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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FireLance" data-source="post: 5289753" data-attributes="member: 3424">Oh, I agree that it definitely has very strong alpha strike capabilities. With shroud of gloom, anyone who gets hit by its breath weapon is looking at 2d8+18 acid damage. That's enough to potentially drop many low-level characters from full hit points to 0 with a single attack roll. What makes it worse is that the PCs are often bunched together at the start of an encounter, and the dragon's high initiative modifier means that it will likely act before most of the PCs, giving it a good chance to catch most of them with its breath weapon.In fact, I think I would worry more about the combination of shroud of gloom and breath weapon than acid blood. All that is required to defeat the latter are a combination of reach weapons for the melee combatants and some co-ordination on the part of the PCs to ready or delay their attacks until nobody is adjacent to the dragon. Yes, that means that a PC who is prone may have to give up his attack for the round in order to stand up and shift away, but again, feature, not bug (at least to me).If I find that the one-two punch of shroud of gloom and action point breath weapon to be too deadly in play, I may decide to institute the following house rule: the dragon can only use shroud of gloom when it starts its turn with its breath weapon unavailable for use. This means that:1. Its initial breath weapon attack will always be unenhanced by shroud of gloom, giving PCs time to spread out if they happen to be bunched together at the start of the encounter.2. A one-two punch is always impossible on the dragon's turn, so the PCs should have some time to react and possibly neutralize the effect on some or all of them before the dragon can follow up with its breath weapon. However, if the dragon uses shroud of gloom and the next PC to act decides to attack and manages to bloody it while standing in a group with the rest of his party, it would be (perhaps literally) his own funeral.3. In terms of pacing, it removes the temptation for the DM to go nova at the start of the fight and makes the fight feel more variable because this complication will be introduced sometime between the initial shock and the time that the dragon becomes bloodied.Story-wise, I can probably spin some justification around the idea that shroud of gloom is formed from the exhalations produced by a black dragon while its breath weapon is recharging.</blockquote>

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