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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sagiro" data-source="post: 4921531" data-attributes="member: 726">We played again tonight – run #20 of the campaign, I think.  (Piratecat, can you confirm?)  I'll skip the plot-related stuff, and comment on everything else.    Other players should feel free to chime in with additions and corrections, as always.This was our first game at 5th level, which meant we all had new shiny new Level 5 dailies:- Logan and Cobalt (rogues) both selected Downward Spiral from Martial Power- Toiva (paladin) selected Unyielding Faith from Divine Power- Bramble (shaman) selected Earthrage Spirit- Strontium (wizard) got to pick 3 dailies for his spellbook.  One was Web, and the other two were from Arcane Power, which I don't own.  One of them, used tonight, does psychic damage and grants combat advantage to allies.  I don't recall anything about the 3rd.- Doc Caldwell (ranger) selected Adaptive Assault from Martial PowerThere was also a fair amount of swapping choices out from previous levels.  Logan swapped out Adaptive Flanker, in favor of  Fast Hands – the new Skill Utility that lets you draw, sheathe, pick-up item, etc. as a free action 1/round.  He also swapped out a feat (forget which one) in order to take Slaying Action.  Bramble swapped out Blessing of the Seven Winds to take Spirit of the Healing Flood.  Caldwell swapped out something as well (his Utility? Not sure) to get the ability to allow a dying ally to spend a Healing Surge.With some in-game downtime at the start of the run, we bought some new Alchemical recipes (Blastpatch and Bloodstinger Poison), and made some Healing Potions using the Brew Potion ritual (a perk of being 5th level!).  And, of course, there was a good battle in this game.  A Kenku hit squad had been sent to take out Bramble, and they lured us into an ambush on the streets of Floodford.  The enemies were: Skrax, a Kenku Assassin (Level 5 Elite Skirmisher) Grink, a Kenku Wing Mage (Level 5 Artillery) Punnuk, a Kenku Ringleader (Level 4 Solider – Leader) Fekkel and Kelg, Kenku Sneaks (Level 4 Lurkers)In theory, that's somewhere between a Level -1 and a Level +0 encounter, but it was pretty hairy at the beginning, as all the attackers targeted Bramble exclusively.  Also, the Kenku got a surprise round, and rolled extremely well on their initiative rolls.  As it happens, Bramble herself (with her mighty Perception Skill) was the only one of us not surprised – a good thing, since had all the enemies gotten to go twice before her, she certainly would have died.  As it was, they had done 33 our of her 50 HP before she got to go, and even with some self-healing on her turn, they had her down to the single-digits before anyone  else in the party could act!Once we recovered a bit, the battle went pretty well.   It was “healer, heal thyself” for Bramble, who managed to keep herself up while the rest of us did the damage.  Some other tactical notes:- Even knowing that it's best to gang up on one enemy at a time, it turns out to be extremely tricky in practice.  It seems like every battle with multiple foes, circumstances of terrain and initial placement of actors make ganging up a logistically unattractive choice.- Strontium's Fire Shroud was particularly effective – there were lots of burning birds taking ongoing fire 5 - The Kenku Assassin had a brutal power:  Feather Burst.  This is a Close Burst 2, enemies-only power that auto-blinds for a turn.  No attack roll necessary!  This was particularly unpopular with the party rogues, as blind = no combat advantage.  - Logan got three of the five enemies with a Blinding Barrage – there was a round or two in there where it seemed pretty much every combatant was blind.- Bramble's new Earthrage Spirit power hit 3 of the 5 enemies, but its use was late enough in the combat that the auto-knock-prone effect didn't end up mattering – subsequent hits to the victims were all death-blows!  Note for future battles:  use that one in the earliest possible round.- Logan made good use of his new feat (Slaying Action), scoring a round of double-sneak attack damage which piled 40+ points of damage onto Skrax.- On the other hand, Cobalt was pretty much a non-factor in this one.  Of his 4 or 5 attack rolls, 2 of them were “1's”, including an attack on which he was getting a +18 to hit.  (Action Point + Action Surge Feat + Combat Advantage). Argh!- This was the first battle of the campaign in which both Doc Caldwell and Strontium hit with a Daily.  In Stron's case, he hit with the power that grants all of his allies Combat Advantage against the target, and this was key in preventing the Assassin (the last bird standing) from escaping.- This was the most rules-intensive and condition-heavy battle of the campaign so far.   We spent a fair amount of time in the early rounds looking up rules on Concealment, Climbing, Forced Movement and some other stuff.  There are still a couple of rules questions we're not sure of:       - If a creature is Slowed, does the speed reduction affect the following power:  “Shift 4 squares and make an attack during that move”?       - Can you Slide an enemy through squares occupied by that enemy's allies?  What about a power that lets you Slide multiple enemies simultaneously – can you Slide them past each other?- As for the Conditions, I kept track of them on a white-board as we went.  It would have been a nightmare without it, but with a constant record of who was affected by what, things went pretty smoothly.   There was a LOT to keep track of in this one – blindness, slowed-ness, characters granting CA to specific other characters, ongoing damage, dazing effects, regeneration – the works.I made sure to change the enemy status to DEAD as we knocked them off.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" /></blockquote>

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