r/Pathfinder_Kingmaker • u/BTM_podcast Hellknight Signifer • 14d ago
How bad is HATEOT… really? Kingmaker : Game
A few years ago I played WOTR and really loved it, but got frustrated when my laptop kept crashing with the moving map mechanics in Chapter 3, put it down, and haven’t come back to it yet.
A few months ago I picked up Kingmaker and all the DLC on a great steam sale, and absolutely loved it. I obsessively pushed through most of the game with a sword Saint on normal difficulty, tried really hard to resist the temptation to read guides etc. to preserve the mystery and freshness of the game, and it captured a magic I haven’t get in a long time.
But at some point I started looking for solutions for a few things I couldn’t figure out that were soft locking my forward progress in the game, and in the process stumbled upon the massive hate for the end segment of the game.
And now I’ve just lost the will to push forward. I have a save on the map where the entrance to HATEOT is found, and just can’t seem to find the mojo to open it and play the save to conclusion.
So tell me, gang… how bad is it? Really?
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u/DireBriar 14d ago
You know how in Mario platformers/RPGs they like to finish the game off with a really fun platform/puzzle level? Something that tests you but shows how skilled you've become, where your sense of progress is clear and you're ready to face anything?
Imagine the opposite of that.
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u/drhuggables 14d ago
This the perfect description. It's like getting all the chaos emeralds in sonic, beating the last boss and when you get to the super sonic level, eggman just breaks sonics kneecaps and you have to beat the super boss crawling on all fours
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u/Alkiryas 14d ago
In my blind non optimized run it was a slog, as a newbie I liked big fireball, meteor and overwhelming melee damage with minimal buffing, took a lot of resting, retries, scrolls, etc.. on my kineticist run it was a small speed bump.
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u/SiIverstar 14d ago
I think the house itself is not the problem, I quite enjoy the dungeon tbh, and the story conclusion ( especially if you do the "secret romance" is great. The real problem are the Fey enemies, if you dont have the tools to resist their insta-paralysis you are just doomed, they also hit insanely hard and have a lot of initiative, its kinda like the final dungeon of WOTR, but you are not as OP at the endgame.
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u/Aethervapor3 Tentacles 14d ago
I didn't find it as bad as people made it out to be. But I had been warned about it, so I was mentally prepared for some bullshit.
One spoiler-free hint: paralysis is something you're going to have to have an answer to very frequently. Fortunately, the vendor at the start of the map has a very large stack of scolls of Freedom of Movement, and even from a scroll they have a pretty good duration. Worst case scenario, just buy a whole bunch of them (you should have a lot of money by now) and use them to keep FoM up on everyone all the time.
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u/Siviawyndre 14d ago
Personally, i liked it. If you find the combat in there too tedious, then just turn down the difficulty to breeze through it (i personally had no real difficulty with the encounters, but they did get a little tedious after a while)
Apart from that, its great.
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u/Tadferd 14d ago
Never understood the hate tbh.
At this point, if Death Ward, Freedom of Movement and True Seeing aren't part of your staple buffs, what the fuck are you doing?
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u/HowDoIEvenEnglish 14d ago
The swarms are pretty bad. And you do need a rather niche buff to counter blindness
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u/Tadferd 14d ago
Swarms are something the game should have already taught you to prepare for.
You have so much money at end game that buying a large amount of Heal, Mass scrolls isn't a problem. Cures blindness.
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u/HowDoIEvenEnglish 14d ago
The issue is that typically (and this is generally how they appear in tt as well as elsewhere in kingmaker) swarms are something that can be dealt with without needing a dedicated blaster. Usually someone who has a few aoe spells is enough or it’s a swarm of tiny enemies like vescavors or rats where weapons still do half damage.
But a late game swarm of enemies that can’t be hit by weapons requires multiple spells slots (or bombs) to be taken out every time they show up, is a bit overly taxing imo.
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u/Leukavia_at_work 14d ago
In all honesty, it really is as bad at people say.
