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Don't read this if you haven't played this scenario, lots of spoilers here and this is a really good scenario, one that I most definitely recommend for PFS players.
Okay, our lodge ran two tables of this yesterday as part of our every two weeks Grand Lodge. Another really experienced GM ran the lower tier table and I was the GM at the upper-tier table, but with only four players (three clerics and a highly optimized barbarian).
The party had a small bit of trouble handling the first fight, the one with the aether elementals. The four player adjustment was to remove the advanced template from the two greater elementals. Fairly straight-forward adjustment, seen it in plenty of scenarios, but with aether elementals and their abilities (especially the constant invisibility and the telekinetic throw), the difference between advanced and normal seemed fairly small to me. The players, all very experienced Pathfinders, had to expend a lot of resources to finally kill the two elementals. But no worries, they killed the two elementals without anyone dropping below half-health, got the vials of essence they needed and flew (drifted?) back to the bazaar.
So far, so good. However, when they finally arrived in Galt at the final location, they made a tactical error and popped into the Material Plane in the foyer without doing any scouting. They killed the Iron Golem right off the bat, no problem (four player adjustment was just like the first fight, remove the advanced template). I decided as the GM that the maenads would hear the fight and so would the final boss. While they killed the golem and explored the middle rooms, I had the boss pull her maenads back into the last room with her and cast fly and invisibility on herself while the maenads cast bull's strength on themselves. I though, should be a tough fight, but they have a ton of spells and channels, so no worries.
When the final battle started, it quickly became evident that the final adjustment hadn't done much to soften the fight. According to the scenario, the four player adjustment is to remove one advanced maenad, leaving three, and to remove one giant flytrap, still leaving one for the final fight. No adjustment was made to the boss, a new monster called a pakalchi sahkil, enhanced with 6 levels of mesmerist. Initially, the group did well, making all their Will saving throws and enjoying the protection from the Freedom's Call aura that one of the clerics put down to suppress confusion, grappled condition, fear effects and paralysis (really nice domain power from the Liberation domain).
However, when she stopped casting spells and just hovered at 20 feet throwing four thorns at a single target, everything fell apart. Her thorns are +23 to hit, she throws four of them as a standard action, they are apparently unlimited in amount and they do 1d4+5 plus 1d4 bleed + a DC 22 poison that does 1d3 WIS damage over 6 rounds and needs two consecutive saves to cure. This doesn't even include the extra 2d6 that she adds on if using painful stare as a swift action. That one ability quickly made an even back-and-forth battle almost unwinnable.
The party finally killed the three advanced maenads but the giant flytrap still had around 50 hit points and the boss had only taken 37 points of damage out of 195. I hadn't triggered the forbiddance spell in the room (I decided that it started 10 feet inside the western door and the players never moved further in than that), she hadn't used her blink spell or dominate person SLA, so I pulled plenty of punches to keep things from getting out of hand.
The fight had gone on for almost 90 minutes and we were out of time, so I ended the fight and ruled that they would have killed the giant flytrap in another round and that with all her minions dead and no deaths (yet) among the players, she retreats to the Ethereal plane, allowing the players to grab the stone and escape. No one was that hurt, but one of the clerics only had 4 CON left and another cleric had taken 8 points of WIS damage, so the party was definitely in no shape to continue the fight against a flying boss with a magical machine-gun full of poisonous thorns.
I've gone over what I could have done differently. I suppose I could have kept the fights separate and let the party fight the golem, the maenads and the mesmerist in three separate fights, but I wanted to penalize them a bit for doing zero scouting and just phasing in right off the bat as soon as they walked through the front door. However, it seems that the final fight as I crafted it was way too hard for four players. The adjustment of removing one advanced maenad and one flytrap while leaving the boss unaltered probably, in my opinion, did not nerf the final battle enough. I would have removed either more advanced maenads (two out of four) or maybe removed both flytraps from the last fight. I guess they could have removed the mesmerist levels from the boss as well, but that might have been too much of a nerf.
