Post your Lair Assault Results Here (Spoilers)

[Saracenus]

Our controller was instrumental in our flawless (well nearly flawless victory).

My Sorcerer was not a big damage dealer (in comparison to the rogue and striker) but added some control at key moments. I would say that Leader, Striker, and Controller are key, Defender is really the one that is iffy.

I would say that speed, alternate movement, team synergy and surge-less healing is the key to success.

For instance the team Thief had Acrobat's Trick which allowed her to climb at movement - 2, which in turn allowed her to move around enemies, avoid terrain effects, and +2 damage.

I took Sorcerous Sirocco which allowed me and another party member that had fair but sketchy Acrobatics mods get past a major terrain hazard.

The TacLord was built to take advantage of the sick basic attack damage that both the Slayer and the Thief were dishing out.

Our Hunter Ranger moved, knocked prone and otherwise messed up the opposition.

The fighter took the heat off us glass canons and absorbed a ton of damage (well over a 150 damage over the course of 14 rounds). He also dished some good damage and was able to nova one round.

The fact that both the Hunter and my Sorcerer were regenerating each round took pressure off the TacLord who kept the Defender and the Thief up and running.

Being bad ass individually is not enough. If your team doesn't work well together you will fail.

 

[KarinsDad]

Anyone else getting the feeling that for power, it is best to just ignore controllers and defenders?

It's not so much ignoring controllers and defenders as it is making sure that you have multiple strikers and multiple ways to heal.

A warlord does both healing and can give attacks to a striker. It's like having both a healer and a striker in the same PC.

Defenders and controllers still have their function, but I wouldn't have more than one each in the party if I wanted to win this. For example, a controller locking down the BBEG for 2 rounds could really help give the team time to wipe out his followers before concentrating firepower on the BBEG himself.

 

[Zuche]

Yes, the challenge favours strikers with leader support, but some argue that the system favours that combination anyway. You'll still get decent mileage out of a controller, but playing the defender effectively may be more of a challenge here. Your enemies can play a nasty game of hit and run if you let them, and there's just enough cooperation between powers to let them do that.

I was wondering when someone else would notice the armor of sudden recovery. Did your group figure out how to maximize its potential for this place yet?

Three groups defeated in my city now, though I think they'll do better when they leave character design to one of the guys that showed up on Thursday night. He'd designed two party options, and he'd designed them well. Thus far, they've been designing their characters independently, with non-helpful levels of overlap.

I gave them the benefit of the doubt on jump checks (counting the same running start for two jump checks in one round, rather than resetting it from one jump to the next) and an attempt to seal an iron door with rope (using the break check for the door instead of the rope, where normally I'd have required a Thievery check to get the full benefit from the door). Sure, pushing mercilessly is the goal, but after how much they'd struggled just to get to the second room, it felt more important to help them move things along instead of getting bogged down in the mud room.

One thing people may be overlooking about this program is how useful it can be as a DM training tool. Without the normal balance limits in place and free reign to experiment with monster and trap placement (and monster selection), there's lots of room to find out what works best against certain groups and what allows certain character types to shine better.

My goal is to make better use of the available resources each time I run this. I've noted a few things that worked quite well, a few that didn't, and times I completely botched my handling of a given option. The insights it's given into some of the players has also been handy. I now have a better feel for how to best trip up some of them, and which ones bear more watching. (One of them may not have been cheating, but he displayed a consistent trend toward... favourable inaccuracies.)

It was also interesting to see how few players paid attention to the promotional material for this game before they played. Only two of the first twelve opted to bring fire protection. Only one thought to test the merits of cold damage. I'm not sure how many of them realized that the packaging was intended to provide them with knowledge their characters were likely to have had in advance.

I'd like to see future Lair Assaults make better use of this "forewarned" feature. For example, if a player attempts and succeeds on a History check before the encounter, the party is given some additional benefit to assist them in the challenge ahead: a pertinent item, for example, or a means to safely bypass certain defenses. Knowledge checks could always use more love.

 

[Rechan]

Anyone notice that a lot of these groups are throwing Essentials characters in?

I can't tell if that's to just take advantage of the Warlord extra-MBA exploit, because they don't have to worry about E/D powers, or because the Essentials are just more popular.

 

[Dice4Hire]

Anyone notice that a lot of these groups are throwing Essentials characters in?

I can't tell if that's to just take advantage of the Warlord extra-MBA exploit, because they don't have to worry about E/D powers, or because the Essentials are just more popular.

Well, warlords with Essentials strikers, is a bit cheesy, in my opinion.

But I am wondering why also. The older classes have more dailies and such with till end of encounter effects. I think I would tend to go with one of the older classes. Being a barbarian with a nice rage would be pretty nice. Other classes can also get some really nice encounter effects.

It is intersting to see what people choose.

 

[Saracenus]

My wife built her Thief in less than 2 hours (most of that was magic item selection).

I think the reason essentials PCs are so popular is they are pretty damn good out of the box and with the right non-essentials feats can be completely bad-ass.

My wife's Thief with CA was pumping out consistently 4d8+11 on a charge and 3d8+11 when not charging. This does not include +1d6 for Backstab twice an encounter. She has a duelist weapon so she did an additional +1d6 and +1d8 with a crit.

