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If you have something, anything, that targets will saves, it can be a pushover. Sleep hex will do it (good luck, poor beast, with that fort save). Glitterdust can nerf it a good bit. Heck, repeated castings of Color Spray will do the trick too. Not a lot one opponent can do when it's getting stunned round after round.When I ran To Scale the Dragon the scariest combat encounter was over, if I remember correctly, early in the second round. Wasn't much of a challenge at all and it wasn't a terribly over-optimized party.
The party found the descent the most difficult part of the whole thing. So I guess that's something.
We had several things working against us:
Bad positioning from the get go
Our main DPS died in the surprise round, second best was my rogue
No good ranged attacks
No way to get into better positioning due to reach and massive attack bonuses from BBEGHowever, once I was actually able to bite into it with my full attack, it went down quick. Two rounds, I think, and I scored two crits off of my keen dagger. Otherwise, we would have been toast. I got lucky rolling miss chance (because I threw down a smoke pellet to give me sneak attack), and was able to land all of my attacks.
Which is how we got it, eventually. It just hit us hard and fast, and we lost three pc's right off the bat almost. It passed its first save against the spell our witch was using (I don't remember right off hand, i think it was something along the lines of oppressive boredom) and since we were down hard from the surprise round and the first round deaths, it was difficult to come back from. Also, remember its ability when attacking it. It sucked because we couldn't use our "good" weapons for fear of losing them. I risked my keen dagger to prevent a TPK.
With the right preparation, any fight can be a cakewalk. We weren't prepared for that fight.
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I GMed that and couldn't bring myself to choose who died (since they were fairly evenly spaced), so I rolled.
The pregen Ranger's number came up, so down he went. Dead-dead.
The badger was furious! It struck the BBEG for 2 or so points of damage, receiving 40+ in return. Yes, quite a roll, but it made for excellent comedy. *poof*
Certainly set an ominous tone for the next martial character.
"So...you're turn."
PC looks at damage dice for badger. *sighs*
Good times.
What's cool is they had a wolf AC who took lead for a sled, and lots of nature talent in the party (even sans Ranger), so the race was exhilarating, albeit maybe they got up their speed a bit much...yet, pulled it off barely. Nice pit spell brought up with Arcane Bond did wonders too.
Cheers.
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If you have something, anything, that targets will saves, it can be a pushover. Sleep hex will do it (good luck, poor beast, with that fort save). Glitterdust can nerf it a good bit. Heck, repeated castings of Color Spray will do the trick too. Not a lot one opponent can do when it's getting stunned round after round.When I ran To Scale the Dragon the scariest combat encounter was over, if I remember correctly, early in the second round. Wasn't much of a challenge at all and it wasn't a terribly over-optimized party.
The party found the descent the most difficult part of the whole thing. So I guess that's something.
We had several things working against us:
Bad positioning from the get go
Our main DPS died in the surprise round, second best was my rogue
No good ranged attacks
No way to get into better positioning due to reach and massive attack bonuses from BBEGHowever, once I was actually able to bite into it with my full attack, it went down quick. Two rounds, I think, and I scored two crits off of my keen dagger. Otherwise, we would have been toast. I got lucky rolling miss chance (because I threw down a smoke pellet to give me sneak attack), and was able to land all of my attacks.
Which is how we got it, eventually. It just hit us hard and fast, and we lost three pc's right off the bat almost. It passed its first save against the spell our witch was using (I don't remember right off hand, i think it was something along the lines of oppressive boredom) and since we were down hard from the surprise round and the first round deaths, it was difficult to come back from. Also, remember its ability when attacking it. It sucked because we couldn't use our "good" weapons for fear of losing them. I risked my keen dagger to prevent a TPK.
With the right preparation, any fight can be a cakewalk. We weren't prepared for that fight.
No argument there! But some fights, they're simple if you have a light spell of third level or higher memorized. Or they're simple if you have a PC with flight and a +20 mod on UMD or higher. Or there are fights that become trivial if you have Cone of Cold, or the right illusion spell.
This one's nowhere near as complex as that. Save-or-suck spells with will saves are pretty common. All you need is one, and a decent DC on it, and you should have it incapacitated within two rounds. That's a pretty low bar for that tier.
So it's a scenario with two very different outcomes depending on whether you can save-or-suck it into oblivion. I suspect that for most parties desiring additional difficulty they aren't going to have a problem meeting its particular challenge.
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No argument there!...If you have something, anything, that targets will saves, it can be a pushover. Sleep hex will do it (good luck, poor beast, with that fort save). Glitterdust can nerf it a good bit. Heck, repeated castings of Color Spray will do the trick too. Not a lot one opponent can do when it's getting stunned round after round.When I ran To Scale the Dragon the scariest combat encounter was over, if I remember correctly, early in the second round. Wasn't much of a challenge at all and it wasn't a terribly over-optimized party.
