I recommend you check out the FAQ for Wrath of the Righteous. I linked you directly to the "question" addressing the challenges many players faced in the early levels and the solutions the developers offered.
If you look through the forums, there were a number of discussions about Wrath of the Righteous scenarios/adventures and how to deal with them.
WotR is a very difficult set, and the difficulty is exponential with number of characters as you’d noticed due to banes like Arboreal Blight and Demonic Horde (and have yet to notice due to the Armies starting in AD2). My recommendation would be to run with 2 characters for now instead of 4.
Alaine, Adowyn, and Balazar are likely the 3 most powerful characters in the set and it seems like most were in your original party. Any mix of 2 characters with complementary skills and some healing options should suffice imo. I would restart where you left off (first adventure of 2) after rebuilding them with the correct number of feats and decks that contain a handful of B/C and 1 upgrades.
Brother Tyler's and Skizzerz's points are, of course, spot on. I'd like to add one thing as a general comment about facing scenarios with difficult Army barriers (the ones that force every character to make a check from a given list).
In PACG, unlike Pathfinder RPG, a valid strategy is to split the party!
This can be especially helpful if one character would be stuck making a check against which they are poor because other characters have taken the "good checks". If you fail such a scenario, consider rerunning it twice, each time with a smaller party.
Story-wise, this is perfectly valid! Your party was beaten back. Regrouping, they realize that the whole party drew too much attention. Splitting up, only to rendezvous at a predesignated point, they might draw the attention of fewer [fill in the blank]s.
This may not always work, depending on the composition of the party and how each half would fare against the location list for your reduced party size. I just know it has worked for me.
I'll confess, I really didn't like some of the choices made in Wrath (I even dropped out of the playtest early because it just wasn't much fun for me). At the top of that list are banes like the blood demon, or others that you have to defeat effectively without weapons/spells.
With the existing mechanics, there's often very little player choice about which character fights which bane, so it always seemed like bad design to have so many foes that certain characters just have no realistic way to beat, or where you were severely punished for actually winning.
It probably would have been more interesting for everyone (players and designers both) if the local group could have determined how encounters played out a bit more rather than having each player treated as separate most of the time.
That being said, another way you can modify the difficulty/fun is to selectively include cards from outside the AP. Cherry pick some nice class deck cards and throw them in each chapter. More than a few of the class decks suffered from power creep and came out after Wrath. When I play these days with my kids, we always do this and it keeps the game from being too frustrating most of the time. Also, I might suggest bringing your party size down to 3 rather than 4. With 3 characters, each character should get 10 turns, and there will be 50 cards in the location decks. With 4 characters, those numbers are 6/7 turns and 50 location cards. Having played with multiple different groups of people and party sizes of every size from 1 to 6, 3 really felt like the sweet spot most of the time.
It has been five years since I finished WotR, so I don't remember the details of the experience. From what I recall, however, yes, there were some very frustrating moments. Nevertheless, we finished the AP successfully (link goes to the listing of each group's successful party - and here are the midpoint versions of different parties). We played it with four characters (two original characters died, so we replaced them). As you can see from the linked discussions, the AP can be beat. It's definitely not a cakewalk, however.
I remember from discussions here that many other groups had similar experiences with the scaling (and also here). The difficulty is relatively high in B and 2, settling down a bit in the middle adventures, and then picking up again later.
There are also some tips on succeeding at the AP here.
I'll have to dig my box out soon to see if I can offer specific advice for the scenario.
David said he gave up on the game, and we've provided helpful feedback and resources for those who stumble on this thread. Maybe you can save yourself some effort.
I'm hoping that he'll come back to see if anyone provided anything he might find useful.
Also, there's a (decent?) chance that similar concerns will be raised in the future by other players. Since the forums are really slow now, anything we post isn't likely to be pushed back too far, making it more accessible.
Wow, is this entire thread a blast from the past.
Most of what I'd offer has been mentioned already. In particular:
-- when playing Wrath with less than 5 characters, I'd never add the Character Add-On deck (so as to avoid its copies of the three worst banes);
-- when fighting Armies, pay attention to powers characters have that can defeat barriers (also, note Kyra can take any skill check against an Undead army, using her power);
-- playing the Army scenarios twice with 1/2 the party each time is a sound option IMHO.
Cap'n Bulldozer -- I'd never thought about the Class decks and hadn't really dug into those. In fact, I can't even say that I have a good idea what's in those boxes. It didn't make sense to me considering that the B+C boxes already came with 11 characters and probably 300(?) cards worth of items, weapons, armors, etc. It never occurred to me to even consider a Class deck. Can you tell me more about this?
In short, the class decks (and ultimate add on decks) were originally designed to supplement organized play. They each consist of a few new characters, as well as around 100 boons that, at least theoretically, complement the characters in the box. There's one for each of the Pathfinder classes; Monk, Paladin, Druid, etc. as well a few that introduce completely new classes (some even with primarily Goblin based stuff). The decks themselves are relatively inexpensive, figure 10 to 20 bucks for one (though you can sometimes find them for much less).
The thing is, quite a few of the cards in those class decks are totally new cards that aren't found in any of the Adventure paths. Some of them are repeats as well, but it would mean you could use them to have access to cards from outside the AP. At least some of the cards are quite good as well.
(You can check out https://pacg.fandom.com/wiki/Pathfinder_Adventure_Card_Game_Wiki
for deck lists and text of the cards, etc.)
I personally never got into organized play, but I still have picked up almost all the class decks, and will select a few specific cards to add when playing, both for some new "rare" cards and also sometimes to adjust the difficulty, or to compensate for the AP card selection being not to my liking. Some people prefer to add in the entire class deck, but I found that clutters up the box too much most of the time, and tends to add a bunch of cards you don't really want in there from time to time.
As a bit of a warning, the cards you add can affect your play experience in some strong ways. For example, when I recently played through S&S with the S&S version of Lini, we added a toad ally from a class deck, as well as some mastiffs. Toad let that Lini get spells back from her discard pile easily every turn, while the mastiffs essentially let her draw 2-4 extra cards a turn. That meant she was usually playing 2 divine favor spells a turn and still having a ton of other action. The class decks are not balanced around the APs, so you might want to carefully consider what you add if anything. (In my case I was playing with my 9 year old son, so we didn't care too much about having uber powered Lini or Mother Myrtle, but some would find that less fun obviously)
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I have party of six (Balazar, Grazzle, Seelah, Merisiel, Wrathack, and Crowe) I think this is a well balanced party with two tanks, 1 and 1/2 heals, 1 caster, and 2 DPS. You think we'll have issues in AD2?? We have been rolling through AD1. We had some character issues in the beginning but when we level set the group and added Grazzle we've dominated AD1 thus far.
Maybe. Rather than look up the Army banes and try to compare your 6 characters to the skills required, I'd say just take it as it comes, and if you find there's a scenario that's too tough, split the party. Run a scenario twice with two parties of 3 and then regroup on the other side.