So:
Not Charging: 14-35 damage/35+1d8+1d6 damage on a crit.
Charging: 15-41 damage/41+1d8+1d6 damage on a crit.

Now she could up that with Backstab for an additional +1d6 and +2 if she uses the Acrobat's Trick.

To get this, 2 feats and one magic weapon.

Had she taken Vanguard weapon it would have been 5d8+11 on a charge.

Why bother with something that requires so much more work?

 

[Mengu]

Yeah the thief is great in both mobility and in striking, out of the box, requires very little additional optimization.

I wouldn't throw out defenders or AEDU classes though. The warden I came up with for an all dwarf party was dealing little over 30 damage a hit, plus another 4 at the start of the enemy's turn. After the cleric's party buffs, and his little cloud of permanent concealment, had 26 AC and resist all 5. With saves at the start of his turn, minor action second wind, etc, he is a pretty durable melee machine.

 

[Taed]

We only had about 2.5 hours to play (the person with the module was an hour late and then left it at home so someone then brought it, very frustrating), and I feel that we only did so-so.

We were heavy on melee. I was a Warforged Storm Warden, and there was a Minotaur Earth Warden and a Minotaur Barbarian. To round it out, we had a Human Shaman and a Revenant Vampire.

The only control we had was the Storm Warden's slides (largely just 1 square) due to powers and Mark of Storms. The only healing we had was the Shaman, though the Storm Warden had Inspiring Fortitude for one-time temporary HPs. We were also short on ranged attacks. So, it wasn't looking too good going into it.

I felt we got kicked around more than we should have in the first room (fire elemental thing and 4 human blow-up-y things), but while two of us were bloodied at the end of that (Storm Warden took the brunt of the damage), we healed up well enough. Shaman healed who he could and Storm Warden then used Inspiring Fortitude to give everyone 14 temporary hit points, so we were looking good at the end of the third round.

We went straight and found the lava floor and a fireball-shooting statue 15 feet away. There was something going on with the doors (not sure if it was in the module or DM's choice) such that we couldn't knock them down or remove the pins. If we could have, it would have been a 20 foot jump to the far end of the room, do-able for 3 of us. As it was, the door blocked a clear jump. I then jumped and wanted to grab the statue, get in back of it, and knock it over by pushing between it and the wall. I jumped and the DM said that the statue was some combination of super-slippery or magically repellent (again, don't know if the module has that or just the DM being difficult) such that I couldn't get a grab on it and I fell in the lava. And then the round 4 stuff happened and it turned to all lava. I didn't die, but got pulled out with a longspear with lots of damage.

At that point (about 2 hours in), the players of the two Minotaurs had to leave, so we were down to 3 players.

We then gave up on that room and moved to the mud room. We took care of two bat-things, which took 2 rounds with just the 3 of us. I did a test jump to the first hanging platform (+13 Athletics), and that went OK, but the other two characters would be hard-pressed to get across each 15 foot jump as they were both low on Athletics. There were also two deformed humanoid things on the far ledge which hadn't attacked us yet, so we would have to deal with them to get to the ledge. I can only hope that if one of us got across, we could either find a switch to raise the other platforms, or use rope to pull the platforms close enough to jump between each.

At that point we stopped, and intend to try it again in 2 weeks, though some of us will probably choose different characters.

So, while we didn't die, we were only part-way through and I don't feel that we did so well.

We spent too much time on melee, and it seems that the right approach would be to control the field, keep moving, and use ranged attacks.

 

[Saracenus]

Mengu,

I wasn't giving up on defenders or AEDU clases. Our party composition was half essentials and half AEDU.

We had 1 Defender who to his credit soaked up a metric ton of damage.

I was merely pointing out that Essentials PCs are popular because they don't require a level of character ops mastery that say PH1-3 class requires. If I only have to max my feats, theme, background and magic items it takes a tremendous burden off building a PC.

Also lets face it, the Essentials Thief can find CA like a pig snuffling for truffles. The AEDU version of the rogue requires way more teamwork and build precision to get that.

Dice4Hire,

The whole point of Lair Assault is bring the cheese. If you don't you are either doing it wrong or trying to get a specific Glory Award. Just sayin'.

It will be interesting to see how Lair Assault plays with CharOps assumptions about build strategies. Most are going for DPR, but ignore synergy between PCs.

 

[Taed]

The warden I came up with for an all dwarf party was dealing little over 30 damage a hit, plus another 4 at the start of the enemy's turn. After the cleric's party buffs, and his little cloud of permanent concealment, had 26 AC and resist all 5. With saves at the start of his turn, minor action second wind, etc, he is a pretty durable melee machine.

Can you describe how you did that? My warden was nowhere near as good. While it sounds like we both used Boiling Cloud (which explains your "little cloud of permanent concealment" and "4 at the start of the enemy's turn"), my damage was only 1d8+6 (~10) with a +1 long sword (Storm Biter Warblade) for the at-wills, and an AC 22 (23 after Form of Mountain's Thunder) with +1 hide (Bloodcut). To round it out, since he was warforged, he had a Disk of Energy Resistance.