Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="DrSpunj" data-source="post: 4653758" data-attributes="member: 994">Yep! <cackles with evil DM glee>I don't know that Nail believes me but this encounter was not designed with any particular PC in mind. The party just hit 3rd level after this encounter and I've been purposefully trying to vary the types of encounters, terrain effects, condition effects, etc. with every battle to get a better feel for 4e and my party's/player's strengths.Here the party was hiking through the desert about a day out from their base city/outpost, trying to figure out a path to some ruins recently spotted by others. I used Skeleton Key Games Desert Bluff tiles for the encounter, telling the party as I laid them out that the bluffs were roughly 20' higher than the ground and were rough but slippery due to their sandy-rocky make-up (Climb DC 20).The 5 PCs arranged themselves (somewhat predictably) with Nail in the middle of the front line flanked by the two Leaders, with the Ranger & Wizard in the second row. I think they were all separated by a space or two.The Ranger & Cleric made their Perception checks for the surprise round but the Kruthik Spitter (Lvl 4 Controller using a Blinding Spit single target attack swiped from the Goblin Hexer and adjusted for level) struck the Cleric blind first thing. Nail didn't get to act before the Spitter struck him blind as well in the first full round of combat. Being in the middle of the front line meant he was also targeted by both the Kruthik Adults with their Toxic Spike recharging range attacks along with the Leaders (which bloodied the still-blind Cleric, btw!).Couple that with the 3 Young & 3 Hatchlings that dug their way out of the ground & bluffs to flank the party and, well, Nail just wasn't able to do much of his Defendery stuff for the first several rounds. For the 1st half of combat he was the PC right in front of the Spitter up on the bluff which wasn't targeted by any PC attacks until most all of the other Kruthiks were taken out. More often than not Nail was the target of that blinding attack, until he was no longer the easiest target out in front of the rest of the party members (or perceived as the biggest threat by the slightly more intelligent Spitter, Int = 5).Right! Nail definitely did his job IMO because the other party members were not able to take as much damage as he did. Even if the blindness kept him from doing much damage, he was able to swing blindly and mark something most every round which strongly dictated the Kruthik's actions & targets on their turns.The other players had a blast, as did I, but I can't help feeling Nail wasn't nearly as happy with this encounter as he's been with others. With only a single mob for the first half of combat able to make a blindness attack coupled with two Leaders I didn't expect the blindness condition to hit very often (but my d20s apparently hated Nail with a vengeance, though I rolled 1s on two or three occasions against the Cleric), that Nail would be the target of most all of the Spitter's attacks (but it made the most sense round after round IMO) or that the party would fail what really seemed like 3/4 of their save rolls, even with some Leader bonuses & extra saves happening at least a few times.In a nutshell, I haven't had the chance to see Nail's BRV fighter in the same game as a non-BRV fighter build, but I don't think Nail's current fighter is at all over-powered. Effective, absolutely, but not overpowered against several different encounter situations we've played over the last several sessions. Now, I haven't been using Elites much (see the Grindspace prevention thread in this forum) and they haven't fought a Solo yet where at least a few DMs or players have had issues with the BRV build. Maybe soon we can test that, Nail! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

Verification