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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rystil Arden" data-source="post: 3688364" data-attributes="member: 29014">It's very difficult to gain surprise against the Fang Dragon's Blindsense.  I mean, you can assume Scry + Buff + Teleport, but then you can always assume that.  The mooks and such were mass-protected from Fire and Cold (Fire to protect against friendly fire and Cold because it seems natural to use against a Fire-based foe), but any sort of Energy-Substitution will take care of it.  Then again, the chances of having an Energy Sub (not Fire or Cold) Maximised Cone of Cold seem low.  Also, note that if not surprised, all of them, even the JPM, have the 1st-level Warblade ability to add Int to Ref saves.  For the JPM, this is especially huge.  I'd imagine that if you gave the mooks 2 Monk levels for Evasion, that would also help their AoE survivability.But as I said, I did tell you the 'right NPC group'--you had to expect it was optimised for that <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />At lower levels, a group made up of two Kineticists and two Warblades proved able to beat a better-equipped group of 4 higher-level PCs.  Specifically, 6th or 7th-level party (with all the equipment thereof) versus 5th-level NPCs is a big win for the NPCs.  The goal here is to blast the PCs 4 times in the first round for 6d6+6 damage each with Energy Missile, netting 108 Damage, save for half (they use Fire on heavy-armoured guys and Cold on Monk/Rogue guys, avoiding that nasty Evasion).  If they save every time, they still take 54, which will defeat pretty much anything up to the d6 HD guys for sure (even with 16 Con, which I think is an overestimate, the d6 HD guys average to 51 at level 6).  This is nearly 100% likely to take out the entire team.  They stand in separate groups (1 Warblade and 1 Kineticist each together but far from the others), thus making AoE unpalatable and the Warblade stands between the party and the Kineticist to prevent a charge.  They will generally be easily able to live through 1 round of PC actions as well, so they can get off another 12d6+12 on the next round, and I'm not really sure how any PC will live through that.  On the off-chance it happens, the Warblades have recovered their WRT and use it again.</blockquote>

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