Here's our group;
10th level half-elf ranger (PC)
10th level elf rogue/shadow dancer (PC)
9th level gnome binder (PC)
9th level dragon-borne soul-knife (PC)
10th level awakened wolf/wild sorceror (PC)
Alek Tercival (NPC)
Luther (Chisel member - NPC armed with Alakast)
The group was stonewalled by Nabthatoron, and managed to do all of 10 points of damage to him. Alek and Luther were killed, and Nabthatoron left them to their fate in the middle of the desert wasteland, and teleported out. He didn't rush out either, as I tried to afford them the opportunity to turn it into an RP encounter instead of melee, but ultimately they couldn't manage to do much except get frustrated.
Anyone else fare better than my group?
Our group was somewhat standard fare: 1 fighter, 1 rogue, 1 warmage, 1 cleric, all 10th level.
On round 1 reverse Gravity got most of us. On round 2 power word stun removed the warmage for the battle. After that, one full round attack drops Alek, and on round 4 he decapitates him and teleports off with the head.
I don't think he got hurt for more than a handful of damage from the warmage before the stun, or the cleric hovering in the air with his searing lights.
I got the impression that he wasn't meant to be fought straight up at that point in the game.
Fortunately, we got to have a more meaningful fight later when we were level 12. He was still very tough for us (he had some babau buddies with him that time) but we managed to triumph and feel pretty good about it.
I don't believe the actual adventure path calls for a second fight with him per se, but if your PC's are itching for revenge for Alek, you should consider giving them a rematch at a later level (like I assume our DM did).
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My group did surprisingly well against Nabthatoron - here was the layout at that point, along with Alek:
Atraiyu - Human Paladin 9
Desmond - Half-Orc Cleric 9
Ferret - Halfling Warlock 9
Cordak - Dwarf Wizard 9
Rand - Elf Ranger 6 / Order of the Bow Initiate 3
Nabthatoron spent the first round using chaos hammer, which was largely ineffective, then took two rounds killing Alek. This allowed the party to begin blasting away at him from afar, without much effect. Power word stun took Desmond out of the fight completely, but around that time Atraiyu got to Nabby and took a huge chunk out of him with a divine might-boosted smite using Alakast. Nabthatoron caught everyone but Rand in a reverse gravity field, but Ferret managed to hit him with an eldritch blast that got through his SR. When Cordak managed to cast fly on Atraiyu, Nabthatoron decided that his goal had been accomplished and got out of there. The group considered it a loss, but they didn't know how close they actually came to victory (he was below 40 hp when he left).
Nabthatoron will make a second appearance at the end of the Siege of Redgorge. Hopefully the party will be weakened from the battle, and Nabthatoron will have some vrock and babau minions to wear the group down this time, along with a healer to keep him on his feet.
My party skipped it. All of it.
Allow me to explain. Around the beginning of Vaprak's Voice the Redgorge Four became the Redgorge Five. I allowed the player the option of taking over the role of an NPC if he wanted instead of making a new character. The list I gave him was extensive and he chose, of all characters, Kaurophon. I allowed him to make his own history for the character and wove in his seeking of the Smoking Eye and Occipitus. he was plunging into the Spellweaver ruins in hopes of finding Sir Alek, whom he had befriended previously in Redgorge and hopes of finding a way to get to the Abyss. We played the siege of Redgorge just yesterday and the party was gestalt as follows:
Zilanya - female drow LE sorcerer/rogue 10
Brynna - female elf NG cleric/paladin 10
Grunt - male ogre NE barbarian/ranger 10
Ragnarok - male dwarf NG barbarian/monk 10
Kaurophon - male half-fiend CN wizard/rogue/fighter 10
I wrote a special ending into Legacy of the Demonskar so I could segue into the siege as a part of Test of the Smoking Eye. The party finds themselves in the desert, disappointed it wasn't Occipitus, and spoke for a time with Sir Alek. He gave the party the Lesser Amulet of the Planes as Nabtahtoron teleported in outside the vault with a demon horde at his back. Sir Alek sacrificed himself to give the party time to use the amulet to escape.
The party chose to return to Redgorge. They learned of the army approaching and eventually decided that a battle was a lost cause. They planned and plotted and did everything they could to arrange a peace. Lord Terseron gave them the day to hand over the Chisel and they were all happy that some negotiating with him worked. By day's end they had turned over the members of the Chisel, all of them willingly going into custody, and then Kaurophon, invisible inside the enemy camp, saw the Blue Duke kill the Lord and take control of the army to prevent further negotiation.
Meanwhile a mass evacuation was underway in Redgorge. The townsfolk fled and before it even began, the battle was over. In the first day. The party teleported the Chisel members to safety and hid inside a rope trick to prepare to go to Occipitus. Grunt spent day two out in the jungle hunting but found Nabtahatoron and his army marching toward Redgorge. Feeling outgunned and overwhelmed the party finished buffing and headed off to the Abyss.
Back in Redgorge all of the big baddies are still alive. It'll be interesting to see what they come back to once they get the Smoking Eye.
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My party just had their second confrontation with Nabthatoron, at the end of the Siege of Redgorge. They were 11th level and had the help of Shensen Tesseril and Annah Taskerhill, but they took much more of a beating and even suffered a few casualties this time around. The difference was that this time Nabthatoron had someone giving him some healing, and the wizard and the paladin were very low on resources.
Nab started off by removing the warlock, the group's primary damage-dealer, from the fight using power word stun. The party eventually took him down, but not before he killed the paladin and Shensen. We almost lost the party ranger as well, thanks to a sneak attack by Todd Vanderboren, but the ranger's half-brother (an additional member of the Stormblades that I included) saved him by teleporting away with Todd.
Nab failed a save (which he'd only fail on a 1, as I recall) on round 1 and was stunned long enough for the six PCs to pound him.
This was one of those times where an anticlimatic outcome was perfectly okay, though--the PCs were convinced they would lose, and the fight was plenty tense even with Nab not able to act. Both the GM and I thought that it was a likely TPK otherwise. Occipitus in general was way too hard for those PCs. (Wizard, cleric, fighter, rogue, paladin, fighter/rogue/dervish. I don't remember their levels anymore, but about what the module expected. But they were not equipped for diverse DR and heavy SR, and by the time they realized that this was a lethal problem, they were trapped on Occipitus and it was too late.)
I loved the concepts in _Shackled City_ but we had continual and finally game-killing issues with difficulty level.