D&D 5E When Fiends Attack: Are Balors, Pit Fiends and Ultraloths too weak?

[mpwylie]

I'm afraid that you seem to have answered a different question than the one I posed. I don't care about whether you think your group can fight Balors at any given level. I'm interested to know whether you feel that Balors (and whatnot) should be only high level, or whether being killable from mid-levels is acceptable.

Fair enough. I find it perfectly acceptable for a 9th level party to kill a Balor....if they can. But I will look at my story and decide whether I want them to or not as appropriate to the story. So though I feel that it is acceptable, it would never happen at my table.

 

[Lidgar]

Balors as stated do seem a little too easy to kill for a mid level party. Resistances and other defenses should be higher in my opinion, as well as an option to damage more than one or two creatures at a time. Giving them an at-will shield spell ability plus fireball 3x per day would do wonders...

One fun tactic is while flying 20-25 feet in the air (thus staying away from melee attackers), attack a party member with the whip. Lucky victim gets 2d6 + 8 slashing damage plus 3d6 fire damage plus Fire Aura (3d6 fire damage) plus 2d6 falling (bludgeoning) damage. Rinse, repeat.

 

[Dualazi]

I have mixed feelings. On one hand, the nerf to the ultralolth and the death slaad is tough. I guess they could hang out with the 3e leonel and lament how things were better in earlier editions. On the other hand, for balors and pit fiends.....

I always love people who complain "the monster's stats are sooo weak" and then ignore the monster's int score. Is intelligence a stat or not? Yeah, yeah, I know the white room fails utterly and completely if you don't use "NPC stupid", but seriously if the monster is smarter than your wizard, why are you playing it less intelligently than a black pudding?

The reason you're playing it like a black pudding is because Int is a very abstract stat, and short of being used for spellcasting, once combat is joined its usefulness has likely already been terminated. When people talk about these super smart monsters, I wonder if they realize that by the time the players are fighting them, the monster's plans have already likely gone very awry. What int really means at the end of the day is that at best, the monster might have an escape route planned, because I think most campaigns operate on the assumption that players will eventually get the chance to strike back and have their climactic encounter with the BBEG. At that point the int score has played itself out in terms of usefulness because little scales off of it aside from the aforementioned spellcasting, so all it means is that the monster might try and waste valuable group members first or kill those already down.

Intelligence is not a catch-all excuse against other design flaws, is what I'm saying.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Part of the problem is a side-effect from Bounded Accuracy. If a Balor is supposed to be scary to a party of level 17 characters, then it should be able to tear through level 10 characters with their probable +1 swords as though they were made of wet cardboard.

Part of the problem is a side-effect of the healing rules. If being hit by a Balor is supposed to hurt, then it can't be something where you'll be fine if you take a nap.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Well, a great many DMs - myself included - find that he dies in a round or two of open fighting, so he clearly can't be that strong. There just isn't time to make use of those abilities if he - as happened in my game - only gets a single action before dying. This was while standing in a large chamber with four Vampire Spawns and a heavily-wounded Rahadin backing him up, and friendly NPCs in the way of AoE blasts.

The line one hundred adventurers is about the graveyard in Barovia Village.

I think you were likely not playing him up to his full capability. He should never only get one action before dying...he can use Legendary Actions to get up to 4 turns per round! If he's that badly hurt that quickly, he should retreat rather than remain and die. His abilities make it pretty easy for him to get out of a battle; he's incredibly mobile.

As [MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION] and [MENTION=6785438]Warmaster Horus[/MENTION] point out, he's very dangerous. I had my group of level 9 PCs just about dead in their first major fight with him in his treasure vault (his location based on the tarokka reading) and then a second battle at his crypt, where everyone was basically on their last legs. In the first battle, he often used his lair action to be able to move through walls and floors to get around the battlefield. At one point, several of the heroes had moved into the vault....he fled using his Legendary Action to move without provoking, and then used his Lair Action to shut the door behind him. That left a few of the stronger martial types uselessly stuck within the vault while the bard and wizard were stuck outside with him.

Those are some seemingly minor actions that can have a huge impact on play. But they have to be put to use to be effective.

I think that this is a big part of why we see such varying opinions on this stuff....there are such varying degrees of tactical play. Some DMs seem to want their monsters to just be able to go toe to toe, turn for turn, with the PCs, trading punches until one side or the other drops. Other DMs have the monsters remain mobile, and thoughtful, and try to avoid taking damage while trying to maximize their damage output. Most probably do a bit of both. None of it is wrong....but all of it will affect how monsters perform.

I think that Legendary Actions and Legendary Resistance should be given to ANY monster that the DM wants to be a solo battle for the PCs. It makes the monster more on par with a group of opponents in the sense of actions per turn. I think this is what the designers intended, but I don't think that they made it so blatantly obvious that everyone realizes it.

I look at those as the equivalent of Feats or Multi-Classing for monsters.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I think that this is a big part of why we see such varying opinions on this stuff....there are such varying degrees of tactical play. Some DMs seem to want their monsters to just be able to go toe to toe, turn for turn, with the PCs, trading punches until one side or the other drops. Other DMs have the monsters remain mobile, and thoughtful, and try to avoid taking damage while trying to maximize their damage output. Most probably do a bit of both. None of it is wrong....but all of it will affect how monsters perform.

