[Spoilers] Battle towards the end of chapter 1

[Keirine, Human Rogue]

Going to put this all under a spoiler tag so if you read this and you aren't GMing or something it's all on you.

Fight towards the end of Chapter 1:

Okay, that fight with the Combusted is a bit difficult. They don't form until people are in the room, and even if you space them out the aoe of their Blazing Howl overlaps a bit and you can easily catch a player in two or even three of them. Then the aura on top of that... geez. I mean, it was partly my party's fault because none of them could make the religion check to recall knowledge about them, and even when I mentioned that they were on fire no one tried any cold spells or even just smacking them with Rousing Splash or something.

The way the fight went, the party ended up with a couple members at Dying 3, one member at Wounded 3, and one member, the Gunslinger, with just a little damage on him. Wounded 3 got off a three action heal and got everyone up in time and they limped back to Father Zantus for some more in depth healing.

Are we sure the Blazing Howl is only one action? It feels like it should be a two action ability...

[Aeshuura]

Haven't got there yet... I will have to look at that! I don't have any Intelligence characters among my PCs, and so some of the other areas, they just don't RK they baddies, which ends up making some parts harder than they need to be...

[Aeshuura]

Yeah, that fight was a little brutal and exhausted a lot of their healing resources... One of the two healers dropped, but was brought back up with the cleric popping them back up with a 2-action heal. I didn't have them use their howl every action, just because I find that boring... but even then it was a rough battle. We just went through that fight last night and I could feel my players clenching...

It was a fun battle though! It is matter of how you play the monsters.

Spoiler:

I had blast shadows like after the atom bomb, so they pulled themselves off three different walls, so initially, only the two melee PCs were caught in the initial blazing howl. What really hurt was they kept using one action each round trying to stop the persistent damage, and they really couldn't focus on killing the Combusted...

[Cellion]

Aeshuura wrote:

I didn't have them use their howl every action, just because I find that boring... but even then it was a rough battle.

What do you mean? Blazing Howl has a cooldown of 1d4 rounds.

I do suspect that the blazing howl was intended to be 2A (though I checked in Book of the Dead and indeed it's only 1 action, so it's not a AoN slip up). It sounds like the true difficulty of the encounter might be more like severe than moderate thanks to the big up-front aoe dmg. Thanks for the heads up!

[Aeshuura]

Really? I didn't see that. I don't have the book, so I was using Archives of Nethys. I must have missed the cooldown notation. Thankfully, I used it only once per baddie, so I followed that without realizing it.

[Aristophanes]

My Water Kineticist made short work of them. ;-)