| Edge93 |
Okay, as per the title I noticed recently that the 5+ players additions on a couple of the Heroes of Undarin battles add more proportionally to the enemies than the player addition warrants. I'll go through each one here to illustrate.
And yes I know the point of HoU is to cause a TPK with near-certainty but I think it's important to do so with as much class as possible and to keep that "Near" in there. XD
Battle 1, four level 10 fiends. This is equivalent to one level -2 foe per player. Each additional player you add one more, still one level -2 per player. Perfectly fine.
Battle 2, two level 13 fiends. This is the equivalent of four level 11 fiends, one level -1 foe per player. Five players you add a level 11 fiend, six you add a level 13 fiend instead of the level 11. Both add the same percentage to the enemy side as we added to the player side. All good.
Battle 3, a level 12 fiend and four level 7 fiends. This one is a little odd because it's a really easy fight and EXP only calculates as far down as level -4. So lets call the level 7 fiends level 8 fiends. Four level 8s and a level 12 is equal to four level 10s, equivalent to a level -2 foe per player. Each additional player adds three level 7 fiends. This is actually a little more proportionally but this one doesn't matter as it's a piss-easy fight.
Battle 4, four level 9 undead. Equivalent to a level -3 foe per player. Add one more of these per player, all good.
Battle 5, a level 12 undead and two level 10 undead. This is equivalent to four level 10s, or one level -2 foe per player. Add another level 10 foe per extra player, still good.
Battle 6, this is the first one with an issue. One level 15 undead, and a bunch of level 6 undead who are way too weak to count into EXP but they do provide a debuff so bear them in mind even though they aren't counted. One level 15 is equivalent to four level 11s, so one level -1 foe per player. But for each additional player you add a level 13 undead. This throws the balance, to keep the encounter proportional it should be a level 11 undead per player. If you have 6 players, putting this up against the EXP chart shows that this takes the fight from one level -1 foe per player to one =level foe per player, what would be called a toss-up fight. If you had 5 it would be between the two but more than 6 players would take it above even a toss-up (Granted parties over 6 are rare and a nightmare to run but that's beside the point) And that's ignoring the stupid debuffing corpses. This fight may well have done my players in if they hadn't had some excellent luck at a crucial moment but even so it left most of them with Drained debuffs that are really gonna hurt later. Giving the level 13 undead in this fight the Weak template wouldn't quite fix the scaling (They'd need enough nerfing for CR -2 rather than -1, not sure if double-applying Weak works like that) but it would keep this from pushing past a toss-up.
Battle 7, two level 14 fiends. Equivalent to four level 12 fiends, or one =level foe per player. A toss-up fight. But for each extra player you add three level 10 fiends. This pushes it above toss-up immediately, going further with every player. To keep it at the toss-up level it would need to be two level 10 fiends instead of three per player. This one can maybe be explained away by the fact that those fiends are specified in the AP to forgo the use of a powerful ability they have unless certain conditions are met and maybe that's considered to nerf them enough but I'm not sure if that's so.
Battle 8, four level 11 fiends. Each extra player adds one more. Perfectly fine.
Battle 9, one level 16 fiend. Equivalent to four level 12 fiends. Another toss-up, and a dangerous one. This one struck me because it actually has no listed adjustment for additional players. While this thread is about the over-adjusted encounters it's only fair to mention this too. Maybe it's because if fight 8 takes too long he shows up during it and thus has backup, maybe he's thought to just plain be tough enough to handle a larger party as-is, maybe the devs thought that if you got this far you deserve a "break", or maybe they just really wanted this to end with a solo boss but pumping him up for extra players would just make him nigh-invincible to each player because of how this game works. No clue but wanted to mention it anyway.
So yeah. Most of the encounter adjustments are perfect but I really wanted to bring to attention the ones that aren't because they are the only place where the fights ever go beyond a toss-up (Battle 6 for 7+ players exceeding toss-up and Battle 7 fr anything over 4 exceeding toss-up). I know HoU is an endurance march destined to almost surely end in failure but with these sole exceptions it NEVER does this by putting up an individual battle that is theoretically above the party's ability. It gives multiple fights that land right even with the party's ability but never over. And I just don't want my players (A party of 6) to die to a potentially unfair challenge after coming so far. Unfortunately I'm getting this posted for discussion far later than I wanted, I'm probably going to be running Battle 7 with them ovre Skype tonight, and that's the main overtuned one, so I've gotta figure out what to do.