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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MrMyth" data-source="post: 4742043" data-attributes="member: 61155">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]</blockquote>

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