In line with that, I have considered giving my PCs more HPs to deal with that, but it seems counter intuitive. As a giant last night connected with a x4 crit and obliterated a PC.
There is also an expectation with smaller encounters. If PCs use some mythic points, spells or whatever then that combat was a success even if they do steamroll it.
Unless you 'cheat' with DR and actually make it invincible then DR is not that big of a factor as paladins and champions can get past it.
... drawing from my remaining notes...Lots of nice suggestions here, like the change to Mythic Saving Throws (which, as is, has been a real kill-joy in my sessions) and Mythic Hexes. And I like several of the "New Ability" suggestions too.
Did you (or your DM) have any thoughts about what to do with things like Mythic Rapid Shot, Mythic Multishot and Mythic Improved Critical? As a GM, these have been a real headache...
(Also curious on your take, if any, on things like Fleet Charge, Precision and Flexible Counterspell...)
Fleet charge I'd make one or more of the following changes to (comments are in italics):
1. Movement is stopped if you take damage. This would prevent running around big guys to smash squishies on the other side and reintroduce a tactical aspect to movement. It would also allow more extreme forms of difficult terrain while allowing them to bypass more mundane versions.
2. Fleet charge only functions if you move in a straight line. This puts it more in line with pounce.
3. Fleet charge cannot be used in back to back rounds. Again, more tactical and limited as you can no longer blitz opponents back to back.
My experience is that heavily buffed parties tend to hit on all but their last attack anyway, so precision isn't that much of a problem in my experience. If it is a problem in your own though you could consider it only applying to the next attack down though (e.g. attack line becomes 20/20/10/5 after taking it one time, 20/20/15/5 after the second, ect). You could also look at removing it entirely.
I liked the suggestion that flexible counterspell does not work vs. mythic spells.
I would remove mythic rapid and manyshot, as I feel they scale damage too quickly given that archery is already a dominate DPS force. Adding yet more attacks into a line that can easily include six or seven or even eight seems unnecessary. Alternatively, direct that additional attacks have to be directed at multiple targets.
Mythic improved critical should maximize weapon dice, which in most circumstances will be less problematic than an extra multiplier on what can easily be 40 or 50 base points of damage.
In line with that, I have considered giving my PCs more HPs to deal with that, but it seems counter intuitive. As a giant last night connected with a x4 crit and obliterated a PC.
There is also an expectation with smaller encounters. If PCs use some mythic points, spells or whatever then that combat was a success even if they do steamroll it.
Unless you 'cheat' with DR and actually make it invincible then DR is not that big of a factor as paladins and champions can get past it.
Ignoring DR is a huge problem in the optimization venue, and not simply because of mythic. As a whole there was a Paizo trend towards really toning down the effects of DR and making it easier to bypass which I was not terribly fond of. While I appreciate the idea of de-emphasizing having to carry around twelve different swords at higher levels the actual result has been to make many enemies sitting ducks.
The easiest solution I think, on the quick and dirty, is to revert to the old rules on epic DR (+6 enchantment vs. +6 total).
Not really, given my argument is contingent on the idea that experienced or highly optimizing players will regularly stomp their way through APs which are designed for new players.
That he did so in this AP really says almost nothing, given that he is apparently a highly experienced player who usually plays custom campaigns and adventures, except that a highly experienced player can stomp their way through an AP (which we already knew).
Well, then we are getting into the territory if AP design is done how it should be. But unless I misremember his statement, JJ said that the writers are not shooting for a "beginner" baseline, but rather for "moderately experienced" gamers. And, as I said quite a few times already, at high levels the encounters don't hold up to that.
For the three initial modules (so in a normal AP, levels 1-9) a lot of groups seem to struggle with AP's, with difficult encounters killing characters and even causing TPK's. You don't hear that from the second leg of AP's (levels 10-18) very often and more often you hear the contrary. There is a good question why that happens. And the answer should be beyond "because few groups play AP's all through".
They do represent an actual challenge, just not to your players. As I noted earlier, designers are faced with a conundrum in design because the player base is exceedingly fractured in terms of not only experience and tactical skill, but also optimization and focus in character building (RP vs. Tactical).
They cannot produce a single product that presents a challenge to novice or unoptimized parties while also doing so for highly optimized parties - not without printing every encounter twice. Given that the assumption is that more optimized parties likely have more experienced GMs and can thus adjust to meet their party's needs, the choice in where to set the bar (high or low) is very easy.
I for one agree with the choice, because it is much easier to scale up encounters or monsters than it is to scale them down.
Even with that assumption it very often feels like monsters are wielding nerfbats against real weapons. Aside from the odious single opponent fight, many encounters between important bosses (what I like to call "trash mobs", because I've been playing WoW since day one ^^) consist of multiple "party CR-2" (or -3), which very often are just a tedious waste of time. They barely can inflict a few points of damage and, if players are even a bit smart, cost almost no resources.
And those encounters are really just there to fill rooms, because otherwise it'd look strange if the giant cathedral is almost empty aside from a few boss monsters. But unlike MMO trash, playing through even those "monsters have no chance in hell of winning" encounters takes at least an hour if you set up the tactical map.
