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Message: <blockquote data-quote="anhar" data-source="post: 2661617" data-attributes="member: 36596">I bought this when it first came out and was kinda dissapointed, and is some cases appalled.When I originally found this site, this is the first thing I came to look at, to see who else didn't like the MMII.  I was amazed to find anyone had given it five stars, even to the point of saying it was better than the MMI!I read closer and sort of understood.  I don't agree, but I kinda understand.  The art is mostly good {especially the famine spirit and the hellfire drake} and some of the monsters are things I, and others, had wanted to see in 3e.  I personally liked the linnorms, especially corpse tearer. I used him extensively in a 2e campaign, other people have liked the gem dragons and the banshee/famine spirit.  I realized it isn't all bad, before reading and thinking I would have given it a 1 star rating.Here's why:After reading several creatures in the book, I have no trust whatsoever   for the CR assigning mechanic they used.case in point-Adamantine Clockwork Horror16HDAC 28SR 22spell like abilities: at will, disintegrate, mordenkainens disjunction, implosion.CR? a whopping 9I read through the clockwork horrors, and started reading the description for this one, there's only one in the world, it's the head of a planet destroying operation, and I really expected it to be nasty {it is} but CR 9? It can cast 2 9th level spells at will!  I understand they kept some CR's artificially low to make the creature more memorable/nasty {dragons} but 9 is ridiculous. your fighter would never hit it, especially after he, and everyone else, lost most, if not all, of their magical equipment in round 1. Disjunction is a nasty, nasty spell. Your wizard/sorceer would have serious problems getting through it's SR, and if he managed to, he'd probably get imploded next round.  Good luck with that Fort save. I seriously thought that the CR was a typo and expected it to be fixed in the errata. That's how ridiculous this seems to me. This isn't 1 CR wrong like the girallon, this is 4-5 CR low.next up-elemental weirdsI think these were CR 10, they were bound to a pool, and if I remember right the pool was seriously deadly to stand in. They had other powers, but mainly I only had one serious gripe: they were 18th or 20th level sorcerers on top of being elementals and having other powers.Once again we have a creature that has access to 9th level spells being expected to go up against PC's with 4th-5th level spells. I believe this was because the weirds were supposed to be oracles or benevolent or something, completely unlike 2e weirds {not that I have a problem with that, it's an interesting idea} so the PC's weren't supposed to really fight them, they were supposed to be plot points. Woe to the 10th level evil/greedy party that starts that fight, this was 3.0 if you remember, and they were one time stop/meteor swarm {or horrid wilting or whatever} combo away from TPK.  Of course only a vengeful or just plain bad DM would put this creature in a situation where the PC's would be likely to fight it, but that doesn't excuse bad CR mechanics.-mountain giant/hellfire drakeI think other reviewers have talked about the mountain giant, but I played a campaign into epic levels and our party would have rather fought 2 or 3 mountain giants {CR 26} than one lavawight {CR 23 w/permanent HP drain. and I mean permanent, no restoration for you}  Same with the hellfire drake.  I really like the picture, and the idea, but it didn't match the CR's in the epic level handbook.  I think that may be the fault of the epic level handbook though, for having unrealistically low CR's. I don't see my 22nd level party only using 20% of their resources killing an Anaxim, for example.This is just three monsters that I can think of of the top of my head. This caused me to start looking at every monster with several grains of salt, to the point where I would just pick things apart and was completely unable to bring myself to trust anything out of that book.  I wondered if they had done ANY playtesting, and concluded that they probably hadn't. I understand if you liked the book, after all, it brought in the banshee and made it a badass worthy of the spell wail of the banshee. It also has some very good art.  I can only assume some people didn't read the clockwork horrors very closely.  No book with that large of a screw up in it should get 5 stars.CR 9!{if I've made any factual mistakes or quoted too much of the ACH's stats please tell me and I will edit. I don't know how much I'm allowed to quote for review purposes.  Further I know that this is a review of an outdated 3.0 product and the world has moved on, etc. it just really angered me at the time}</blockquote>

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