Pyramid of Shadow, Major Concerns with Climax

[Cadfan]

My group is about to get to the final fight of Pyramid of Shadows. I have some concerns. Am I correct, or am I missing something?

This will be spoiler heavy.

[SBLOCK]The final fight involves a bad guy, Karavakos and his 12 shadow copies. The shadows are minions with relatively normal stats, though they do get a 6 damage ranged attack against reflex. Karavakos, by contrast, is an elite level 15 artillery monster.

The party is, and is supposed to be, level 10. The fight is a level 13 encounter.

First issue, his defenses. He's got an AC of 29, and a reflex of 32. Our wizard's attack bonus is +12, or +13 with a fire spell. Karavakos is a tiefling, so fire is a no-go due to fire resist 12. This means that our wizard hits this guy on a 20 with cloud of daggers, or a 19 with scorching burst (which then does 1d6-3 net damage). The cleric has the same problem. Our fighter, the character with the highest attack bonus, will hit on a 14+. Karavakos has about 250 hit points. No defense is below 29.

How is this supposed to work? Seriously. Am I missing something obvious? Flanking will help a bit, but our leader powers that boost accuracy mostly depend on hitting and won't be very useful since our leader only hits this guy on a natural 20. Our automatic damage powers are mostly fire, and this guy teleports so its going to be impossible to trap him in a zone in this full poster map encounter.

Second, the terrain. The Black Plinth and Energy Orbs deal 4d6 damage and stun (save ends) if you start your turn adjacent to them. You make saving throws at the end of your turn. You get stunned again at the start of your turn, unless you have moved outside of your turn. Then you take damage again. So... this automatically kills any character who can't move as an immediate or free action, or who doesn't have an ally capable of moving them?

I can't help but think that this combat is screwed. Even if our characters are underpowered, and I don't think they are, adding a flat +2 to everyone's attack rolls and defenses would STILL leave the spellcasters hitting on an 18+ with most of their spells.

I simply cannot imagine any plausible way for this fight to be won, short of exploiting the permanent pin from the Black Plinth and the Energy Orbs. Push Karavakos into it, sit back, drink a latte and wait? Other than that, the whole thing seems a foregone conclusion. And pushing him is really not an option, because he's a teleporter and can easily just never come near those terrain elements.

Should I drop his defenses by a few points?[/SBLOCK]

 

[Jack99]

Non-elite level 15 artillery have defenses down to 22 or so. Sounds like his defenses are a bit high - at least some of them.

Edit: Just to clarify, some regular monsters do have defenses up there, such as the Malison Incanter, who has 29, 26, 27, 27.

 

[C_M2008]

From what I can tell your PCs attack bonuses are right where they should be for their level.

I'd drop the AC one point (thus a flank will bring the fighters hit ratio to 50%) and lower the NADs to 25/26 to give the casters a chance.

I'd lower the damage on the terrain to 3d6 and replace stunned with weakened, otherwise yes it is an autokill.

Of course miss powers, especially reaping strike will be very good here.

Adding some positive terrain feature that gives the PCs a boost might be cool, especially if a skill challenge is needed to activate it.


But another example of awesome adventure writing from WoTC, the 4e rules are great, but I've not been impressed with the modules thus far.

 

[MrMyth]

I actually fully revamped this encounter when I ran it, both for some of the reasons you describe and a few others.

[sblock]The thing I noticed about Karavakos that really bugged me is how boring fighting him would be. Once he uses Blast of Cold and Thunderlance (and he could drop both round 1 with an Action Point), he basically gets to spend the fight spamming Scorching Burst.

So I recreated him from the ground up as an Elite Tiefling Wizard, which got him enough powers to actually have different actions from round to round. His defenses, however, remained much the same - namely, very high, and hard for the PCs to deal with.

What I did was alter one Feature of the Area - the Black Pillar in the nearby room. In the book, it says it is simply some pillar of darkness that hurts people that enter it. As just another product of Karavakos's experiments, it doesn't seem all that interesting as a part of the encounter. I decided it instead had a holographic image of the Pyramid floating inside the Pillar, and that this was how Karavakos viewed and manipulated events in the rest of the Pyramid. When they PCs saw this, I let them make skill checks to figure out what this was - and that if Karavakos was connected to it, attacking it could potentially create feedback that hurt him.

I can't remember the exact details I came up with, but I gave it much more reasonable defenses, had attacks against it slightly damage Karavakos, and after a certain number of attacks it shatters and Karavakos takes a big hit to his Defenses.