Yep. Some DMs, like me, even want both. I like having dangerous low-CR baddies like Strahd who are deadly because they are smart; I also like having big bruisers who don't need to be smart to be dangerous. (Also, this lets the players outsmart the monsters, which is fun. Just ask Harry Dresden--he is constantly going up against things much tougher than he is.) Some monsters are like elephants, powerful and demanding respect; others are like a man hunting an elephant with a knife, fragile and yet deadly.

From a world-building perspective, there is something fun about having a bad guy so mighty he doesn't even bother to defend himself, because other creatures like PCs aren't even a threat. (Liches are my favorite for this because even if they underestimate you and you manage to kill them, they Just. Don't. Even. Care. Like Freddie Krueger, they keep coming back.)

But it's no fun having everyone be like that.

 

[MechaTarrasque]

Also, nothing wrong with giving a monster a single feat (as long as you don't go all Pathfinder and give them 12 feats). Any one of alert, mobile, or mage slayer can add a lot of spice (and little to no change to CR) to a monster. For mid level monsters without a ranged attack, magic initiate is good.

I would recommend the feat for when you want the monster to last a little longer, but it isn't the big fight, and save adding legendary actions for the underboss.

 

[CapnZapp]

If the party reacts in an unexpected way (keeping a tight formation so that you can't conveniently isolate a PC; or responding instantly with ranged cantrips as soon as you grab someone) then drop that strategy and Hide instead; you can always come back later with reinforcements, possibly while the PCs are asleep.

Strahd's single greatest asset is his crazy-high Stealth, which combined with regeneration and mobility let him pick his moment.

Trouble is, now he's just a frustrating dick that accomplishes nothing.

I'm sure Strahd can evade a confrontation forever, but why would anyone want to play it like that.

Have you ever seen a vampire movie where the vampire acts like a frightened weakling?

You paint a picture that is utterly incompatible with how everybody expects a vampire lord to act: with supreme confidence and arrogance.

The facts are simple. The stat block needs to support that arrogance by allowing the vampire to withstand everything the party can bring to bear for at least several rounds.

Since it utterly fails to do that, it is time to stop trying to talk yourself out of the stark fact that his stat block is severely underpowered. And really, there's nothing wrong with admitting it.

The first step towards getting WotC to produce books with sturdier stat blocks is acceptance of reality.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Have you ever seen a vampire movie where the vampire acts like a frightened weakling?

What in the world are you talking about?

The antagonist in a slasher movie typically has a ubiquitous presence. He can show up anywhere at any time, especially when one of the protagonists is alone, and he will take advantage of the situation and murder them to death. Even when he doesn't show up, the very fact that he could ratchets up the tension in any situation where the protagonists are at a temporary disadvantage (e.g. isolated and in the dark).

Am I to assume that you feel that the antagonist in a slasher movie is acting like a frightened weakling?

You paint a picture that is utterly incompatible with how everybody expects a vampire lord to act: with supreme confidence and arrogance.

Wrong on so many levels. Wrong that everyone shares your conceptions of how vampires act; wrong about the picture I paint; wrong that a supremely arrogant hunter cannot hunt his prey with confidence.

The facts are simple. The stat block needs to support that arrogance by allowing the vampire to withstand everything the party can bring to bear for at least several rounds.

Since it utterly fails to do that, it is time to stop trying to talk yourself out of the stark fact that his stat block is severely underpowered. And really, there's nothing wrong with admitting it.

And wrong about what I've written in this very thread. I'm the guy who compared Strahd to a guy with a knife, remember? Fragile but dangerous. Strahd isn't the elephant, dangerous just because he is.

You often make blanket statements, [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION], arrogantly proclaiming that it's time for someone to stop denying something and get on board with CapnZapp's opinion. The weirdest thing about these statements is that you often address them to people who are fully cognizant of the things you are proclaiming, sometimes to a greater degree than you are. I'm tempted to believe that you are actually addressing them at random into the ether with a generic "you"--maybe it's just a failure of communication instead of a failure of understanding.

 

[Jer]

Speaking of gift wrapping: I don't think remembering that your pit fiend/balor can fly is a "clever tactic." Do we have to have "flyby attack" in their stat block to remind DM's about the flying? It seems to me the 5 9th level champions will be less effective even with their +4 swords if the pit fiend is flying 20 feet up.

I laugh at this because I remember a time when I - as a novice DM, oh so many years ago - let a group of players just wail on a demon (vrock) because I forgot he could fly and they killed him and his entourage in a much less dramatic and much shorter than expected . It was only after the session was over that I realized exactly why that combat had been so short.

But yeah, actually. The whole point of a stat block is to help the DM make the encounter work. If the stat block doesn't include subtle and not-so-subtle reminders of how to make the combat dramatic and tense, then I actually do think that the stat block should be rethought. I miss those touches from 4e and think that the 5e monsters are poorer without them.