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Dragonlance Shadow of the Dragon Queen shows up in the wild!
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<blockquote data-quote="Thommy H-H" data-source="post: 8833310" data-attributes="member: 6797019"><p>It's kind of by-the-by, but the base Death Knight in the MM (which this Soth statblock is very much just an enhanced version of) is the swingiest of swingy monsters in a game already renowned for its swingy combat! It's high CR is weighted almost entirely on its offensive side, thanks to its one round of 140 average damage. Confusingly though, some of the rest of the damage in its DPR calculation has to come from a very specific combination of spells, upcast in quite specific ways. So it's both too damaging <em>and</em> not damaging enough for its offensive CR, if you don't grock the non-intuitive way to use it post dropping the Hellfire Orb in turn one.</p><p></p><p>When I used it recently, I brought it into line with the current statblocks and turned all its smites and weapon buffing spells into extra necrotic damage on its sword, after reverse engineering the entire thing. But it was still swingy: I hellfire orbed a level 13 party in the first turn and took half of them out, but once they closed, the death knight was mincemeat. It needs minions! (In this case, it was only a relatively incidental encounter: the death knight wasn't a named NPC, he was just guarding the lair of an atropal, which the party proceeded to easily overcome despite the buffs I gave it from its ToA stats...)</p><p></p><p>All of which is to say: yeah, CR is quite a granular system, particularly for monsters who rely on very particular circumstances to punch at their weight. But that's D&D.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Thommy H-H, post: 8833310, member: 6797019"] It's kind of by-the-by, but the base Death Knight in the MM (which this Soth statblock is very much just an enhanced version of) is the swingiest of swingy monsters in a game already renowned for its swingy combat! It's high CR is weighted almost entirely on its offensive side, thanks to its one round of 140 average damage. Confusingly though, some of the rest of the damage in its DPR calculation has to come from a very specific combination of spells, upcast in quite specific ways. So it's both too damaging [I]and[/I] not damaging enough for its offensive CR, if you don't grock the non-intuitive way to use it post dropping the Hellfire Orb in turn one. When I used it recently, I brought it into line with the current statblocks and turned all its smites and weapon buffing spells into extra necrotic damage on its sword, after reverse engineering the entire thing. But it was still swingy: I hellfire orbed a level 13 party in the first turn and took half of them out, but once they closed, the death knight was mincemeat. It needs minions! (In this case, it was only a relatively incidental encounter: the death knight wasn't a named NPC, he was just guarding the lair of an atropal, which the party proceeded to easily overcome despite the buffs I gave it from its ToA stats...) All of which is to say: yeah, CR is quite a granular system, particularly for monsters who rely on very particular circumstances to punch at their weight. But that's D&D. [/QUOTE]
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