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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2337683" data-attributes="member: 4937">Cool.Ok, let's move on to an even harder tactical problem.   Suppose the Noble Salamander summons the Huge Fire Elemental.  What's the proper way to play the Elemental?The elemental is a hard monster to run well, because its got two competing exceptional abilities that it wants to take advantage of - speed and reach.   Speed encourages you to keep well away.  Reach encourages you to stay relatively close.  You'll have to blend these into a good balance.   Used well, they'll complement each other.  As far as advantages go, the first thing you should notice is that elemental is a combat brute for a CR 7 creature.  In fact, CR 7 might be a tad light in its estimation (its probably closer to CR 8).   It's list of combat advantages is enormous: DEX 25 + combat reflexes, speed 60 + spring attack, +11 bonus to initiative, average 44 points of damage + sets target on fire from a full attack, and DR 5/- + good hit points.  It can take and give a beating, and I can easily see it overwhelming a party of 7th level characters in quite a few circumstances.  As far as disadvantages go, its only got two.  It's got very low AC and its got absolutely no ranged attack.   That last one cannot be overemphasised.   Fast and brutal as it is, if it can't close with the party it loses.   Fortunately, unless the party is just maxed out in ranged capabilities, that DR -/5 is going to be a huge advantage.Note something here.  It's got a +24 grapple bonus, and you might be attracted by that because I mentioned it as an advantage of the Salamander, but note that that is because the Salamander has improved grab + constrict and low manueverability.   The Fire Elemental except in rare cases does not want to lose its manueverability advantages or dexterity advantage by taking the time to grapple something.  Where the Salamander is interested in controlling the ground that the fight takes place on, forcing his opponents to fight where he wants them, the Fire Elemental pretty much could care less about the particular ground that the fight is on (unless its water or something).  The Fire Elemental wants to control the distance between himself and the party.   In since, both the Salamander and the Fire Elemental share the desire to be chased by thier foes, but whereas the Salamander would prefer to not to have to move in order to acheive this goal, the Fire Elemental is happiest running around.  If the party 'gets away' the fire Elemental cannot do anything about the parties ranged attacks.   If the party gets too close, the Fire Elemental is going to lose its advantage from reach -  It's a AoO generating machine with Combat Reflexes + 25 DEX, and ideally wants to get an AoO on everyone in the party every round.Each round, the Fire Elemental should try to position itself such that it maximizes the ratio of attacks its going to get to make versus the number of attacks its opponents are going to get to make.   Even though its full attack action does twice the damage of its regular attack, it should never stand and fight against a single foe.   Standing and fighting against a single foe carries the risk that it will be the object of multiple full attack actions in succeeding rounds, and lose all or most of its AoO chances.   So each round, the Fire Elemental should choose one target which can spring in on and attack, and then back out after finishing the attack to a position which ideally allows it to reach any spell casters or ranged attackers, but which forces melee attackers to move through its threatened area and to take move actions in order to attack.    The best position is therefore one about 10' away from a ranged attacker (5' step is still in range), but about 15-20' from a melee attacker.   Since you can take 12 5' steps with each move action, you should be able to find such a position that you can reach witout drawing an AoO while getting there.   Remember ranged attackers don't have threatened areas.If the party stays clumped, the average round for the Fire Elemental would be to attack someone and then circle all the way around to the back of the party after the attack.   The party will shift around, and then so will the Elemental.If the party has got strong ranged attacks and spreads out so that you can't get alot of AoO, things get harder.  The best you can hope for is to pick on one weak party member, and hope that it forces the party to come to thier aid.   Your DR gives you alot of staying power, and one PC's hit points just might not hold out.   You really don't want to let the party move back far enough that you're forced to charge an opponent at some point, so the ideal situation is to fight in a rather large room (say 60' x 60' or maybe a little bigger) rather than a small room you can get pinned in or an open space that's too big to control fully.   A flying foe is just enormously bad for a fire elemental.   Low ceilings please.</blockquote>

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