic Heroes should get the chance to feel badass while they curb stomp some puny monsters.


Victor Zajic wrote:
I think the under APL fights are on purpose. Mythic Heroes should get the chance to feel badass while they curb stomp some puny monsters.

I'd agree, except there were far too many of them. An entire dungeon level in Book 2 was under-CRed. Not one encounter. An ENTIRE LEVEL. And most of the random encounters in Book 3 fall into this category.

I was going over it with my fellow GM, and the average CR level for Books 2 and 3 is lower than some of those in non-mythic APs. So it's not just not thinking of the mythic tiers as powerful enough; it's ignoring them completely, and THEN deciding to make the encounters a bit easy.

My group of 4 15-point PCs curb-stomped everything in said dungeon, every random encounter in Book 3, and most of the set encounters in Book 3.
The encounters that challenged them were the ones where (as many other GMs have said) I either grouped several encounters, or gave a random encounter with 4x the recommended number of enemies.

There's definitely a CR underestimation in these modules.

Silver Crusade

Victor Zajic wrote:
I think the under APL fights are on purpose. Mythic Heroes should get the chance to feel badass while they curb stomp some puny monsters.

I have heard the same sentiment about an adventure in Kingmaker.. by the designer IIRC. However some of those fights would still not be a significant challenge even without mythic.

As a showcase of "we are sooo awesome with mythic" I think the character has to power a credible threat to the group without mythic.
If the group could already decimate them.. whats the point?

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