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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sagiro" data-source="post: 4936934" data-attributes="member: 726">Tonight was Run #21, and something of an oddity.   We had only four players – the players of Toiva, Logan and Strontium were all out, and we had a guest player as Temigent the Goliath Barbarian.  With Bramble, Caldwell and Cobalt, we therefore had three strikers (barbarian, rogue, ranger) and one leader (shaman).  Super-brief plot overview:  we started with an interrogation of the captured Kenku assassin from the previous run.   He turned out to be a member of an officially sanctioned assassins' group called “The Enlightened” that only agrees to target evil or unsavory types.  Our prisoner didn't know anything about why Bramble was chosen as a target, so the interrogation didn't get us much more info.  Bramble certainly doesn't seem evil or unsavory. Anyhow, a couple days later our new Commander, Brogh, decided we should make the Grey Guard tower more defensible.  Our job was to inventory and clean out one of the tower's sub-basements, filled with long-abandoned junk.  We were clearing out space and sorting through oddments when a stuffed elk's head opened its eyes and spoke.  It was being possessed by some intelligence that was incensed to discover that we were not spell-casters.  It launched a crazy attack.To jump back for a second:  when we first started going through the sub-basement, Piratecat asked each of us to describe two things we saw in the room.  We described a bunch of stuff, including a large statue, a pile of old papers recently used as a mattress by Temigent, a hat-rack, a book-case missing a shelf – random stuff.  Little did we know that Piratecat was about to attack us with our own creations!The malign being animating the elk-head started animating all sorts of junk in the large basement, and impelling said junk to attack us!  Most of the stuff was small and treated as minions – a set of fireplace tools, a barrel of warped arrows, some costumes from an old trunk, a painted-over mirror, the elk's head – but a few things, including a stuffed owl-bear, the aforementioned stone statue, and a huge pile of ropes and chains, were tougher to fight.  What made the fight so tough was that the minions (fictionally, random stuff that our one enemy was animating) were endless.  At first it looked like we were making headway, and figured that we could whittle down the smaller fry until only the actual enemy would be remaining.  But that's not how it worked.  In fact, we didn't realize until about the 2/3 point of the fight that there was a skill challenge embedded in the combat itself.  We could take standard actions to try to figure out where the guiding intelligence was coming from, and this eventually allowed us to discover the source of our pain – an evil book beneath an overturned shelf.  With the room filling up with hostile odds and ends, Bramble annihilated the book with thunder damage and the threat vanished.  Some notes on the battle:- Piratecat re-purposed some monsters for this fight; we ended up fighting an “Arbalester” (The stuffed owl-bear, which hurled projectiles at us), a “Chain Guardian” (the pile of ropes and chains) and an Animated Statue (the stone statue, naturally). These were a Level 4 Artillery, a Level 5 Elite Controller, and a Level 5 Brute, respectively.  Additionally there was a never-ending stream of “Possessed Odds and Ends” which were Level 5 Minions.   Conservatively estimating there were 10 of these in total, that makes 1275 XP worth of enemies, which is somewhere between Level+2 and Level+3 for a party of four 5th level PC's.  (And Temigent is only 4th level).  So, a hard encounter, and it felt like one.  No one went unconscious, but Temigent was down to 7 HP at one point, and the other three of us spent a large portion of the fight bloodied.- Once again, Bramble spent most of her healing on herself; the enemies had the best luck hitting her.- Temigent, despite being 4th level, way outclasses the rogue and ranger for damage, for which he's incredibly optimized.  - 20 STR  - Wields a heavy flail, which does 2d6 damage  - Feats give him +2 damage, and an additional +1 while raging  - His daily is Bloodhunt Rage, which gives him an addition +4 to damage if he or his foe is bloodied.  So, with Avalanche strike while bloodied, he did 6d6 + 18.  Even with his at-wills he was doing 2d6+1d8+15.  By comparison, the best Cobalt can do with an at-will is 1d4+2d8+8, which assumes combat advantage.   To put it another way, the rogues, even with sneak attack, can get their damage up into the low 20s about half the time.  Temigent did 45 in one swing with his Avalanche Stirke, and his at-wills rate to do about 25.- Doc Caldwell has taken the “Student of Artifice” Feat, which gets him the use of the Healing Infusion power from the Eberron Player's Guide.  He made good use of it, lobbing a ball of healing goop at a heavily-injured Temigent.- With the Chain Guardian nearly dead, Bramble used an attack that did a base 2d6 damage. Anything other than snake-eyes would kill it.  “Just don't roll two ones,” said Caldwell's player. We all groaned. “Why did you say that?”    Sure enough:  snake eyes.  Sigh.- We blew through a LOT of Dailies in this fight, which makes sense given its difficulty.</blockquote>

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