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Pathfinder Lost Omens, PF Special Edition Subscriber. Organized Play Member. 1 post. No reviews. No lists. No wishlists. 2 Organized Play characters.


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Pathfinder Lost Omens, PF Special Edition Subscriber

Posting here, since I've heard this is the best way to get Paizo eyes on feedback. My group completed revenge of the runelords and found the mythic system quite poor.
For anyone considering running the AP, I would suggest just totally ripping out the system and reworking the AP to include some other sort of high power experience such as free archetype or custom feats. This review will include some light structural spoilers for the AP but nothing of story relevance.

Mythic Points

Mythic points can be gained in a variety of ways, such as completing mythic deeds, starting a session, following your calling, or slaying mythic opponents. Getting points at the start of a session can be narratively weird, with players able to access their mythic abilities at full power at times that could be during any point in an adventuring day depending on where the previous session left off. Otherwise, the system generally feels fine, you have mythic points and spend them for useful abilities and get them back from defeating tough encounters and challenges. However one area this breaks down is with daily mythic point recovery, accessible via calling or the feat Summon Mythic Power, which lets you get back a mythic point once per day. Since Revenge features multiple skill challenges that take place at the pace of one skill check per day, this feat absolutely breaks these scenarios, allowing for a reroll at mythic proficiency.

For adventuring days that featured a lot of combat with the occasional chance to fight mythic foes and gain back mythic points the system felt fine usually. However, it certainly was odd that the session ending in the middle of an adventuring day made a big difference on how mythic points could be spent, as getting +3 from starting a session is quite a lot of mythic points compared to 1 hero point from starting a session.

Mythic Challenges
These were truly awful due to how mythic proficiency works. For example, a mythic hazard lv 14 at lv 12 offers two options for disabling: a dc 38 thievery check with minimum legendary proficiency to attempt and a dc 41 arcana check. A lv 12 PC with capped stats, master proficiency, and a +2 item bonus has a +25 to their skill check letting them succeed on the arcana check on a 16 on the die, and cannot even attempt the thievery check due to the required legendary proficiency. Effectively this hazard is not interactable unless a PC spends mythic points or attempts to simply beat it to death instead (which is difficult). A party who simply rolls poorly with their mythic points could find themselves easily wiped or unable to win the encounter. Given this hazard design is repeated throughout the AP shows this is the intended experience for mythic deeds.

For a mythic chase example, dcs could be similarly high although usually less extreme and without proficiency locks that hazards might have. However an interesting quirky my party realized is that as mythic proficiency simply boosts your proficiency to mythic, it was best to simply select the lowest DC option that correspond to stats you had rather than bother with what your character was good at, because the DCs were too high to reasonably hit with your normal stats anyways.

Mythic Enemies
Mythic enemies often felt more like massive slogs than suitably epic foes. Mythic resilience often left them with few options to target via saving throws as a monster could easily have one strong save, one save with resilience, and a single weak save to target, or have two saves with resilience. Often they would also have the ability to use their mythic points to simply remove conditions as well making debuffs difficult to stick even if they did manage to land. They also had mythic resistance, which our group had no idea how to apply, as mythic resistance seems to state it does nothing against mythic characters, but mythic strike implies it's just permanent always on resistance that only mythic strike gets around. We ran it as permanent resistance for a small period of time before seeing how that interpretation was genuinely awful and gave up. Mythic enemies after a point also had extremely large HP bars with their ability to spend remaining mythic points and heal for half hp, which just made fights take longer especially as mythic characters did not have higher damage output for the most part outside specific destinies. We very thankfully did not have to deal much with creatures who forced rerolls on crits, which seems like an awful feature that makes fights drag on even longer as well.

Mythic Destinies
The destinies were horribly unbalanced. Our group tried timewrecked, avenging runelord, celestial, archfiend, and eternal legend. Timewrecked was picked by my chirurgeon alchemist, mostly because the destiny system did not seem to have any option that supported my character concept in any meaningful way, so I went for the destiny that at least boosted my speed and gave some defensive options. It was ok but did not vertically boost my power in any sort of mythic way. Avenging runelord was effectively useless and did nothing for our poor wizard, who suffered all game for daring to pick a caster in mythic and had a very hard time landing spells due to mythic resilience on a lot of monsters. Celestial offered a lot of appealing options that made our champion much more powerful in a wide variety of circumstances ranging from passive boosts to mythic point spends. Archfiend was terrible for our rogue and did absolutely nothing to boost his performance. After the rogue died, the player rolled a gunslinger with eternal legend, which offered which had strong options like Earth to Heavens strike which gave him a repeatable, resourceless option that was way better than anything a non-mythic character would have access to and vertically boosted his combat power by a decent amount. Eternal legend also included the incredibly powerful Fight Through Oblivion which made the gunslinger effectively unkillable to damage. Overall the destinies had vastly different performances and seemed to support martial power the most, with casters being left dead in a ditch for options and less traditional characters such as my alchemist being entirely unsupported.