So, what I guess I am saying again is that the designers wield the nerfbat way too much when writing their high-level encounters. And that, as far as I can see, they do very often not present that actual challenge.
Of course you are able to judge encounter design for your players better than designers. By the same token my regular GMs are much better able to judge the strength of our parties than designers - which is why one has to rebuild pretty much every single encounter or challenge regardless of which adventure he is running for us and another will likely have to do so before long as well. It goes with the territory. If you want to run things out of the book or with marginal adjustments then you and your parties need to collectively agree to demilitarize as it were on the optimization front.
And I disagree here. AP's should be written for at least moderately competent players which know how the rules work. I am not saying "they should be written for powergaming twinks", either, but the goal, as stated by JJ, is to target "moderately experienced" players. I disagree with him what "moderate experience" means, but at the very least he says that Paizo does not write the AP's for complete beginners.
And, as I pointed out above, the lower level modules corroborate that. They very often include pretty damn harsh encounters. It's only at the high levels that the challenge falls by the wayside and as far as I can see, that doesn't come because the writers suddenly lose their competence as developers, but because the baseline they write against is not adjusted correctly to the actual power adventuring parties have at that level of play.
Right, you see weak low level characters and assume they are building towards a specific mechanical goal that has simply yet to be actualized. The thing is, that isn't the case. This is not a circumstance in which their builds have simply yet to 'come online' as it were. This is how they build across the board, and how many casual or novice players build.
I know it's hard to believe, but many people don't plan their builds out five, ten, or fifteen levels in advance. Some build as they go. The Bard / Fighter is not an exception.
Again, I'd like to see those characters at level 14 ( and 16 and 18) with their full level-appropiate equipment. Then we'd have a comparison point how the developers compare to what I consider normal high-level groups.
I guess for this AP specifically we would have to see how their high-level mythic characters look like, but I got a sneaking suspicion that nobody in the Paizo office has so far played WotR at high levels. ^^
Which is a fine opinion to hold, but one I simply don't agree with - at least with regard to the root of the problem. As I said further up in the thread, different rational people can draw different conclusions on the same subject when the subject is inherently subjective and their experiences vary widely.
My opinion is that the problems start with character optimization and are exasperated by mythic which has a greater influence on optimized characters than it does on nominal characters in much the same way that high levels exasperate problems more than low level.
I suspect there are groups that have run through with few problems, and I suspect that in the absence of optimization many issues with combat difficulty start to fall away.
This isn't to say that the problems you faced aren't real or meaningful, but it is to say that they are not universal, and that the solutions that work for you may not work for others (or may be distasteful to others). I, for one, would rather rebuild every encounter than remove mythic, or play with 1d4 uses of mythic per day, or adopt many of the changes you have put forth. I suspect many others would feel the same way.
And to take the discussion back to mythic gameplay, here is our fundamental disconnect in regards to that ruleset. I think mythic rules allow even non-optimized characters to multiply their power far above to what the designers suspected. I did that as soon as I saw the monster section of the Mythic Adventures book. The problem here is that all the good options are in two section (three for spellcasters) of the same book and they are really not very hard to miss. To boot, in the case of mythic feats they are not really "new" options, but rather upgrades to the staple feats people already always take (and, yes, I think every strength based melee guy takes Power Attack sooner or later and archers take the archery feats).
You don't need to be a heavy or even slight optimizer to notice that half the mythic abilities are really, really good and the other half really does not do much in comparison. So while I am far away from saying that every mythic character will look the same, I see very few of them which won't at least choose the same base set of abilities, because they are obvious and easy to find. Mythic Power Attack, Fleet Warrior, Mythic Rapid Shot/Manyshot, Wild Arcana and so on and so on.
And as an addendum: According to JJ, those "moderately experienced" players are supposed to mainly use the CRB. But this AP already has them using another hardcover with very powerful rules (one which, btw, refers back a lot to the other additional rules hardcovers, especially in the feat and spell section), so maybe the encounters should have taken that discrepancy into account.
BTW, it's "and they are really very hard to miss", not "not very hard to miss" in the third paragraph from the bottom. Sorry, errors like this one (and more grammatical stuff) happen when you are writing large tracts of text on the fly.
Again, I agree with parts, which I don't know if other APs share.
Many of the NPCs are honestly built poorly. I know that not every feat and ability needs to have combat purpose, and I don't have issues with one or two throw away or RP purpose feats. But too many have had the nerf bat taken to them.
Why does a high level wizard have 4-5 combat feats? Why does a champion use a terrible weapon, one that hinders him as his main attack. Why do Stanton Vahne, Joran and the sorcerer have craft feats with no means of using them? Constantly I've rolled my eyes at subpar selection while most of us say that this is too easy.
Maybe PCs are supposed to choose their feats via random rolls or dartboard.
I understand the purpose behind them but two of three don't possess any of the requisite skills needed to use the forge. I know its an easy fix, but it has bothered me ever since Sword of Valor.
Its also humorous that Stanton's notes would help you redeem the forge when he should have absolutely no idea how to use it despite having forged Soulshear...somehow. Apparently through blind luck.
He retrained that Feat after the fact.