Sanity Checking some Monster Damages

[keterys]

Wraiths and Mad Wraiths are horrible in all kinds of different and stupid ways, yes. Absolutely. Worse, they amplify each others' horribleness. It's shocking to me that they made it past the design board in that state.

It's not quite as bad as x4 hp with regen 20 (on account of weaken having a chance to miss and its base hp being reduced for being insubstantial in the first place), but... yeah, horrible, horrible.

Well, to give an example of what I'm looking at, here's a version of the Wraith that I hope is still scary, but not in an annoying-I-hate-this-game kind of way.

Its damage potential is notable, especially if it can get combat advantage, though resistance to necrotic is still a severe detriment to it. Enough so the Spawn Wraith might be a serious trigger. The CA damage being ongoing helps prevent multiple wraiths from stacking too effectively, and giving people room to sweat and grant saves. No regeneration, no weaken. Its defenses were too low for its level (like, Fort was Lvl+7), so it did gain some there though as I swept through.

I'd probably tweak it a little more, just cause it's a bit too scary when used on level 1s at the moment probably. But, eh, you get the gist of it.

 

[Elric]

If anyone is holding their breath - please don't. I'm going to completely redo the spreadsheet before I do anything further. My thinking is to gradually increase the number of expected rounds, factor in crits, check not just at level, but at level -2 and level +5 (the range of use suggested for a creature) which should bring to light somethings like the deathjump, as well as institute the checks for excessive damage. I don't intend to have this done anytime remotely soon, I just wanted the initial feedback so I could shape how I was doing this.

Thanks once again to everyone who responded and helped.

P.S. Storm Gorgons and Efreet Karadjin can do _serious_ damage unless folks have resistance gear. Sorrowsworn Deathlords and Reapers are fairly anemic in comparison, even without resistance gear.

Nice work. Storm Gorgons are a specific example of the general phenomenon that creatures with Auras would often be (much) too strong if their Auras stacked. This is a problem, because it means that a single creature with an Aura is stronger than it should be, even if an encounter with five of them wouldn't be noticeably harder than it should be (because of the lack of stacking).

The Storm Gorgon's aura affects allies as well, which makes it hard to avoid using a bunch of creatures with non-stacking auras in the same encounter (since its natural allies, the Storm Giants/Titans, have auras as well).

Another example: the Bloodfire Harpy (L9 soldier) has: Burning Song (Fire) aura 20; enemies within the aura at the start of their turns take 5 fire damage (deafened creatures are immune). Aura 20 means it should hit every pc every round of combat after the first and many on the first as well. If it lives 3 rounds against a party of 5, that's 75 damage already, not counting its attack actions. It's spread out damage, but still too much.

The Mad Wraith probably has the nastiest aura in the MM: any "killer encounter" for high level characters could be made more difficult without adding significant exp cost simply by adding a few Mad Wraiths to keep the players peretually dazed. Who cares if they're level 20 characters and the Mad Wraiths can't hit them!

 

[Neuroglyph]

Impressive analytics - and I agree with other posts, that there seems to be a tendency to drop damage in favor of special attacks on WotC's part, which makes a certain amount of sense.

I lok forward to seeing the finished SS

 

[keterys]

Yeah, the Bloodfire Harpy can do immense overall damage... fairly slowly. Though they're a bit harmed by resistance to fire needless to say

Here's the Mad Wraith I'd done up:

Aura changed to trigger on ending a turn and still lasting until start of turn, which completely changes the dynamic. The touch of chaos no longer has the ability to trigger OAs from the target's movement. Changed the -2 to Will Defense to match the vulnerability, which also helped to keep a bit of fear to the creature while keepings its numbers still quite tame. Plus the usual defense tweaking.

On the SS itself, I've done the initial data entry on 20 levels of monster and figured out most of the requirements and such. Like I have a spot where you can specify factors for area effects and ongoing damage, so you can count area effect damage as less valuable and reduce or increase the value of ongoing damage depending on how easy it is for you to group to make saves and such. Today I put together the formulae I needed for figuring out damage with resistance, so that I can have additional sheets with resistance of 5, 10, and 15. So, progressing along slowly and steadily.

