Post your Lair Assault Results Here (Spoilers)

[Dannager]

So I would have had to do at least 400 more points of damage to manage a TPK.

I don't think this is really accurate. Like, at all.

in order to TPK your party, all you need to do is kill them all. You don't need to burn through all of their potential healing. That's a sucker's game. You take every single one of your monsters, and you nuke the guy who can fire off the most healing. Once he's unconscious - and this part is important - you kill him outright. You don't leave him bleeding out on the ground. You chop his head off. You don't allow for the possibility of him standing back up. Now it doesn't matter how much healing he had left. He can't use any of it, because he is a corpse. Rinse and repeat for the next five party members.

tl;dr - Don't give your party the chance to heal. Kill them all outright.

 

[Tuft]

I don't think this is really accurate. Like, at all.

in order to TPK your party, all you need to do is kill them all. You don't need to burn through all of their potential healing. That's a sucker's game. You take every single one of your monsters, and you nuke the guy who can fire off the most healing. Once he's unconscious - and this part is important - you kill him outright. You don't leave him bleeding out on the ground. You chop his head off. You don't allow for the possibility of him standing back up. Now it doesn't matter how much healing he had left. He can't use any of it, because he is a corpse. Rinse and repeat for the next five party members.

tl;dr - Don't give your party the chance to heal. Kill them all outright.

This. Combat outcome in RPGs depends heavily on GM tactics - whether you concentrate your fire or spread it, how your monsters handle marks, whether they risk opportunity attacks, if they take time to coup de grâce, etc. Makes comparing outcomes kind of pointless.

 

[jodyjohnson]

We had nearly an entire table (4 of 6) of Encounters players so only 2 had played beyond level 2-3.

We ended up tank heavy and healing light. Out of main heals in round two.

My dwarf knight dropped towards the beginning of round 2, was up briefly with a Crit on the death save, dropped again on round 3 after I stood up and moved out of ongoing damage.

After that we started losing characters faster than they could Heal potion and ended with the Bard (only 2 heals) and Paladin (no heals!) went Leroy Jenkins and just tried to get to the last room.

Party compoistion: Elf Pet Ranger, Warlock, Dwarf Knight, Vryloka Swordmage, Half-orc Paladin, Bard.

We rolled low for initiative and pretty much got area nuked to half-dead in our starting squares. After the Encounter Bard blew a Encounter heal on her friend who was down 7 I knew we were going nowhere.

I do think a party optimized for the dungeon would do much better.

Certain characters ended up useless (abilities completely negated by the scenario rules).

KDs party looks similar to what I'd put together AFTER playing the module so it doesn't surprise me that they beat it easily. But they still haven't completed all the glory awards.

The earlier you beat the scenario, the longer you have to wait for the next Lair Assault (December). I have a feeling we'll slowly improve and within 4-6 weeks we may have some Encounters players with more 5th level experience.

At least no one cried.

 

[jodyjohnson]

I think the scenario would be completely different if it was 3 separate encounters over 20 rnds instead of one mega encounter - the dailies, and encounter long effects have too much weight.

Or instead at the end of Turn 5, 10, 15 a temporal distortion rips through ending and reset all encounter powers. No damage just changing the meta.

 

[KarinsDad]

I don't think this is really accurate. Like, at all.

in order to TPK your party, all you need to do is kill them all. You don't need to burn through all of their potential healing. That's a sucker's game. You take every single one of your monsters, and you nuke the guy who can fire off the most healing. Once he's unconscious - and this part is important - you kill him outright. You don't leave him bleeding out on the ground. You chop his head off. You don't allow for the possibility of him standing back up. Now it doesn't matter how much healing he had left. He can't use any of it, because he is a corpse. Rinse and repeat for the next five party members.

tl;dr - Don't give your party the chance to heal. Kill them all outright.

What you say sounds good on the surface, but you forget (or didn't know) the fact that the PCs outnumber the NPCs in every encounter here. In fact, I "broke" the rules a bit and had 5 foes in the last encounter, but it didn't matter. The PCs win the action economy part of the game before the encounter even starts (a major mistake on the part of WotC when setting up this challenge, higher level monsters do not make up for number of actions per round).

In order to do as you suggest, NPCs have to at least down a foe (which I tried with NPC focused fire, but it didn't help).

Every PC had around 40 hit points remaining except the Swordmage who finished the fight with 6 hit points. The Companion was full up at 26.

The reason the Swordmage was at 6 hit points (after taking 130+ after reductions, probably close to 155 or so before reductions) was because the Swordmage and the Companion were the only two PCs that most of the NPCs could target in the last encounter. Two of the five last NPCs were Soldiers with melee only attacks, so they were totally unable to get to the PCs in the back.

I was attempting to focus fire on the leaders, but they were hanging back in the corridor behind the portcullis where they could get a cover bonus (sometimes behind other PCs) and the NPCs couldn't get to them. The BBEG did manage to recharge his area attack once and blast multiple PCs twice back there (ha ha, no cover bonus), but he also often had two melee PCs on him so that it was tough for him to get away to do that.

The Bard had used Stirring Shout on the BBEG, so every time a PC hit him, that PC got back 4 hit points. Some PCs actually had more hit points at the end of this fight from this power alone than they had walking into this fight.