The party found the descent the most difficult part of the whole thing. So I guess that's something.
We had several things working against us:
Bad positioning from the get go
Our main DPS died in the surprise round, second best was my rogue
No good ranged attacks
No way to get into better positioning due to reach and massive attack bonuses from BBEGHowever, once I was actually able to bite into it with my full attack, it went down quick. Two rounds, I think, and I scored two crits off of my keen dagger. Otherwise, we would have been toast. I got lucky rolling miss chance (because I threw down a smoke pellet to give me sneak attack), and was able to land all of my attacks.
Which is how we got it, eventually. It just hit us hard and fast, and we lost three pc's right off the bat almost. It passed its first save against the spell our witch was using (I don't remember right off hand, i think it was something along the lines of oppressive boredom) and since we were down hard from the surprise round and the first round deaths, it was difficult to come back from. Also, remember its ability when attacking it. It sucked because we couldn't use our "good" weapons for fear of losing them. I risked my keen dagger to prevent a TPK.
With the right preparation, any fight can be a cakewalk. We weren't prepared for that fight.
It's possible, though if they've never played it, they may not see it coming. That surprise round is brutal. Top it off with the skill checks to get up there and down again (which if you don't have several character who are able to make those, it hurts), and this is one of the tougher scenarios out there. The author has even come out and said that they write scenarios to kill characters, and the difficulty is intentional.
Save or suck is the way to go, for sure. The hard part (for the players) is figuring that out before it shreds them. Imagine if the save or suck caster was the one to go in the surprise round.... I don't see a group lasting very long against it if that happened.
Another tough one that I've seen is In Wrath's Shadow. Played correctly, the opening encounter is harsh. Very, very harsh. And the last fight isn't a joke either. My group ended up mostly incapacitated, either unconscious, blinded, panicked, or any combination of the above. That scenario uses save or suck spells on you quite frequently.
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I GMed that and couldn't bring myself to choose who died (since they were fairly evenly spaced), so I rolled.
The pregen Ranger's number came up, so down he went. Dead-dead.
The badger was furious! It struck the BBEG for 2 or so points of damage, receiving 40+ in return. Yes, quite a roll, but it made for excellent comedy. *poof*Certainly set an ominous tone for the next martial character.
"So...you're turn."
PC looks at damage dice for badger. *sighs*Good times.
What's cool is they had a wolf AC who took lead for a sled, and lots of nature talent in the party (even sans Ranger), so the race was exhilarating, albeit maybe they got up their speed a bit much...yet, pulled it off barely. Nice pit spell brought up with Arcane Bond did wonders too.
Cheers.
Ah.... good ole Harsk. That's definitely playing on hard mode.
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The big scary thing in To Scale a Dragon went down in 1 round to my fully buffed(Thanks to my pocket cleric) Zen Archer. I spent pretty much all of my days resources (Ki, Perfect Shot, ect.) to do so, but it was worth it. The GM disagreed with the fun of it however.
Heh, I wish we'd had a decent ranged build, alas, we did not.
Venture-Captain, California—Sacramento
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Having people able to fly fast really makes that one easy. Nodachi weilding Barbarian took the big scary out and didn't get hit once.
Also I think that is the only time I have ever got to use the Brace quality on my nodachi. (Land in front of one of the enemy sleighs, and ready to strike the dogs as they came at me. GM was generous and agreed that a dogsled moving full speed counted for a charge.)
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Venture-Lieutenant, Massachusetts—Boston Metro
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Has anyone anywhere ever seen that actually happen? I've seen over optimizers quit out of supposed boredom because things weren't challenging enough but I've never yet seen one of them reform.Just to play devil's advocate, but why? A large part of me says, let them overwhelm the scenarios. Then, maybe, if it stops being so much fun to hyper optimize, they will start making more balanced characters.
Well, honestly, that is their choice. Depending on the players, that is unfortunate. However, there has been a trend locally in the Twin Cities (I believe) for players that start as hyper-optimizers to often tone it down as they play more. Especially if they start GMing a lot.
If they are complaining that they are bored, or unchallenged, that is a great time to sit down with them to ask why... and suggest that more rounded Pathfinders might be more in line with the campaign's story.
I think the primary problem as a GM for some of the players is that we kind of are more well rounded than not making it hard to target any particular weakness. That and even for a completely unoptimized character some of the scenarios aren't that particularly hard which Im not going to complain about because I like the balance we have in scenarios. It could be better in some cases (ie. Ward Asunder) but still its good.