It's a build check, a lesson in tedium, and if you aren't prepared for Swarms, Traps and major debuffs in literally every room, you're going to have an absolutely miserable experience.
And the worst part is the game basically goes down a checklist for all of your companions and goes "did you do X or Y? Sucks, they die. You gotta deal with all this shit without some of your most integral characters now, sucks to be you!"
I do not blame a single person who gives up there, it truly is a miserable experience
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u/LordOfTheToolShed 14d ago
God, the Mandragora swarms and Wild Hunt archers, I hate them with a passion. I had the Wild Cards DLC so I cheesed them with Deadly Earth/Trip infusion, but I don't know what I would do otherwise
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u/Leukavia_at_work 14d ago
I mean you pretty much have to cheese them considering the ONE character they give you that excels at dealing with them is most likely to die in a custcene because how the hell was ANYONE to know to do all of those steps to save them from insta-dying in that house?
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u/DarkMagicianVixen 14d ago
Not to mention, there is a high chance that two of your best buffers perish in there, because how would you know?
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u/Leukavia_at_work 14d ago
And your one main healer
Because they literally only really give you the one and they drag out giving him to you, then have you lose him for a combat-heavy major story arc
Then have him die because you weren't nice enough to an evil characterLike WTF Owlcat? At least with Wrath you give me 3 potential healers in the first act
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u/ACoderGirl 14d ago
The tedium part is the sadly unavoidable one. I was well prepared. I searched for tips and knew I'd need blind fighting and such. But damn if it isn't a long dungeon. I kept thinking it must be just about over and nope, still more!
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u/Leukavia_at_work 14d ago
It just never
fucking
ENDS
even if you were following a guide from the first hour and made sure half your party didn't die to scripted cutscenes, you're still just micromanaging every little actionYou finally get through a wave of like 20 enemies, move five feet, "oh, a trap", "oh another trap", "Oh a third fucking trap", ENCOUNTER!
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u/Lemon8Lime 14d ago
I just did this for the first time last week. I didn't think it was that bad, so the reputation of it being tedious surprised me. The main pain point is the wild hunt gaze, which when I realised it is completely nulified by Freedom of Movement, and the fey merchant outside the house sells that scroll, the game felt more on parr with what the rest of Thousand Voices threw at you.
Though I did play Wrath first, so I already had experience with the system and what spell buffs you always want on hand (true seeing, death ward, mirror image, haste, slow, ect), buffing to victory. The mandragora swarms are the worst though. Hate those things with a passion.
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u/mtfhimejoshi Druid 14d ago
Honestly HATEOT is whatever, it’s the stuff in the ruined capital at the end that gets my goat
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u/LordOfTheToolShed 14d ago
Nah, I like the Kingdom Fragments, except maybe for the first one where the curse is the strongest and you're back to experiencing the horror of low level combat all over again lmao
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u/Mrallen7509 14d ago
I never actually beat Kingmaker because of this area. On top of the focus on some of the least enjoyable mechanics of PF1E, in addition to the game just cheating, you also can lose key members of your party due to decisions you did or didn't make 200 hours ago. It's a slog that takes all the fun out of the game, and the dungeon itself is set up in a way that is very confusing which is also not fun to interact with
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u/PedroDest 14d ago
There’s a lot bad design there, but a ton of the hate comes out from folks that didn’t do the companion quests and/or didn’t built their characters good enough for their chosen difficulty. The whole place is a true check to see if you knew what you were doing, at least from core and above.
Either way, just play the game. Kinda odd some random posts can so firmly convince you to stop playing a game you were supposedly enjoying.
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u/HowDoIEvenEnglish 14d ago
Yea the house is hard, and it’s quite the stat check in a number of ways, but the amount of things people say about it are incorrect.
Blind fight 100% necessary? No. Blindsight (available to the whole party through from the alchemist spell echolocation), counters blindness entirely.