Amusingly I've found about two dozen required errata for either the Monster Manual or the Compendium entries so far.

 

[Trebor62]

Glowstones (AV) will nerf the Mad Wraith aura if the party has them in there inventory.

Glowstones create a zone of light and radiant damage to undead until the end of the encounter. Radiant damage shuts down the Mad Wraiths aura for the turn. The Glowstone damages undead entering the zone or starting there turn there.

I made sure my second party found some glowstones as treasure prior to the Mad Wraiths in Scales of WAR. With those they created a safety zone for themselves that made it impossible for the Wraith to use its Aura on them.

Also there is an Wotc article from one of there DM's running Scales or War and how he had to really nerf the Wraiths behind the screen during the encounter to avoid a TPK.

 

[keterys]

Glowstones are indeed quite effective for dealing with wraiths... though wraiths in turn are quite effective at just leaving when glowstones are used and there's no one to attack outside of them.

 

[Diirk]

I used to think Needlefang Drake Swarms were the most out of whack creature in the game, but then I ran across a monster our DM at the time had grabbed from the monster builder because it fit the theme... the Minotaur Battle Shaman.

It must surely be the result of poor editing, but this is a level 12 artillery with what must be the most brutal at-will ever:

Area Burst 2, enemies only, 3d6+5 damage, slides 2 squares and forces the target to make a basic attack against the nearest ally.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Interesting. I'd have to say that its pretty tough to gauge monster threat level overall though in a specific situation. There are those monsters like the Wraith and Needlefang Drake Swarm that are just plain out of line for sure. Others its much harder to say. For example I had a Death Jump Spider encounter a good while back that just turned quite nasty. 3 of them had a 4th level party for lunch. I think it was a combination of slightly high die rolls on my part coupled with a bit of a tactical mistake the party made at the start of the fight and all of a sudden they became quite lethal. Nobody died but only because the terrain made it pretty easy for them to withdraw quickly.

The same party came back the next day and owned the exact same encounter with no problem. It may look by strict numbers like the monster is going to have to get quite lucky to swing to the high side of its potential, but it seems to me that swingy monsters in practice are more threatening than the math would strictly suggest.

I think another factor overall in encounter design is that you find a lot more swinginess when using mostly a bunch of the same monster, at least at lower levels where resistance potions and such aren't much of a factor. Throwing a single wraith in with some other types of undead, not too much of a problem. Throw in 3 wraiths and it becomes murderous really fast.

It seems like some of the very low damage monsters are analogous in the other direction. A single low damage high defense monster combined with the right terrain and some backup from a controller or artillery is not bad at all usually. Several of them together on the other hand is just a real drag.

The SS could be interesting as a way to flag things not to overuse or that need a bit of extra help from the encounter design to be interesting. That and some of the low offense monsters are good candidates for customizing since you can throw in a couple of variant powers and all of a sudden they perk up without having to worry too much about turning them into something way too scary. It'll be interesting to look at.

 

[Iron Sky]

Also there is an Wotc article from one of there DM's running Scales or War and how he had to really nerf the Wraiths behind the screen during the encounter to avoid a TPK.

They TPK'd my party, or would have if I hadn't used the "portal tremors pull the PCs into the Shadowfell thingy". The insect swarms took everyone down again near the end of the adventure (in the garden). I had the guards arrive and drive the bugs off and stabilize the characters(since the module obviously wanted everyone alive for the talk at the end).

Two (fudged) TPKs in one adventure isn't alot of fun.

 

[renau1g]

Glowstones (AV) will nerf the Mad Wraith aura if the party has them in there inventory.

Glowstones create a zone of light and radiant damage to undead until the end of the encounter. Radiant damage shuts down the Mad Wraiths aura for the turn. The Glowstone damages undead entering the zone or starting there turn there.

I made sure my second party found some glowstones as treasure prior to the Mad Wraiths in Scales of WAR. With those they created a safety zone for themselves that made it impossible for the Wraith to use its Aura on them.

Also there is an Wotc article from one of there DM's running Scales or War and how he had to really nerf the Wraiths behind the screen during the encounter to avoid a TPK.

Glowstones are good, if you're expecting undead.... sometimes that's not the case.