Got back into Wrath after completing Baldur's gate 3 and this absolutely slaps harder than BG3. The Pathfinder system is far superior to DnD 5E and the sheer scale of the story is incredible.
The Evil Lich path is the best Evil Path I've ever played. Dark Urge is like loony toons in front of how evil I can be as a Lich which is also the best Undead/Necromancer playthrough I've ever had in any game. And you can be even MORE evil in other Mythic Paths like Swarm.
The mythic paths is the best system in a CRPG ever. The game feels wildly different depending on your Mythic Path. I've not played all of them yet but the amount itself is very good.
The combat is very good. I still have no idea how it ultimately works and while I like the feeling of uncertainty and freshness, many people might not like it. It's definitely far more complicated than 5E. The sheer amounts of Classes, Subclasses and abilities is also unparalleled. The easy switch between Turn based and realtime combat is pretty good when fighting hordes of trash mobs. I prefer Turn based myself but Realtime is very useful time to time.
You can definitely make mistakes with character creation and it's also more 'difficult' to respec characters compared to BG3 since they can only be respecced from the level they met you at.
The story is amazing. Imo it's better than the story of Baldur's gate 3. The characters are not as developed as Origin Characters in BG3 however which is somewhat of a downside. Also there is no full VA so reading is required and the writing is pretty good imo so it won't bore you.
The game definitely has pacing problems at multiple points through out the story. Enemy padding also gets really really bad by the end.
If you liked Baldur's gate 3 or any other CRPG, play this because it's superior.
Wrath does not put you into insanely hard encounters though and you can generally get around everything with some planning. Kingmaker on the other hand does not give a fuck about you. My game got ruined during the encounter with the Tree Girl where my Wizard had to take on a ton of high level enemies alone and this was so early game that my Caster absolutely sucked and there was no way I could win this encounter with my build.
Yeah, Wrath actually does a pretty good job ratcheting up the difficulty and sense of desperation gradually over the first bit of the game, throwing you against gradually header and harder encounters until just before it seems like it's about to become impossible, and then your mythic power comes online and you get somewhere between a significant and absolutely bonkers power spike. The encounter near the wardstones where you're up against like a bunch of CR 18s at level 6 and then go sparkly and just rip them apart is very satisfying.
Kingmaker has some crazy difficulty spikes that it just does not telegraph at all (that solo encounter with Nyrissa that I think you're talking about is a notable one), and unless you're pretty comfortable with Pathfinder or at least D&D 3.5 it's very easy to build a really bad character. Mythic powers in Wrath make it a lot more forgiving even though the encounters are technically a lot "harder" in terms of CR.
The power trip as a Lich is insane. I've never felt that powerful as a caster in any game except Morrowind.
Either of the spellbook merging options are just crazy powerful. Caster lich and caster angel turn you into a WMD basically instantly. Really fun.
Lich is better imo because of Repurpose and the health leeching spells.
Lmao I remember how rough that early game was in Kingmaker. I wound up restarting several times with different builds.
That was my first exposure to Pathfinder and as someone who spent entirely too much time theorycrafting character builds in D&D 3.5e it was both a nostalgia trip and a breath of fresh air compared to D&D 5e. Never got into wrath though, every time I picked it up I closed it without ever getting to any gameplay because the thought of playing even an improved variation of D&D just made all the will to engage with it drain away.
Levels 1-5 in 3.5 and PF1 campaigns just suck. You can't do anything fun, and it's just everyone auto-attacking until someone gets lucky. Level 17+ is rocket tag, but the middle there is
compared to how dumbed down 5E feels.