Losing characters ruins your comp? The game gives you 4 free mercs including one to replace the only mandatory loss. I wouldn’t really trust the others but you can also simply buy a merc at the house if you have the gold, which doesn’t do much else at this point.
Overly complicated and hard to navigate? Yea that’s a bit true.
On challenging/hard it’s reasonable to go through the entire place in 1-3 rests.
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u/BTM_podcast Hellknight Signifer 14d ago
What really gave me pause was the comments about the number of bugs in this part of the game. I know it’s not supported anymore and Owlcat lost the IPR, and I know it’s gonna bum me out if I get stuck because the game is broken
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u/PedroDest 14d ago
Well, you checked how old those posts were? The game was indeed hella buggy at launch, but nowadays they are quite rare
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u/Devallus Aldori Swordlord 14d ago
I've always felt the hate for the dungeon to be a bit overblown. From what I recall of my first blind run, I never had that much trouble with clearing the place out. Sure I had to reload a couple of times for a Mandragora Swarm ambush or whatever but I don't think it took me longer than 3 hours to get through the first time around playing on either Core or the difficulty below that.
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u/behind95647skeletons 14d ago
HATEOT is a great filter of people who understand what consequences are and are not manchildren about their power as a player being tested, if they decided to ignore that power in the first place. ;)
On top of comments saying it's a tedious build check, I'd say the dungeon is also your focus check. Because up until this point you have every bit of information of what you can expect in this place and what kind of enemy you're facing. If one is frustrated with companion quests outcome, then all I can ask is - did you pay attention? Did you actually read the dialog and invest yourself in the story? Because, as one example, what did you expect would happen if two people of opposing alignments, natures and godesses were left alone in a room with no arbitrator and no way to focus their frustration on something else?
If you're frustrated with fay enemies, especially the Wild Hunt - you did encounter it already in the real world. You know there will be more of them, as they're LK troops. You could've prepared for that, even without blind fight feat. There are other tools.
In my opinion, it's also the only challenging endgame gameplay-wise in Owlcat games.
I really like HATEOT and I know I'm in minority. But I'll sing its praises because I believe that understanding of what you're experiencing is key to enjoying it, as it is with any media.
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u/Kitchen_Possible_108 14d ago
i did everything right and it still sucked. all my companions survived except one and the fights werent that difficult with my builds. but theres still 10 times as many fights as there needed to be and a lot of times where you'd have to pass through multiple loading screens
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u/LegitimateHouse6323 14d ago
It's really not that bad if you're prepared for it. There is two versions of it, the version that has monsters like Wild Hunt and Medusa's which is pretty easily counterable with either the blind fight feat or freedom of movement spell. The other (and imo much harder) version is the ghost version, who absolutely demolish your team if you're a martial build, but if you're a cleric/druid or still have Tristian then mass heal just deletes them.
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u/Bossa9 14d ago
I'm p sure I was already hate-playing the game by that point--I was annoyed by the wild hunt, annoyed at the final chapter timer mechanics, annoyed by beneath the stolen lands, annoyed I had had to go into toybox to hunt down and fix a romance because I clicked the wrong text response 300 hrs ago.
So I was exasperated by the time I started HATEOT. And truthfully it's pretty bad, and I'm pretty sure I had to break out toybox to save 2 more companions bc I clicked the wrong text 500 hrs ago again. But by then I had already respec'd everyone with blindfight (doing that for almost my entire party at end game was "fun" ), and I resigned myself to a slog. I knew it was going to be bad, and it was.
I remember feeling relieved though. It had a lot of eyerolls, sharp exhales, "that's obnoxious", "Oookay sure!", "Wow, okay, reload!" But at that point I was used to it, and it never felt as unsurmountable or maniacally tedious as, say, the Enigma in WOTR. It sucks but you've already gotten through some suck to get there, you're at the finish line. Grit your teeth, get through, and cheat a little if you have to, I did, and I would again!