So what do you guys think? I know someone will question the party make-up (one barbarian and three clerics) but one of the clerics was a storm/lightning kind of cleric with lots of spiritual ally/spiritual weapon summons and direct damage spells, so he was more sorcerer or wizard than straight-up cleric. They obviously had almost unlimited healing, so I thought that would keep them out of trouble. The Freedom's Call ability also kept them from getting grappled by the flytrap, panicked or shaken by the boss's gaze attack or confused by the maenads' dancing, so they had the right tools for the job in that sense. I think that either the party just didn't have enough damage to kill stuff fast enough (I thought the barbarian and blaster cleric were doing quite a bit of damage from my standpoint) or, more likely in my initial opinion, the four player adjustment didn't do enough to reduce the lethality of the final encounter.
I apologize for the long rambling description of what happened, but I figured I might as well give you guys all the details so you can help me figure out what went wrong. Did I make the final fight too hard? Did having three clerics in a four-person team prove to be too much of a handicap? Or was the four-player adjustment not enough to offset the lethality of the final encounter?
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While they killed the golem and explored the middle rooms, I had the boss pull her maenads back into the last room with her and cast fly and invisibility on herself while the maenads cast bull's strength on themselves. I though, should be a tough fight, but they have a ton of spells and channels, so no worries.
This is a long scenario any way you run it. And the maenad and Muzthari fights are always difficult unless you have an overwhelmingly powerful group. But I think the above was the mistake that made it far harder than it should have been.
If they overhear combat elsewhere in the manor, they groggily prepare for combat but only leave the room if it sounds like Muzthari is in danger—even then only joining the combat at the start of the third round.
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In retrospect, it might have been wiser to have kept a firewall between the fights. Unfortunately, the group wasn't trying to be even a little sneaky. They phased in and fought the iron golem with a raging barbarian and a couple of lightning bolts. Then they checked the door to B2 but didn't open it, wandered into room B-5, looked around (no stealth checks from anyone), then back down the hall to peek into B2. About 5 minutes had passed since the iron golem battle. I was assuming that the BBEG wasn't going to just sit there while a wild battle was going on 75 feet away down an open corridor, so I did what I thought an intelligent boss would do - pull assets back to a final stand and get prepared for the group that was obviously assaulting the premises.
So for any GMs out there, you might want to go with the idea that Muzthari is so engrossed in the soulstone (and maybe the Forbiddance dampens sound as well, who knows....), that unless she actually sees the Pathfinders, she won't call the maenads out of their hang-out, depending on them showing up on round 3 as written. Will she open the door and join in if the maenads are attacked in a noisy fashion? Probably best to just have her hunker down and pre-buff in her room.
And definitely heed the warning about skipping the iron golem if you have less than 150 minutes left (yes, the scenario recommends 2.5 hours for the three 'fights' in the Garden of Betrayal. Combining two of them did not save any time at all that I could see....)
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I decided as the GM that the maenads would hear the fight and so would the final boss. While they killed the golem and explored the middle rooms, I had the boss pull her maenads back into the last room with her and cast fly and invisibility on herself while the maenads cast bull's strength on themselves.
I would agree that this was what made the final combat harder. Going directly through the middle rooms the mesmerist would probably buff/lay a trap while they took care of the maenads.
All of this took 3+ rounds, plenty of time as written for the maenads to open the door and make it a joint fight. It was tough and although 2 pcs were knocked unconscious (no deaths) they were victorious in the end. I think players should make wiser choices "that's a lot of things, let's wait until we have an advantage or at least until their spell casting buffs wear out"
Two other things to remember - even if the maenads do go into her forbiddance room, they have to make the saves vs gaze and they take damage for entering from the forbiddance (not LE), softening them up a bit.
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And definitely heed the warning about skipping the iron golem if you have less than 150 minutes left (yes, the scenario recommends 2.5 hours for the three 'fights' in the Garden of Betrayal. Combining two of them did not save any time at all that I could see....)
As a piece of general advice, I cannot think of a single instance where time has been saved by making a fight more complicated. Adding combatants is going to drag a combat out, especially ina 7-11 where each individual encounter is generally designed to challenge a party on its own.
