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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Obryn" data-source="post: 4971430" data-attributes="member: 11821">Well, damn.  We only made it through two encounters tonight - kind of a short session, and battles took extra-long due to everyone running 2 PCs for the night - but the one I thought would be rough wasn't, and the one I thought would be a pushover almost killed several PCs, and bloodied every single one.  In some cases, several times.[sblock]The Roper encounter was pie.  I think that was mostly due to excellent rolling on the party's part, and awful rolling on mine.  The Rogue critted with a sneak attack, and rolled well on her vicious weapon, doing somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 damage.  And the Roper couldn't roll above a 10 to save his life.  Literally.  So I bloodied one PC, and then he was done.  The Swordmage's mark really sucked the fight out of him, too.On the other hand, the hags+skeleton fight...  Wow.  Now, I modified this - the hags looked ridiculously easy and dull to me, so I swapped them out with a foe of equivalent XP - a single Elite Lamia.  Nevertheless, I figured the trolls wouldn't be a threat, and the lamia would be dealt with.Wow, was I wrong.  First off, the party's companion character - an upgraded Splug who's been a fun recurring NPC in the campaign - ran down to go check out her mushrooms.  Everyone else followed.  Result: Party surrounded.Second, the Lamia is a really nasty opponent.  Her swarminess meant that only our Invoker was doing anything against her, basically.  (And, ironically, the trolls' explosions took her down a few pegs!)  Nobody wanted to land next to her, and her minor-sustained swarm took a ton of HPs off the swordmage and made him run away and hide.  And a recharge close burst 5 stun (save ends)?  Whoa.  She slowed them down a bit for the skeletons to beat on.  I only used that twice, though - being stunned sucks.  It sucked slightly less since every player was running 2 characters, but still.Third, the skeletons I thought would do nothing at all (given the warren trolls' abysmal performance) were actually insanely powerful.  I hadn't realized how much damage they could do.  And their dice were on fire this fight - tons of 15+ rolls, and a few crits on top.  These things hit hard, and when the Lamia was occupying the party's attention, these guys were performing a major beatdown.  I hadn't looked closely, but their damage is 2d8+16 (or 2d8+32 on a crit).  Huge.  They knocked the swordmage and the rogue out, and almost took the avenger and the artificer with them.  (The deva invoker was okay against them - resist 11 necrotic helped.)  What's more, with 5 of them, that's 10 free explosions for yet more necrotic damage.  And everyone actually used their second winds.I had no idea this was the fight that would almost send the party running.  But yeah, it was a nice way to soften them up and burn some of their action points and dailies before their fight with Skalmad... who I upgraded, giving him some Warden powers. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />[/sblock]-O</blockquote>

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