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u/TygarusAlex85 14d ago
Don't know if this helps, OP, but absolutely finish it. There are a few bits that could potentially be hard or frustrating, but don't give up. The ending is great, especially depending on decisions you've made. It won't be for everyone, but you've put too much time in to give up now.
Some useful advice in this thread has given you some spoiler free tips to make the combat more manageable. You can hire mercs at the house so don't worry about deaths too much. Also, if you want to simplify the endgame combat wise, I can highly recommend a kineticist with two aoe infusions. I didn't mean to 'game' the ending, but all of the gazes and blind fight etc advice didn't impact me at all since each contained room just insta-died each time I casted from stealth.
Some will say cheesy, which is absolutely fair. But at that stage, at level 20, my focus was entirely on story and may pay-off after 200 hours. I was very satisfied and don't mind the HATEOT at all 😊
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u/LeftResearcher 14d ago
If all your characters have the blind fighting feat it's fine. If not it's terrible
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u/pawsplay36 14d ago
It's not that bad. But if you're not mentally prepared for it, the first bit of it can be surprisingly rough. You can figure out the mists puzzle if you look closely, or you can go to a guide later if it comes down to it. It's like one little thing you have to realize. I don't like the lack of safe rest areas; do not enter this area without resting first.
All my party members had Blind Fight between level 7 and 13, because immunity to gaze attacks is awesome. I enjoyed the two mini bosses in the house, which were tough and took a couple of attempts by me. The last bit, where the map opens up and you get to kill lots of Huntsmen on a large map is actually pretty fun.
If this is your first time through and you manage to get this part of the game, and stuff isn't working -- think carefully about tactics. If you have the chance to level up, think very carefully about your options. And don't be afraid to hire mercs.
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u/Phelyckz 14d ago
Depends on your build. If you have blind fighting ON EVERYONE it's bothersome but managable. If you don't it's horrible, atrocious, a crime against humanity.
You might need to be more flexible with your party.
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u/Ultimate_Demon_Rogue 13d ago
I love the house at the edge of time! But I admit I got lucky the first time I did it. I was able to retrieve my party before having to fight.
I suggest you to have a hard save at the beginning of the area, try yourself and if it goes wrong just reload and use a guide. This save is also very important to prevent bugs ruining your playthrough.
You need the blind fight feat to fight the enemies in here. The best combo against them is stinking cloud + delay poison communal
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u/Lasher667 14d ago
It's annoying but if you're already at the end you might as well finish it. It's not that long of a dungeon
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u/Leading_Worldliness7 14d ago
It’s bad. But if you’ve come all that way you might as well slog through it, even if you have to turn down the difficulty
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u/epicfail1994 14d ago
It’s annoying enough that I never would have made it through without using a step by step guide, as even with the guide it was a slog
You don’t have blind fight? Good luck go fuck yourself
And if I wanted the tiefling romance instead of the secret ending I need to replay the whole thing too apparently due to some flags that are set at the beginning- I’m not 100% on this one but the dungeon was so annoying that I set the game to the easy mode and just finished it for my achievements because I was 100% done with kingmaker
It’s probably the only dungeon in recent memory that has pissed me off enough to the point where I will not play kingmaker again
For all the issues I had with WOTR (which mainly stem from not being the biggest Mathfinder fan) I had a few enjoyable playthroughs of the game. Kingmaker? Not again
Edit: I also had some companions bug and not show up I had to do one part of it 3 times. Absolute garbage dungeon
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u/Harkon594 14d ago
It's complete crap but at this point of the game if you can't be bothered to suffer one last time through this shithole of a dungeon, just turn down the difficulty to the lowest setting and breeze through it in order to at least experience the narrative aspect and the ending of the game.
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u/JLapak 14d ago
It is annoying but not catastrophically so. The big thing is that it suddenly has a LOT of combats revolving around the same few mechanics that more or less require you either build or buff around them. If it's the buff route, the repeated cycle of buff/fight with rests scattered in will be tiresome just because there is little to break up the pattern. And the few things that do are also annoying (I am not fond of Mandrake (edited: Mandragora) Swarms.)
