Romance has no approval stat

Measured from the client's own quest-state layer — logic/romance-chains.jsonl (192 etudes) and logic/romance-summary.json, build 20212986, patch 2.7.0x.

If you came from other CRPGs looking for an approval meter to farm, Wrath of the Righteous has a surprise: the game ships no numeric approval stat for romance at all. We dumped every romance-related structure in the client and the number simply isn't there. What exists instead is a state machine made of etudes — the game's quest-graph nodes — plus a handful of counters.

What a romance actually is in the data

Each companion romance is a chain of etudes: named graph nodes that activate, complete, and spawn children. A canonical chain looks like:

• a root <Name>Romance etude;
• Active / Fail / Finished* child states;
• 22 event etudes named *KTC* across the set (the timed "come talk to me" beats players know as the dialogue pop-ups);
• a few counter flags — RomanceCount appears in exactly 7 rows, used where the game needs "how many of this companion's events have you seen", never as a score you can raise or lose.

That's the whole machinery. There is nothing to grind: progression is event-driven, gated by story flags and dialogue choices, not by points.

The chains, by size

Etude counts per companion (attribution is name-based and recorded per row; a few etudes carry variant spellings and sit in the unattributed bucket):

| Companion | Etudes | Distinct finished states | |---|---:|---:| | Daeran | 41 | 3 | | Wenduag | 26 | 2 | | Arueshalae | 22 | 2 | | Camellia | 20 | 0 | | Sosiel | 20 | 3 | | Ulbrig | 19 | 2 | | Lann | 18 | 2 | | Galfrey | 7 | 1 |

(DLC content included: Ulbrig is DLC1; part of Daeran's chain lives under DLC6 prefixes.)

Two honest observations straight from the numbers:

• Daeran's chain is the deepest (41 etudes) and the only one with three distinct ending states — including one literally named DaeranRomance_Finished_TrueLove. Endings are separate etudes, so multiple conclusions per romance are first-class, not dialogue variants.
• Camellia's 20-etude chain shows zero Finished states in the dump — her romance resolves through different node names. The dataset records attribution per row rather than papering over it.

Why this matters for players

There is no approval threshold to miss. If you saw the dialogue event and made the choice, the etude completed — romance progress in WotR is a checklist of story beats, visible in our quest data, not a hidden score decaying because you picked a rude line. Guides claiming otherwise are describing other games.

Sources

• logic/romance-chains.jsonl — all 192 etudes with parent/child edges.
• logic/romance-summary.json — the per-companion rollup quoted above (schema romance-summary-v1; note text states the same verdict).
• Build: 20212986 (patch 2.7.0x).