Victor Zajic
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On saturday I played a level 1 human abyssal bloodrager through the first level of Thornkeep, with interesting results.
Fighting with a rapier and wand of shield/lantern in offhand kept my AC top notch most of the dungeon, when I wasn't raging, and power attack gave me enough damage to power through some DR/5 we encountered. When I raged my damage went through the roof, and I was able to solo an ambush by 3 striges, even though I had taken off my armor to be better at climbing.
The party managed to take down the wight before it managed to hit anyone, thanks in part to 2 claw power attacks while raging and a crit by Valeros.
When we got to the shadow we had to flee to town to re-equip, but being able to use scrolls of magic missle and magic weapon was a big help.
The cold/fear room trap ended up wrecking the party, dealing massive damage and sending a third of the party frightened to run and trigger the boss fight before we were ready. This lead to a blender of different parts of the party rushing(namely me) to the first PC's aid only to get attacked twice on a surprise round/held actions, then attacked 6 more times before my init came up. Needless to say, even with AC 19 I went down before I could do anything. Followed quickly by the next PC behind me.
We eventually managed to pull out a win after a couple critical rounds of the crickets failing to hit the cleric on 3-6 attacks, while he managed to heal me to conciousness with a wand. That let me rage/2 claw one of the crickets to death over 2 rounds, while lying prone on the ground. The last dropped me again, but the cleric had managed to get more of the party concious, and I think either Valerous or the Cleric managed to finish off the cricket, who was close to death from magic missles the sorceress got off before it mauled her into negative hit points.
So the class seems pretty strong, 2 attacks a round at +5 with power attack for 1d6+7 clears most monsters at level 1, but with only 6 rounds of rage a day I had to ration it carefully. The wand of shield really helped my survivability, though it would be hard to get my hands on as level 1 outside of the 2PP rule from PFS.
I also think 3 of the encounters in the module were way over the top for a party of all level 1 characters, and that we would have TPKed if we hadn't gotten lucky at just the right time, so the class wasn't so powerful that it could carry the party through challenges it shouldn't be able to beat normally.
Probably will play the character again, now at level 2, on sunday. Will post the results when I can.
Looking over the Abyssal Bloodline, one thing really catched my attention. At level 7, you get cause fears as a bonus spell, but the spell doesn't work on anything with more than 5HD, which will be almost nothing at level 7 and beyond. It would be nice to get a bonus spell that wasn't next to useless.