Acererak's page

Sorry for this thread necromancy, but my group has just defeated Dragotha last night and this thread helped me immensely to prepare for the fight and make it memorable. Other DMs preparing for the fight might also benefit from these lessons.

The party consisted of the following charcters:

Dwini Yavanna (Cleric 10/Contemplative 9)
Bartleby (Archivist 9/Loremaster 3/Divine Oracle 3); Dwini´s henchman
Ian Buckminster (Sorcerer 6/Mage of the Arcane Order 9/Archmage 4)
Khoukie (Druid 19)
Olga Gimlik (Fighter 8/Cleric 1/Barbarian 6/Frenzied Berserker 4)

vs.

Dragotha (advanced to ancient wyrm, CR 29)
Wormdrake CR 20
Mahuudril CR 19

If you just look at the numbers in the http://www.d20srd.org/extras/d20encountercalculator/, this challenge computes as “unbeatable” for the characters. It was definitely not:

Despite the dire warnings of Balakarde´s ghost, the party decided to skip the whole tabernacle assault and instead directly teleport into the writhing sanctum to attack Dragotha himself. Balakarde´s descriptions of the place were enough for a greater teleport, and they brought cure disease potions along to counter the inevitable worm infestation on arrival.

Dragotha had an anticipate teleportation, greater, running and thus had three rounds to prepare for their arrival. He used these to call in the wormdrake and Mahuudril and cast some minor buffs.

The following rounds (it took 16 in all) were a showcase of how broken high level play in 3.5 with 9th level spells becomes:

Both sides used multiple time stops, gates (Dwini gated in a 48HD Solar and a 38HD wyrm golden dragon) wishes (one by Dragotha to get back to full hp and recover all his buffs and one by Ian to land the party back at Dragotha´s feet when he finally dimension doored away to the temple to recover and get more help from his avolakia clerics), a shapechange (Ian into a gold dragon) and a miracle (Dwini asked Fharlanghn to swing the tide of battle).

Dragotha managed to kill the Solar with one arcane striked full attack and would have killed Olga as well, were it not for her deathless frenzy (she was still up & fighting at minus threehundredsomething hp when Dwini cast her miracle), Bartleby died twice. Apart from that, there were no player casualities.

Lessons learned:

As Sc8rpi8n has stated before, key to the fight were Balakarde´s Fragments and action economy (3 actions by Dragotha and his minions vs. 7 by the party and their gated allies per round). To make the fight more memorable for you characters, here are my suggestions:

- absolutely advance Dragotha to ancient wyrm and thereby CL 20! He needs those 9th level spells to be competitive and last more than a few rounds. Also, change his spell and feat selection to your taste.

- give Dragotha more actions (more minions, contingent spells, pact spells, quickened actions etc.)

- let Dragotha full attack as much as possible and use his spells mainly to fuel arcane strike (in our fight, he wasted two rounds forcecaging opponents, while he could have probably killed them each with one full attack instead)

I sure hope this thread necromancy works (and that anyone is still playing AoW with 3.5 rules and reading this).

My players are 18th level now and have just entered the Citadel of Weeping Dragons. I already had to optimize the citadel a bit (i.e. the walls in my version of the citadel are not only magically, but also gorgon-blood treated to hinder ethereal movement) so they would not bypass most of the adventure.

The fight with Alakora the Marilith will probably come up next session and I see a potential problem there:

According to her tactics, she starts the fight polymorphed and will then cast project image, so her following spells will originate from her projected image.

Sooo .. if she is polymorphed when she casts the spell, won´t her image be in her polymorphed form as well since it is supposed to "look, sounds, and smell" like her?

He could get around that / optimize the "domain slot" requirement in two ways:

1. Pick the feat "domain spontaneity" for the healing domain. He then just needs to spend a turn attempt and can turn any spell into a healing domain spell.

2. Or, even cheaper: take the Spontaneous Domain alternate class feature (PHB II) so instead of spontaneously casting cure spells, he spontaneously casts healing domain spells.

:)