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A couple of months ago on reddit, James Jacobs asked for playtest feedback on level 12-20 Mythic play and seeing as I was also very curious how these rules worked in practice, I decided to organize some playtest sessions! So far I've run 3, one each at levels 12, 16, and 20, with more upcoming over the next couple months. So far aside from myself there's been about 10 people involved in the playtesting, and we've playtested nearly every path at least once.
Methodology: In each test, the players assembled mythic parties of 4 characters with mythic as the only variant rule or house rule in play. I normally have plenty of house rules, but for this I wanted to keep close to RAW in order to test how mythic interacts with the game as written. They were built using the standard treasure for new characters table with one additional item of player level (since that table puts you one behind on fundamental runes compared to what the game expects, skewing results down). At level 20, the characters also received the new mythic fundamental runes, with spellcasters given other high level items to compensate for not being able to use mythic weapon potency or mythic striking. Each party was also composed of either 2 melee martials and 2 casters, or 2 melee martials, 1 ranged martial, and a caster, in order to ensure an imbalanced party comp didn't skew results.
Each test pitted the party against multiple encounters, both mythic and non-mythic, with full rests between each. (the idea for this was to test them at peak capacity rather than make it an attrition challenge) The mythic monsters followed the guidelines from War of Immortals, both for encounter building and monster building. Encounters were all balanced as either severe or extreme, as the mythic encounter rules suggested that mythic chars would significantly outperform standard chars and these were 1 encounter in-game days.
Session 1 - Level 12
The party consisted of a Godling Wizard, an Archfiend Animist, a Mortal Herald Exemplar, and an Apocalypse Rider cleric (Battle Harbinger class archetype).
I first tested to see if mythic significantly outperformed regular PF2E chars at this level via 2 non-mythic 160 xp extreme encounters, 1 vs a horde of lower level dragons and 1 vs a solo lesser death. Despite these being winnable fights for a normal party (albeit very tough ones), the mythic party got trounced both times. Mythic didn't seem to be a massive power difference at 12 contrary to my expectations.
The 3rd fight was a severe mythic encounter with +2 solo mythic brute and 2 level -2 monsters. The -2s got deleted very quickly thanks to aoe mythic casting spells, but the mythic monster stuck around for a while and was mostly just hurt by the martials. Mythic resilience came up a little bit, but the casters were able to mostly avoid it once they realized this monster was mythic by healing or targeting other defenses. It just felt almost exactly like any severe with a level +2 with two level -2 lackeys, and the party beat it quite easily.
Takeaways: (these include observations by both me and my players that we discussed following the sessions)
1. By far the most used mythic stuff was mythic casting/strike plus godspeed, and mythic points disappeared extremely quickly despite being refreshed between encounters. Usually by the end of round 3 almost everyone was out of points, at which point the game largely becomes identical to standard PF2E
2. Casters felt stronger vs non mythic enemies, while martials felt stronger vs mythic enemies. Mythic casting really lets casters boost their odds in a way the system doesn't usually allow, but it's quite limited.
3. Basically no one used Destiny specific mythic abilities. The Archfiend opened their realm once and it accomplished absolutely nothing since monsters at this level usually have high movement.
4. Building a mythic monster was more confusing than it really should be since there's a lack of guidance on how to assign abilities that cost a mythic point. It's not based on level because there's very high level mythic monsters in this book with only 2 abilities that take mythic points and at least one lower level creature with 3 such abilities. You just get the list and that's it. (notably the template abilities are not on this list except for the ability in the caster template). There's also some discrepancies between the text and the table, with the table saying that mythic reroll and mythic defenses are mutually exclusive features while in text the former is just one of many abilities and the latter is given to all mythic creatures of level 20 or higher. It felt very slapdash, to say nothing of the whole "resistance and resilience are equivalent features even though the former gets completely bypassed" thing.
5. Overall this mostly just felt like a normal PF2E session. The 2 abilities and 2 resiliences I gave the level 14 mythic brute didn't make it feel epic or legendary, just slightly more of a damage sponge than normal. Mythic Striking and Casting were both a notable numbers bump but they didn't make as big a difference as you'd expect. It definitely felt more notable for casters as it's generally harder to raise DCs and lower saves than it is to buff attacks and lower AC, but even that was really limited to just helping them get rid of low level lackeys a bit faster. It really didn't "feel" mythic, especially after the points quickly ran out.
Session 2 - Level 16
Party was a Broken chain Barb, Celestial Gunslinger, Eternal Legend champ, and a Mortal Herald Sorc
The 1st fight was a 160xp horde encounter against a bunch of aeons (2 kolaruts, 4 Akhanas, a bythos, and a marut), but it was easily stomped via mythic aoe spells and the champ's shield of spirit.