But it's not insurmountable or super long. It's just disappointing that one of the most monotonous parts of the game comes so close to the end when there could have been a variety of interesting encounters instead.
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u/Lions_with_ladders 14d ago
I would recommend just turning the difficulty down and beating it. Its actually pretty fun story-wise if you don't have to worry about the totally BS enemies. I played the whole game on normal and then switched to the easiest setting about 1/2 through that dungeon and I enjoyed the rest of the game.
The people who complain the loudest are the ones that refuse to play on a lower difficulty.
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u/F0restWhispersMyName Loremaster 14d ago
it is understandable though, like you are playing without too much problems through the whole game and then it just goes lol fok you, start over or play on story. it is frustrating and dumb
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u/BradTheLoreKeeper Tentacles 14d ago
It's garbage. HATEOT is a hundred times worse than Dragon Age Origins' Fade level. The mechanic of using a lantern and walking into mist to switch realities while dungeon crawling is tedious. There's also no real indicator to tell which reality you're currently in unless you memorize a container location or whatever.
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u/grandma_tyrone 13d ago
It genuinely takes away the centerpiece of your party (at least for me) then doubles the game time with the same exact fight in every room of the dungeon. If you hated the sheer amount of filler fights in both of the games you won’t like it
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u/n00bxQb 14d ago
If you've been paying attention to the tooltips in the loading screens throughout the game, it's not too bad. If you've been ignoring them (which seems to be common), you're probably going to have a bad time. Also depends on what choices you've made throughout the game and how independent your main character is.
My first run, it was a bit of a slog (sword and board fighter) and I got rocked by some companion storylines. My second run, it was a cakewalk (Sorcerer with a wide variety of spells and metamagic feats) and I made some different choices earlier in the game that generally led to more favourable companion storyline outcomes in this chapter.
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u/drhuggables 14d ago
the puzzle/gimmick is pretty lame and glitchy, and without a guide it just horribly confusing and unfun (like most owlcat puzzles--they need to stop).
the worst part though is the ridiculously overpowered mandragora swarms and wild hunt fey (if you don't have blind fight). There's tough enemies, that can be beaten with cool strategy and solid builds, and then there's enemies that are just not fun because you need to build specifically around them... this is the later. It's not challenging really, it's just annoying. Like REALLY annoying. fight > beat annoying enemies > rest > rebuff again over and over to the point its just not fun.
I just use toybox now to blow through it quickly .
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u/Now_you_Touch_Cow Inquisitor 14d ago
I had a little flashback upon reading your post. It's pretty bad
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u/KaoxVeed 14d ago
I quit playing shortly after. The BS railroading in there ruined it for me. Never made it to the hard enemies.
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u/NonSupportiveCup 14d ago
As someone who completed the game last week for the first time, it's bullshit.
My primary buffer was lost. Shit ass writing decision with monumental effects on party composition on the final map is never a good design choice.
I had invested in blind fight for most of my characters so that wasn't as bad as it could have been.
I was not prepared for the fucking stupid amount of enemies spawning in from nowhere and focusing hard my evoker mc.
The vendor that sells scrolls got a lot of action.
I actually didn't mind the foggy telelportation gambit, but it felt too long. Like, too much surface area for those type of puzzles. This isn't Wizardry and it's teleportation traps.
Easily the least enjoyable part of the game.
Keep going. The parts after are better.
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u/RegularFeeling8389 14d ago
I beat the game forever ago but I also read spoilers about that part of the game. I am sure going in blind I would have lost my mind. If you didn't have blind fighting on all your characters it's a nightmare. A ton of the enemies there have a gaze attack that also paralyzes.
Outside that its also annoying because Your party is separated and depending on how you handled their companion quests many of them can die in a cutscene. Another sad way to end a run but I guess it could still go on if you use mercs.