Horse hockey. They totally shut down two types of somewhat common builds. Not just a little, but completely.
Nullzone's swordmage survived to the end with a triumphant team. The evidence does not support your conclusion.
Maybe next time, they'll say "If you are using an Axe, then every time you hit with it, your PC and every PC within 3 squares takes 10 cold damage.". You got lucky and didn't take an axe, good for you.
You forgot to mention that several of your enemies will also wield axes, and that most of them have resist 10 cold. I'd be interested to see how that effect could be justified in the same way that the consequences of teleportation were, but that's actually less of an obstacle. I mean, if you were adaptable, you'd start looking around for other weapons. Sure, it sucks to lose out on your Expertise feat and the weapon's enhancement bonus and other properties, but you do what everyone that ever got a raw deal in real life does: you adapt to the situtation, or you die.
I'd also be interested to see what would cause everyone to take 10 acid damage every time someone attempted to use a healing surge. Figuring out how to game that to advantage would be a pretty sweet challenge.
Where does one draw the line between good encounter design and crappy encounter design? Personally, I wasn't impressed by virtually any of this design. I considered the entire encounter (from not being flexible for future encounters, to handing out a map, to telegraphing players to take fire resistance, to screwing over some classes) to be a pretty subpar design. C- at best.
Yes, I've read your assessment both here and on the WotC forums. It tells me more about your limitations than the systems.
I've run this thing four times now, and seen it run twice by other DMs, and never once have I seen it play out the same. The last group to run through it spent the last hour on their feet with excitement, and most of them were on their second or third attempt at the place. I've already got the option to rearrange the traps to my heart's content, and mix and match for monsters gives me sixteen different combinations for monsters before I place any of them in the lair, and that's not even taking nightmare mode into consideration.
Thus far, I've seen four different strategies attempted for breaking down that sealed door, all of which managed it within two rounds, even though three of those four attempts relied heavily on luck. That's backfired terribly twice, as neither party made sure the route behind them was probably secured. (The last group had it down to a science. Unfortunately, the one enemy they'd left behind had to take the long way around, justifying reinforcements from the creatures I'd placed along that route during setup.)
I've only met one guy that didn't enjoy the experience, and even he admitted that it was because he preferred a different playing style. Good for him, knowing what he wants from the system, and I hope he finds it soon.
Not in my group. We only played it once. It was too boring with too few ways to modify it to play a second time, especially when a party wipes through it the first time.
Earlier, you claimed you'd done everything you could to challenge your players. That's bunk. You couldn't beat a group that hid most of its membership behind the portcullis? Really? There was very little they could have done to strike Vell if he and his entourage moved down to the bottom left corner. but that idea was just too advanced? Hey, most of their attacks wouldn't have been able to get around the forge from that angle either. Did you even give any thought to having Vell, the guy with time on his side, retreating toward the rune-filled corridor? How many ranged 20 attacks did the rest of the party have?
I know I've made mistakes with this thing (lots of mistakes, most of them in the player's favour), and yet we've run about twenty different players through it, with only two PCs surviving (but unsuccessful) to the 20th round. You attempted it once, with one group, and you're done?
What you describe as boredom, I see as the frustration of someone that doesn't understand (or perhaps just doesn't care to understand) how to use the tools effectively. Maybe that's an unfair assessment, but I find that's usually what's behind such claims.
Your first post reviewing your only attempt at this adventure discussed how much your players enjoyed themselves. Then you turned around and called the program a failure. There seems to be a disconnect here.
Sometimes, life's not fair. But there is a difference between your PC heading into this direction and falling into a trap and the encounter designers saying "Bwa ha ha ha ha ha", those offensive Swordmages (as opposed to any other class) are going to be totally screwed here. The former trap catches any player, the latter trap is designed to screw over one type of player.
You see one player screwed over. I see a team-building exercise. You see teleportation as impossible. I see resources that can still be exploited by anyone that can properly weigh the risk against the reward. The Aegis of Assault works just fine if the party puts a bit more thought into their formations and have the swordmage work harder to stay adjacent to his target. (It's not like you have to teleport and attack when you're already adjacent to the creature you marked. If you can do both as an immediate reaction, the option to do either also exists.) Turtling may not be the favoured defender strategy, and most people don't like using their standard action for full defense or to aid another's attack, but it's something every defender should be prepared to do.
One is a matter of bad luck during the encounter, the other is a matter of bad luck picking a class that the designers totally screwed over for this encounter. That poster is totally within his rights to be hacked off at WotC because that part of the design is just plain terrible.
Well, sure, Nullzone has the right to complain, and the right to be wrong, and the right to walk away as I attempt to play this subatomic violin. Meanwhile, if I've got four teammates in the game counting on me, I have more important things to do during the next three hours than to whine about how useless I am. Seriously, how badly screwed over can you have been if your "helpless" character comes through alive and victorious? I'll admit that Nullzone earned some bragging rights there...only to lose them by griping about how unfair this was.
A treat for a forward looking player? You mean like those reading up on it on the Internet? Snort.
Nah, there's paying attention to what's presented in the advertising (in case the adventure's title wasn't clue enough), and then there are people who think cheating makes them better players. All they're doing is robbing themselves.
PS. I doubt you'll find a lot of people who agree with your POV here.
The appeal to majority fallacy? Really?
Screwing a specific class over is just wrong.
No, screwing over a specific player is just wrong--and no, they're not the same thing. If your character can't do what he does best, you figure out what you can do. If that bores you, try to find something else that could work. Maybe even try playing the character a bit?
Hey, Nullzone, was your entire table bored for the whole three hours, or was it just you? Because if it was just you, you might want to show more interest in what the other players are doing.
I assume the designers just thought they were going to throw in a feature to catch Eladrin off guard and just plain forgot about offensive Swordmages. Either that, or they're pretty darn poor designers.
Or...they thought it was an interesting feature, realized that any consequences it might have were no more than a bonus obstacle for certain groups, and decided to include it without regard to the First World Problems it would cause some people.
I'm pretty sure the problem wasn't with the design team here.
