I just finished the second book with my group, and I have to say: this was not a good adventure at all. The combat encounters are far too easy for any competent group, the "set piece" combats are particularly awful as they rely on throwing the party at a single opponent with only occasional AOE attacks, and the recommended tactics for the characters are also bad.
From a story perspective, the potential entertainment value of exploring a city run by evil witches is curtailed by draconian security and an exceedingly railroad-y plot. The resistance group feels flat, because they just give the players a big mission as soon as they meet them, and that's that. The final fight with Nazhena was particularly bad.
First, her tactics state that she uses Summon Monster IV to summon an Ice Mephit, which is easily the weakest thing she could summon with that spell. It can cast Magic Missile 1/hour and has a 1d4 breath weapon. The author expects this waifish creature, and a single Ice Golem, to hold back a party of 6th level PCs, which is completely ridiculous.
The tactics for Nazhena are similarly unrealistic. She casts Summon Monster IV in round 1, then Spectral Hand in round two, and then begins casting touch spells to take advantage of her Winter Witch abilities. Now, her initiative bonus is nothing special, and the golem has a -1, so they're unlikely to go before the PCs. That means she's basically wasting like 4 rounds on prep before she even begins damaging the PCs. Even a moderately well-built martial will be averaging a good 20 DPR, and the module has already given the PCs an Adamantine weapon by this point, so the Golem is going down before Nazhena even has a chance to do anything. And if your players have any sort of tactical knowledge (say, using that cauldron they got in volume 1 to summon a small army of small elementals to harass enemy casters) the encounter is going nowhere fast. It's a tactically dull, easy encounter with little to no emotional impact because the PCs have only ever heard of Nazhena before; they've never met her.
This is the most bored/disappointed I've ever been while running Pathfinder, and I'm honestly not entirely sure I'm going to bother with book 3.
As a player, not a GM, I aggree on many of the things you are saying. My GM changed a bit Nazhena's strategies. She casted an Ice Wall so we had to choose between splitting the party or letting her have rounds to prepare herself. The Ice Golem was weak but it blocked our way and I remember we couldn't target the Wall with ranged attacks (maybe there was a Sleet Storm or something similar, I cannot remember). So the Wall, even being easily destroyed, made a difference.
Honestly, if you run this story as very combat oriented it can be disappointing, as they aren't nearly as exciting as the ones in the previous books.
My GM focused on the roleplaying and did a great job so it never felt flat or excessively railroady. I liked the characters I met at Whitethrone, specially Greta, who joined us for a short time before dying in the third book.
He also made the pipers neutral instead of evil and even somewhat likable and reasonable, so we had great roleplaying about deciding if we should kill them for going on with our mission. It was a hard decission.
The third books encounters are more interesting than the second's but the story even if it can be interesting is totally unrelated to the main plot. Again, my GM made it interesting by making it related to our characters backgrounds so it was great, but as written it's not very good. The 4th is great but again unrelated, and the 5th is one of the best books I've ever played.
The 6th... my GM cut almost everything and substituted it for a homebrew because he hated it xD
What worries me a bit are a couple of things you say about Nazhena:
First, you shouldn't be afraid of changing the strategies if you think they won't work against your group. You know them better than the AP does and Nazhena has been spying them, so she should know how to react
Second, you say your players didn't bother about Nazhena because they hadn't met her. Not directly, but they had. Didn't they meet Thora Petska's doll and learned her story? What Nazhena did to her was awful. After meeting Nadya and knowing the whole story everybody in my group hated Nazhena. After playing the whole AP I still remember her as one of the most hated villains of the story.
Edit: sorry for the double posting.
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I should clarify: I *did* change Nazhena's strategies. I had her summon a Medium Ice Elemental instead of an Ice Mephit, and she started off by casting Ice Wall, trapping the Cleric in a hemisphere of ice. The party's monk was able to punch through the wall pretty quickly though, and the hemisphere version of wall of ice doesn't deal damage when you pass through a breach or break through it.
The players did meet Thora, but it was quite a while ago and I doubt they remembered; it didn't seem to have much impact.
My players also took a liking to the pipers, and wanted to find a peaceful solution, but the scenario doesn't leave much room for one; the pipers are taking the hut and the forest, period.
My PCs avoided befriending Greta, and were little more than cordial with Solveig, so roleplay was kind of a bust with this volume. It doesn't help that none of them have the knowledge/social skills to make heads or tails of the situation they're in.