The Swordmage had the Rose King's Shield feat, so she was gaining 5 temp hit points (and sometime 10 temp hit points) at least every other round. She was a defending Swordmage and saved her Encounter powers for the last fight, so she had at least one foe marked every round, sometimes as many as 3 NPCs, and if some of the NPCs would have tried to range attack a Leader, she would have stopped 7 of the damage of the attack.

The PCs had 7 healing potions remaining (2 on the swordmage, 1 on everyone else). It only takes 2 minor actions to drink one and gain 10 hit points. I was surprised that the Swordmage didn't use hers, but she said that the Leaders were healing her a lot, so she didn't see the need. Even though she went down to single digit hit points a few times, she felt confident that the Leaders would keep her alive (maybe a poor assumption on her part, but she did take more attacks than anyone else, so maybe it was a good strategy after all, she'd still have 2 healing potions remaining after all of the rest of the party healing was gone).

Using up healing surges was irrelevant. Players were going to suck down every bit of healing that they had before they would allow any PC to go or stay unconscious.

In order to kill a single PC outright in the last encounter, the NPCs would have had to go through 40+ (not including reductions) + 26 (bloodied, 32 in the case of the swordmage). Even if every NPC hit a PC enough to make him or her go unconscious, there's no way that the Leaders would have let that PC stay on the ground long enough for another NPC to do a Coup De Grace. The NPCs just didn't do enough damage and have enough turns per round to manage that. Action Economy just didn't give the NPCs enough of a chance to do that.

So yes, my players are very smart and have been playing 4E since it came out. They used cover, distance, specific powers, and other good tactics to prevent the very tactic that you suggest. They optimize their healing so that every ounce of healing they possess will be used before a single PC can be killed. They prevented the lower defense PCs from even being in the fight and forced 3 out of the 5 NPCs to focus on the defender and the companion due to terrain.

Your suggestion sounds good in theory, but there's no way that it would work that way in practice. My group would never make that rookie mistake and allow it.

 

[KarinsDad]

But they still haven't completed all the glory awards.

True.

It sounds like your group had fun though and that's the important thing.

My players really don't care about the glory awards too much. They actually managed to acquire quite a few of them. They didn't get the "kill all the monsters in the dungeon" one, but that's because we stopped the encounter after the vault room was finished. They could have gone into the final room and killed the last 2 NPCs with the 5 remaining rounds, but that was anti-climatic at that point. They actually managed between them 9 of the awards and probably could get some more if we played again, but none of us are interested in playing again.

Going back and seeing if one of them will fall into a pit, or kill a fellow PC, or create less effective PCs so that we can have a TPK to just acquire glory awards just isn't fun for our group, so we are going back to our normal campaign until the next Lair Assault comes out.

 

[KarinsDad]

I think the scenario would be completely different if it was 3 separate encounters over 20 rnds instead of one mega encounter - the dailies, and encounter long effects have too much weight.

I totally agree with this. I don't understand how WotC didn't figure this out when playtesting.

Some of the players playing this encounter a second time could take Blade Initiate and viola, instant +3 to AC for them for the entire encounter for a single feat and an Int of 13. Duh!

 

[Matt James]

I had all of the NPCs stay back and use similar tactics to the PCs. It forced the PCs in and I was able to slaughter them.

KarinsDad, I hope the PCs had fun. It took a bit of adjusting for me to realize it was me vs. them, and not me presenting a world and story. Lair Assault should be no-holds barred. I hope you guys stick around for the others when they come out. I designed the third in the series and I hope you find it to your liking.

 

[jodyjohnson]

I think that group would be challenged to complete the Speed Demon glory award.

Or maybe they should keep trying with less optimised characters or less players each time.

If it was just about winning the encounter there's little reason to have it last 13 weeks.

In the end though it was a challenge - but the challenge all happened during character building so that the actual play itself was a challengeless grind.

 

[KarinsDad]

I had all of the NPCs stay back and use similar tactics to the PCs. It forced the PCs in and I was able to slaughter them.

KarinsDad, I hope the PCs had fun. It took a bit of adjusting for me to realize it was me vs. them, and not me presenting a world and story. Lair Assault should be no-holds barred. I hope you guys stick around for the others when they come out. I designed the third in the series and I hope you find it to your liking.

The PCs did not have fun.

The players had a blast.

The DM was a little bit bored. "Ha ha, I hit the Bard with a mega attack" Ranger immediate interrupt "Err, no, the foe is dead or the attack misses".

It was actually fun for me as well, but I pulled out every stop I could think of and it didn't help. The players had too many options, there were not enough foes, until the end of the encounter Dailies were too potent, the foes did too little damage, and the terrain damage which was the major set of damage in the encounter was easily avoided by the players.

Even the cover of the module telegraphed the kind of elemental resistance that the players should bring to the fight. Don't let the cover give the players clues if you want to challenge them.

I had even planned on having the Warlocks when they were nearly dead do a shift over the mud and then teleport switch places with a PC so that the PC ended up in the mud and the Warlock would end up in the midst of the party (DM stretching the rules a bit), but both times it could have occurred (each Warlock), none of the PCs were taking ongoing damage anymore and the Warlock could not use the transposition power.

PS. A running encounter like this makes "until end of encounter" dailies too powerful. Have the PCs do rests, make them run out of healing surges and Dailies. Always have more foes per room than PCs so that Action Economy is in the favor of the NPCs. That's the way to challenge them. This encounter was a poor first attempt by WotC. I hope the next two are much better.