What this meant was the following:
1) The PCs had a way to do some minor damage to Karavakos while dealing with all his duplicates.
2) The PCs could get some damage into Karavakos, but couldn't as easily hit him with direct effects - and thus, a round one stun wouldn't make the encounter completely anticlimactic.
3) Eventually, as the fight enters its endgame stages (and presumably when the PCs are really feeling the burn), Karavakos suddenly gets weakened and is vulnerable for the final take-down. (Which makes a good point for him to run to the heart of the Pyramid and perform Karavakos's Last Stand.)


For the Energy Orbs and Black Plinths, I just decided that when the PCs got hit by the damage + stun, it also knocked them back by one square, so it only hits them once. I'd recommending doing the same - or if you do want it to still be nasty, keep it as written, but allow them to shift 1 square away from it when they successfully save. (So once they save, they get away, but they will be feeling the pain until then.)[/sblock]

 

[Agamon]

My level 12 party is having no problem with AC 29/ Ref 32. They fought an elite dragon eel with AC 33/F 32/R 29/W 28 with some hook horrors and a leveled up bog hag and it was a fun fight. Granted they get a couple more pluses due to being paragons and 2 levels higher, but is it that much difference?

 

[wayne62682]

I don't know if my DM modified the encounter at all (I think there were less than 12 copies, but I didn't keep track) but my group, with only 4 players, beat him at only 9th level (we skipped part of the dungeon). It was hard, but we didn't have an insane amount of trouble with him.

Our group was:

* Dragonborn Fighter (me), sword+board, with +3 Lifedrinker Longsword
* Eladrin Ranger, archer, with +2 Feybane (something like that?) bow, +2 (maybe +3?) leather
* Dwarf Cleric, melee type, with +2 Flaming Maul and +3 scale
* Eladrin Wizard, blaster, with Staff of Storms (taken from a previous Karavakos shard), +3 robes

 

[SlyFlourish]

There are usually a bunch of ways a party can give another member +2 to hit. My group was level 10 when they faced him and had no trouble beating him down. I'm having a lot of trouble finding encounters tough enough to challenge them.

 

[hong]

Fights like this are where taclords come into their own. +3 or more from Lead The Attack can transform a fight, not to mention the bonus when the other characters spend their APs.

When we fought K, it was one of the best fights of the module. AFAIK, the DM only changed one thing: if you save against the stun, you also get pushed away so you're unaffected next round.

We didn't have a wizard, so there wasn't the problem of someone being useless against K. However, your wiz should have a field day against the minions.

 

[Nymrohd]

Well he got the elite defense bonus on his built to Ref which is what is causing you trouble. His base Ref should be 30 (10+7+6+5+2), AC should be 29 (10+7+6+5+1), Fort and Will should be 25 (10+7+3+5). Making him elite means giving him up to 3 +2s on defenses starting with the best and excluding any particularly weak ones. So I guess he should have AC 31, Fort 25, Ref 32, Will 25. AC should be higher, Ref is perfect, the other two should be quite lower. Probably the problem is your party is hitting the worst defenses.

Also I would expect a level 10 fighter to have +16 vs AC without being optimised. Is he a very low hit built (Str 16, prof +2 weapon, no weapon talent)?

 

[Cadfan]

Well he got the elite defense bonus on his built to Ref which is what is causing you trouble. His base Ref should be 30 (10+7+6+5+2), AC should be 29 (10+7+6+5+1), Fort and Will should be 25 (10+7+3+5). Making him elite means giving him up to 3 +2s on defenses starting with the best and excluding any particularly weak ones. So I guess he should have AC 31, Fort 25, Ref 32, Will 25. AC should be higher, Ref is perfect, the other two should be quite lower. Probably the problem is your party is hitting the worst defenses.

I suppose. Our ranged cleric attacks almost exclusively reflex, and certainly attacks reflex exclusively with her at will attacks. Our wizard's at wills exclusively attack reflex. This means we hit on a 20. Only a 20. Even if we had better gear, we'd still be hitting on a 19.

To those who keep saying that the fight was no problem for you, do you remember if your spellcasters were only able to hit on a 19 or a 20?

Also I would expect a level 10 fighter to have +16 vs AC without being optimised. Is he a very low hit built (Str 16, prof +2 weapon, no weapon talent)?

5 from level
5 from strength (starting strength 18)
2 from weapon proficiency
2 from weapon enhancement
1 from weapon talent

You can't assume a +3 weapon at level 10 unless the characters are being created from scratch.