2nd was a solo 160xp vs a Bastion Archon, this one was much harder, party narrowly won thanks to a lucky crit fail on normally cast eclipse burst and while it was subtle mythic definitely made a difference (eg it made a slow into a fail instead of success, helped a couple Gunslinger attacks hit, and helped one person stay conscious via a mythic ability)
Lastly, the 3rd fight was vs a Mythic level 18 Star Archon Mythic Striker plus a Weak Giylea and aTrumpet Archon, for a low extreme 130 exp encounter. The party won fairly easily, and I'm not sure mythic made a difference. It once again felt like a pretty normal fight. The mythic enemy didn't feel very mythic, just had mythic resilience and a reroll that it used (had some other stuff but didn't get a chance to use it before it died).
Takeaways:
1. We expected it would feel notably more mythic than the level 12 test, but it still just felt like normal PF2E for the most part. Even in the fight vs the Bastion Archon, where mythic helped eke out a narrow victory, might have gone exactly the same way had the players had a different variant rule buffing them instead like the ever common Free Archetype.
2. So long as it's kept to 2 saves only, mythic resilience isn't quite as bad as I'd feared it would be.
3. Players used some destiny specific abilities more, but mainly abilities that didn't cost a point like Broken Chain's Cry of Rebellion or Celestial's Armaments.
4. Mythic points still run out very quickly, and it's becoming increasingly clear that having a large number of decent things you can potentially do with mythic points matters much less than 1-3 very good things you can do with them. And again, in a normal campaign environment players are working with much less points per fight than in these stress tests.
Session 3 - Level 20
Party was an Eternal Legend Barb, Archfiend Animist, Druid Beastlord, and Celestial Monk.
Only 2 fights this time as playing at level 20 with new chars meant that fights took longer. The 1st was a 4v4 vs 4 level 20 planar scions (a Nessari, a Balor, a Veranallia, and a Yamaraj). The party cleaned this up easily and it was definitely the most mythic-feeling of any of the encounters so far, albeit not equally between the players.
The second fight was vs. the new published monster Verex-That-Was, and frankly, it was kind of awful. From the GM side, Verex is just a really boring monster to run, with barely anything to do other than move, attack, and use swallow whole. From the player side, mythic resilience on all 3 saves felt awful (especially for the druid), mythic immunity made the Beastlord's companion largely worthless since none of its features ever make it a mythic creature, and mythic defenses (where all crits against it get rerolled) was just the absolute opposite of fun. At least resilience feels a bit diegetic (this monster just has really high saves), defenses feels like whenever you roll a crit a Paizo dev personally comes into your play session and says "akshually you didn't, try again lol." There's just no causal relationship or narrative weight to it and it feels dreadful. This fight eventually devolved into the 2 casters stuck in the monsters stomach while the 2 martials slowly chipped away at Verex's health (boosted significantly by undying myth ressurecting him when he first reaches 0) until he finally went down because his damage output is actually pretty low.
Takeaways:
1. This session the players absolutely felt mythic, but it varied greatly between the paths. For example Celestial and Eternal legend were basically power fantasies of the sort you could find in something like the Owlcat WOTR CRPG while Beastlord just felt like a normal level 20 Druid who'd taken the animal companion feats. You could REALLY feel how wildly imbalanced the paths were compared to each other. Some of them would be underwhelming as a normal archetype and others make you into a god killing superweapon, the gulf is utterly massive.
2. Mythic Defenses as a mechanic is just really unfun and immersion breaking. It doesn't make the monster feel mythic, it just makes it feel annoying.
3. In a similar vein, Mythic Resilience in all 3 saves feels substantially worse than having it in just 2 as the other mythic monsters I'd used did.
4. Verex in general, despite being a level 24 mythic monster with multiple mythic abilities, did not feel mythic in the slightest. He just felt like a giant bullet sponge who did nothing but survive for a long time and swallow people without access to freedom of movement/Unfettered Movement. It was worse than unbalanced, it was just plain boring.
5. At this level, Mythic Casting becomes a lot less powerful now that it's only a +2. Mythic Strike is a little better since for most classes it's still a +4, but in general they're both pretty undramatic. If you don't have strong ways to use mythic points from your destiny (and many of the destinies frankly don't give you many effective ways of using them) it's possible to feel less mythic than you did at level 10 or 12.
6. It's tough to say how much of it was due to them having stronger mythic destinies, but the two martials severely overperformed the 2 casters here, though the Animist definitely still pulled their weight.
That's all for now, got another level 20 test in a week's time and there'll be more after that! (I won’t be able to update this post by then, so it’ll by a comment below) I'll also follow up with a separate comment about mine and my player's thoughts on the individual destinies, which vary wildly in both power and subjective fun factor. For those of you who have also had the chance to run or play mythic in this level range, how do these results match up with your own?