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As we delve into the second half of the AP I can't help but notice the giant enemies theme has a horrid downside: the melee characters are taking a severe beating. Many of these CR 8-10 creatures have to-hits of +17 through +20. The iconic fighter in this portion of the AP has an AC in the low 20s. Is it really the intention of the designers that the melee types are hit roughly 80% of the time? It's difficult to tell from the iconics, but does the AP assume a strong buff line from the casters?
Im really looking forward to this so far we have very few melee characters of the 6 known character the rogue/fighter and the monk will be our 2 combat experts the rest will be casters
I admit that I'm generous with character power (they got 32 point buy, and alpha rules, and the fighter in question also got to use BOXM 2), but that fighter was nearly untouchable. Mithral Full Plate with armour training, Two-Weapon Defense, a decent Dex and other protective gear amount to a great AC.
Players definitely need to adjust their tactics. When my group realized that there was more to combating giants than charging in and trying to do your biggest hit every round with no thought toward teamwork, their survivability went up a ton. Additionally when the wizard realized he had spells other than fireball, and the cleric actually put some thought into her spells for the day (and read the Spell Compendium, can't reccomend it enough!), things got even easier.
That's because, as many have noted, at higher levels melee characters are irrelevant, as are evokers. Wizards and clerics using buffs, battlefield control spells, and save-or-die/be disabled spells decide all combats. The fighter might as well stay at home -- if he tries to attack, he's really just getting in the others' way.
That's because, as many have noted, at higher levels melee characters are irrelevant, as are evokers. Wizards and clerics using buffs, battlefield control spells, and save-or-die/be disabled spells decide all combats. The fighter might as well stay at home -- if he tries to attack, he's really just getting in the others' way.
Whom do they buff when the fighter stays home? Each other?
I agree that high-level fighters are pretty sad, but let's not go too far. SOMEONE in the party has to be doing SOME damage in order to beat up the enemy (whether it's a fighter, a guy casting fireballs, or a summoned monster, it doesn't matter).
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I hope to blame dice rolls...i've had waaaaaaay to many PC deaths in my campaign, and I can safely say part of it is dice rolls, and part of it is the lack of tactics...I still have the individuals mentality going on with my group.
Heck we've been running the AP for a while now and are just now about to finish Fort Rannick...still got giants to go and at the Graul Farmstead, two PC's died, at the Fort one has died already...sadly those deaths happened in the same game day and were the same Player...I felt bad...but he was a good sport about it.
Then with finishing up Fort Rannick, as the DM I could've had a TPK. The Monk was the only one able to get to the sorceress (nope they haven't met the Lamia yet) and I put her to sleep. Finished off the rest of the party minus one under a confusion spell...if I was a player I would've coup de graced the monk, but I don't like to be that ruthless as a DM.
But more to the point the fatality has been high and it's been dice rolls...seems when I roll good the players roll bad. And that Ogre damage is pretty nasty, 3d6+13!!
As we delve into the second half of the AP I can't help but notice the giant enemies theme has a horrid downside: the melee characters are taking a severe beating. Many of these CR 8-10 creatures have to-hits of +17 through +20. The iconic fighter in this portion of the AP has an AC in the low 20s. Is it really the intention of the designers that the melee types are hit roughly 80% of the time? It's difficult to tell from the iconics, but does the AP assume a strong buff line from the casters?
The primary melee fighter in my group [Fighter5/Pious Templar5] realized around Fort Rannick that there would be Giants ahead of him and buffed his AC way up. The standard Stone Giant has very little chance of hitting him. Add in his giant-bane sword, and he's doing all the chewing and spitting. The party's Cleric, Druid and Wizard all usually open with a buff on the fighter, and then set him loose.
I still have the individuals mentality going on with my group.
That's not gonna do. If they can't work as a team, they're all fired. Security! Get that party out of the dungeon, and do it as a team! If you can't work as a team, you're fired. Henchman! Go find another security team who can work as a team. They may have to escort the old security team out of the dungeon!
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So far, we're through about 1/3 of Sins of The Saviors.
Our party consists of:
Whispergnome Rogue
Human Bard
Maenad Bard Cohort
Human Shapeshifter Druid (primary melee)
Human Wizard Cohort
Dwarf Ardent/Cleric
Xeph Druid w/ Dire Wolf companion (wolf=primary melee)
The Cleric, Xeph, and Wolf have all been killed, as has the Maenad (see the RotRL Obits page for details)
The Shapeshifter is nearly untouchable when he's buffed up -AC in the low 40's when fully prepared, the Wolf is very tough -AC 35 when buffed, and 123 HP, and the rest of the party tends to stay back and either snipe, hide, or deliver blasty death.
