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Message: <blockquote data-quote="burntgerbil" data-source="post: 4642116" data-attributes="member: 49839">As a matter of fact I just ran one of these tonight, against a party of 6 5th level PC's. It was relatively short for a solo fight - The PC's won. 1) The hp's would have been much harder to keep track of had I not had a calculator on me. 2) for all of the "show" that the berbalang puts on, It's attacks are somewhat lacking. 3) the encounter lasted about an hour - a bit too quick for a solo 5 levels higher than the party. 4) I had ruled that they could tell the original from the duplicates. 5) The original berbalang had a vampiric dagger that he was using  ( I had to house rule reasonable damage)  that gained him enough HP to make more duplicates. The party liked the role playing aspect of this encounter - although they agreed that for all the effort that was put into dividing and reabsorbing and exploding, the flanking bonuses from claw attacks were pathetic. I ruled halfway through the encounter, that if a berbalang was flanking with one of it's duplicates, that it get two attacks instead of the +1d8. From a math standpoint, all I could reasonably manifest were 2 copies and 1 original, and even with high defenses, a party of 6 with a cleric wore them down quickly. Also, due to the 3 vs 6 nature of the battle and the fact that they needed to flank to really do anything, the combat was inherently stale - a la 3.5 "stand around and smack him" combat. All in all, this was a very easy 2500 xp for the party - I had to downgrade the XP to reflect the ease of the encounter. If it were up to me, I would make the change of the flanking extra attack I mentioned earlier, state that the original is distinct in some manner, give the original only regeneration 5 or 10 and give them an attack that did a little more to shake things up - pushing or pulling or dazing or stunning even. Perhaps allowing each duplicate to create a pair of minion clones as an encounter action would be cool also. I would probably just create one entry for the original Berbalang and an entry for "berbalang clone"  that were distinctive from the original but identical to each other. This would reflect the way that the original should be a solo controller and the duplicates should be strikers/soliders. There is a lot of great design space that went unused here.</blockquote>

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