I had a great time running Rise of the Runelords and Mummy's Mask, though I never did get to finish those. This just felt like more of a chore. I'm used to skilled players finding ways to tear through the "boss" encounters, but this book just didn't feel fun :|
On the bright side, they did manage to kill Logrivich with a tanglefoot bag :D
We had Nadya with us so we couldn't forget Nazhena as Nadya was always resentful of her and told us some stories about her. I guess that can be the difference. I actually found Nazhena to be more charismatic than Elvanna, but that always depends on the specifics of the game.
I have to agree that many of the encounters were not that amazing, though. My GM had to change a lot of things from all the AP, being the 5th book the one that needed less adapting.
Compared to S&S, the game that I was GMing at the same time and which didn't need a lot of work, RoW seems needing some adapting to run smoothly. And I aggree that most parts are extremely railroady.
The last boss of the next part is very disappointing as it is never even explained what he is actually doing there.
My group had a pretty disastrous time with Nadya, culminating in the Mesmerist threatening to kill her children and Nadya killing the Mesmerist in her sleep.
I should explain:
After the scene where Nadya's son gets lost, the Cavalier, who wasn't paying full attention to the fact that Nadya had packed up her whole family to lead them to Whitethrone, flipped out at Nadya for endangering her children, and basically drove her out of the party. The other party members tried to convince her to stay, and managed to at least convince her to lead them to the next village where they could hire another guide. I intended to give them additional opportunities to repair the relationship, but the two people most interested in doing so trusted the Mesmerist to do their negotiating, and the Mesmerist made the baffling decision to threaten Nadya's children if she didn't lead them to Whitethrone.
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That explains everything. We had Nadya with us until the end of the adventure. She wanted to be with us to ensure a better life for her children and for Irrisen. We had some replacement characters around to be with us if a player missed a session or died and had to be replaced for another one. Nadya was one of them.
Being the way she is, threatening her kids seems like the worse thing to do.
Agreed. I didn't kill the player just to be a jerk; I couldn't imagine Nadya letting that stand. The other players had opportunities to notice something while keeping watch, and the victim had a chance to wake up and notice, but neither of those things happened, and they failed the fortitude save against the Coup de Grace, despite Nadya only having a handaxe to do the job with.
She must have been very pissed to do that or very scared for her children.
I don't know the situation but it seems that it escalated a lot!
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Nazhena not only occurs in the encounter with Thora Petska, but Radosek Pavril also works for her. The players hear about her several times in the first adventure. I also had the villagers of Waldsby tell about hear and fearing her (including Nadya, who is married to one of the PCs in my campaign). I also made it very clear (via NPCs) that Nazhena was spying on the group via the mirrors. So when they met her at last, they really wanted to kill her.
I partly rewrote the second book by adding some encounters and adapting some others. However, I usually do this, because I have more than 4 players and also adapt a lot to their backstories. I also added quite a bit of stuff to the third book.
We knew that she might be spying on us while we were at the Pale Tower. Our Fighter, who was a noble woman, was sleeping at Nazhena's room after cleaning the tower. My PC, who was afraid of sleeping alone because she suffered from severe nightmares, was on the top of the tower where the birds used to be but was unable to sleep.
So she decided to make a visit to the Fighter. They had already been intimate once, so my PC though she might allow her to sleep with her.
They ended doing more than sleeping, and suddenly, they realized there was a huge mirror in the room.
They didn't know if they should feel embarrased, start laughing or just ignore the mirror. In the end my character gave quite a speech to the mirror just in case Nazhena was watching.
We never knew if she was.
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That is really a fun scene!
As a player, not a GM, I aggree on many of the things you are saying. My GM changed a bit Nazhena's strategies. She casted an Ice Wall so we had to choose between splitting the party or letting her have rounds to prepare herself. The Ice Golem was weak but it blocked our way and I remember we couldn't target the Wall with ranged attacks (maybe there was a Sleet Storm or something similar, I cannot remember). So the Wall, even being easily destroyed, made a difference.
I will also be giving her legendary actions and making sure she is pre-buffed before PCs engage her, so no time is wasted "setting up" (I have 6 PCs and 2 NPCs), along with a duergar wychguard (the white witches have a pact with the chaos dwarfs to provide trained guardians to them in exchange for something suitably horrible).