With the Bards keeping up their musics and tossing out spells, the 2 druids buffing themselves (and the wolf) and the Xeph and Dwarf healing as needed, the party is doing really well now.
From the lower levels, we had a paladin of freedom who was murderated during the assault on Fort Rannick (Human Bane Ogrehook + Power Attack) but the rest of the party is as we started (save cohort additions)
After the Fort, we were really unable to simply alpha-strike enemies, dropping them before they could retaliate, and even fought Mokmorian twice before he offered us jobs.
With the healing we can put out (Augment Healing and Healing Hymn means a CLW can heal 1d8+7+15) and all the buff and prep stuff we can do, unless the enemies can kill in 1 shot or otherwise remove a PC from the fight (will saves on the wolf are kiler, as are will&fort saves on the rogue), ending the fight is not too difficult.
As stated above, the only reason this whole thing works is that we work together. Bard, Druid, Cleric buffs go to the whole party almost all the time, keeping the melee-characters up and running, the weaker PCs from instant-death, and everyone moving around quickly.
-t
As we delve into the second half of the AP I can't help but notice the giant enemies theme has a horrid downside: the melee characters are taking a severe beating. Many of these CR 8-10 creatures have to-hits of +17 through +20. The iconic fighter in this portion of the AP has an AC in the low 20s. Is it really the intention of the designers that the melee types are hit roughly 80% of the time? It's difficult to tell from the iconics, but does the AP assume a strong buff line from the casters?
Low 20's for AC on the tank seems awfully low for fighters of around 10th level.
My fighter players have low to mid 30's by this level. The baddies need luck to hit with a +17.
Low 20's for AC on the tank seems awfully low for fighters of around 10th level.
My fighter players have low to mid 30's by this level. The baddies need luck to hit with a +17.
How is his ac that high?
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hmm....fighter with gear only?
+3 Full Plate
+3 Heavy Shield
+2 Ring of Prot
+1 Amulet Nat Armor
12 Dex
Lessee
Thats 11 (armor) + 5 (shield) + 2 (deflect) + 1 (natural arm) + 1 (dex) or AC 30 with no magical buffs from the cleric/druid/bard/wizard.
Throw in
Haste +1 AC
Recitation +2 or +3 AC
Barkskin +3 or + 4 AC (net bonus +2-3)
Combat Expertise, Fighting Defensively, or more money spent on AC (Ioun Stone, +2 or better NA, +3 or better Ring) or potions could bump that even higher.
So, AC 35 means +17 to hit needs an 18+ to hit, and forget about power attack.
Using Pathfinder rules makes that even higher when you add in Armor Training.
And that's just the fighter. Druids get all the same bonuses, with slightly less base armor bonus but generally higher NA, Dex, and easier access to buffs. Clerics get all the same, but have Magic Vestment and other buffs.
High-ish AC is not too hard to come by, and with some good allocation of GP, you can make yourself very hard to hit with anything but seriously dedicated melee-ists. The real hard part is being able to survive the high-DC saves and no-save spells.
-t
PF fighters also get armour training for another couple of points.
Valeros has: +2 mithral breastplate, +1 frost longsword, +1 short sword, +1 composite longbow (+4 Str) with 20 arrows, silver dagger, amulet of natural armor +1, belt of giant strength +4, gloves of Dexterity +2, ring of protection +1, cloak of resistance +1
He's a TWF which is why his AC is so low: no magic shield. That's three points of AC right there. He seems to be preferring 10 extra feet of speed over survival, which means that he invests money and ability points into his Dex stat, which explains the rest of the disparity.
Valeros has: +2 mithral breastplate, +1 frost longsword, +1 short sword, +1 composite longbow (+4 Str) with 20 arrows, silver dagger, amulet of natural armor +1, belt of giant strength +4, gloves of Dexterity +2, ring of protection +1, cloak of resistance +1
He's a TWF which is why his AC is so low: no magic shield. That's three points of AC right there. He seems to be preferring 10 extra feet of speed over survival, which means that he invests money and ability points into his Dex stat, which explains the rest of the disparity.
Yes, the fighter in our group usually has a AC or 35-37 during combat and my Druids animal companion wolf commonly has a 37 AC. They stay up front and take the hits until our offensive spells do the trick. It helps that the fighter has a Giant Bane weapon and with haste and attack buffs does 50-100 points of damage per round.
I have not run it yet just alot of people said there was not enough Items or Gold so i wasnt sure how he got all the magic items needed by 10th level
hmm....fighter with gear only?
+3 Full Plate
+3 Heavy Shield
+2 Ring of Prot
+1 Amulet Nat Armor
12 DexLessee
Thats 11 (armor) + 5 (shield) + 2 (deflect) + 1 (natural arm) + 1 (dex) or AC 30 with no magical buffs from the cleric/druid/bard/wizard.
Throw in
This is close to what my tanks do. Usually their dex is 14 with Mithral Full Plate. Their is an Ioun stone that grants a bonus to AC at a pretty reasonable price. An amulet of natural armour +2 is not that pricey for this level (though the shield might only be +2 as well). There are also feats that will add to AC.
The real difficulty is that one gets to extremes. The fighter that maxes out everything in AC is only challenged by spell lobers and such. If the the monsters don't have at least +17 to +20 to hit then the game starts to become dull as one deals with round after round of the monsters missing. On the other hand its not that much of a stretch to envision a fighter with only 23 or 24 AC in which case the same monsters just can't miss.
In my experience however pumping up the AC is always the correct answer. The monsters will miss more often even if they can still hit sometimes and they can no longer do really nasty things like two handed power attacks because they will never manage to hit with such attacks.
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I have not run it yet just alot of people said there was not enough Items or Gold so i wasnt sure how he got all the magic items needed by 10th level
not sure where the "low treasure" claims are coming from.
our DM has been running some of his own stuff in between adventures, but mostly to replace random encounters on overland travel or to fill in gaps where we missed / skipped things.
If you do plan on running this soon, I would recommend just tallying up the readily available treasure hauls (like npc gear or obvious loot piles) and checking against the Wealth By Level chart. I would bet if the party gets EVERYTHING (or comes back with crowbars and adamantine hacksaws to pull everything else up) they will be a bit higher than expected.
Expect to be able to drain extra resources with resurrection/restoration/heals later on, as there are plenty of ability-draining and 1-shot-killing potential in adventures 3-4-5
wish I could be more specific on this, but I am a player this time 'round, not the DM.
-t
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As far as the treasure goes...well it's all there, maybe not in the form some would think, but there surely is money there. That's the other thing my group does...when they took out the Skinsaw Cult, no one looted any of the bodies! Maybe i'm just used to that old school Dungeon Crawl, but there is all kinds of money in the adventure path. I think the worst one is Hook Mountain Massacre, mainly just because the money is there, but there is no where to spend it.
Actually RotRL, is kind to melees. Really kind. Most of the enemies are giants. Giants are not very tough melee combatants. They have the same weaknesses as PCs - full attacks, weakened by iterative attack penalties and inability to move more than 5' and full attack in the same round. Their reach advantage is small enough to be trivially negated by any smart party and their stats aren't generally very big for their CR. Also, you very rarely fight opponents that actually make use of mobility and ranged attacks in RotRL - those NPCs, who technically can do so, usually are confined to areas that restrict such tacticts.
My comments (our group played all the way through RotR)...
The ogre/giant sections are definitely a tactical exercise for melee characters. When meleers made the mistake of letting multiple giants get full attacks on them, they went night night. I was playing the caster.
1. I used battlefield control (web, solid fog, etc) to slow down/isolate opponents.
2. The meleers would stick and move, not just stay there to take a full attack.
3. Our meleers got reach (varisian bladed scarf, enlarge, etc.) so as to not be continually pulling AoEs and to make maneuvering easier.
4. I was a conjurer. For some reason all the monsters were smart enough not to attack my summons, but I used them to grapple/assist/hinder to aid the meleers.
5. I totally used a bunch of save-or-loses (ray of stupidity on cave bears, glitterdust/confusion on giants).
However, speaking as the caster it's not like the meleers were useless. My tricks gave them advantages, but they're the ones that dealt the damage to actually kill things. (Any high level 3.5e fighter does more damage in a combat than any wizard - it's why "everyone knows" playing an evoker is a TRAP! See the Wizards CharOp boards for more.) Sure, I could affect 2-4 giants at once, and sometimes disable them via blindness, fear, etc, but certainly not to coup de grace level (or to where I felt like getting within 30' of them!). The meleers killed things; my job was to make it much easier, tactically, to kill them.
In my opinion, RotR does a great job of encouraging, even mandating, smart tactics and teamwork. If you think meleeing means just running up and whacking and not having to think about it - yes it will suck to be a meleer in RotR. Arcane and divine caster support is a necessity, as is devising individual and group movement/positioning tactics.
I'll kick their ass!
As far as the treasure goes...well it's all there, maybe not in the form some would think, but there surely is money there. That's the other thing my group does...when they took out the Skinsaw Cult, no one looted any of the bodies! Maybe i'm just used to that old school Dungeon Crawl, but there is all kinds of money in the adventure path. I think the worst one is Hook Mountain Massacre, mainly just because the money is there, but there is no where to spend it.
I think the problems with loot in RotR are:
1. Lots of Small or Large items. If you play D&D where you can just magically change everything in for cash, that's not a problem, but in a more realistic campaign, no one in Sandpoint is up for buying Large ogre hooks, for example. Or Small dogslicers. We had to go to Magnimar to sell stuff like that, and even then it was to unsavory chaps where we worried about the stuff eventually being used against us (who the hell with a good alignment is gonna want those, esp. in bulk?).
2. Lack of accessibility to places to sell. Sandpoint has a small gp limit. During at least half of the installments, there was nowhere to sell off (Hook Mountain, Runeforge, Xin-Shalast)...
3. A bit more roleplay/realism, which the APs bring, does limit your looting options a little more. "These guys were cultists, we had to kill them!" has some plausibility to the Magnimar guard. "These guys were cultists, so we had to kill them, loot their bodies, and carry of a cartload of office furniture to sell!" verges on the retarded.
4. Places you feel like you should spend money on things other than plusses - like Fort Rannek. We blew thousands of gold on it and our men.
So DMs - you do need to think about your approach. If you use a semi-realistic approach, you will have a lower than usual treasure trove for your players. Or, you can wave your magic 'cash it in' wand. We did the former but it came out OK. We were undergeared for some time, and were always looking for ways to cash in and make money. I took crafting feats to try to make our cash go farther, and we scoured the MIC for new spiffy (inexpensive) items.
But - IMO, D&D has become too much about the gear loadout anyway. We enjoyed the challenge.
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With a TWF gnome ranger with favored enemy (giants +6), Weapon Swap and a giantbane sword, the only thing that sucked about his melee effectiveness was the rigamarole of rolling through the combats to the inevitable result.
We dropped the campaign before he went into gnome giantslayer and it just became ridiculous.
With a TWF gnome ranger with favored enemy (giants +6), Weapon Swap and a giantbane sword, the only thing that sucked about his melee effectiveness was the rigamarole of rolling through the combats to the inevitable result.
We dropped the campaign before he went into gnome giantslayer and it just became ridiculous.
It might sound silly, but that is one of the coolest things I've read in a while :)
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With a TWF gnome ranger with favored enemy (giants +6), Weapon Swap and a giantbane sword, the only thing that sucked about his melee effectiveness was the rigamarole of rolling through the combats to the inevitable result.
We dropped the campaign before he went into gnome giantslayer and it just became ridiculous.
Yup, this sounds pretty neat!
In our campaign we have a dwarf ranger with Crossbow Mastery, FE giant +4 and the Big Game Hunter feat. He dishes out the damage from 80 feet away. No giant bane yet, though...
Ryn, who like oddly effective builds
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It might sound silly, but that is one of the coolest things I've read in a while :)With a TWF gnome ranger with favored enemy (giants +6), Weapon Swap and a giantbane sword, the only thing that sucked about his melee effectiveness was the rigamarole of rolling through the combats to the inevitable result.
We dropped the campaign before he went into gnome giantslayer and it just became ridiculous.
His attack sequence at 10th level against giants was +22/+17/+22/+17 (1d4+2d6+13 or 1d4+2d6+11). He was easily dropping two stone giants in three rounds solo, typically while taking about one hit (with an AC in the low 30s, thanks to gnome giant-dodge). The casters might well have been able to handle it faster, but frankly, there wasn't much need.
As you might imagine, of course, he was hugely less effective against non-giant targets. But for two entire adventures - Hook Mountain and Fortress - he was pretty much a pint-size nuke.