Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue" data-source="post: 6948407" data-attributes="member: 20564">Session #6Missed Session #5, was on vacation for my 15 year wedding anniversary.We are making a contact in a town when three Hill Giants, one advanced, come upon us.  Lots of interesting terrain that we didn't make good use of because we wanted to stop them hard so they couldn't hurt any townsfolk.Went first again.  I tell you, advantage on initiative for a dex-based class is basically a license to go first all the time.  Adding in advantage the first round (on everyone since you're going first) and that's quite nice.Because I didn't take sharpshooter but do have Archery Fighting style, I need 3s or higher to hit.  So every attack hits.  Unfortunately the giants weren't adjacent so Hordebreaker didn't kick in and I only took 2 attacks since I used my bonus action to Hunter's Mark, but 2 hits did around 32 damage.  Then our sorcerer (he's back) hit me and the GWM paladin with twin spell Haste.  OMG, we Cuisinarted through them.  The paladin was doing more damage - oath for advantage, GWM for +10 per attack, and then laying smites on it made up for my extra attack, but he had to engage in melee so I'm fine with that.With the Bard taking out one with Tasha's Uncontrollable Hideous Laughter in round 1, I did the killing blow on giant one at the top of round 2 and started on the 2nd which I think the monk finished off, and then we dealt with the tasha'd one.  I think they each got a single Attack action for the entire combat, maybe one got a second.I won't go through the play by play, just that I was hitting 90% of the time for 2d6+9 with 3 attacks, which is a 43.2 expected damage per round.Then we started tracking them - trained Survival plus good Wis for spell DCs and it was easy.  The Bard is also trained and used the Help action to grant advantage.At this point I worked out with the DM about regular use of Primeval Awareness, with the basic intent of "if I sense giants I want to intercept".  It took several days but we did, and went after them.  Each night I used my two 2nd level spell slots to cast Darkvision (8 hrs, no concentration) so we had people who could see in the dark on every watch.Small crowd of four ogres - they are giant type.  I stealthed up with the bard to check on them and listed thanks to Giant language from favored enemy, then we went back to report.The sorcerer has been trying to impress all of us how cool he was and basically maneuvered himself into "I can take them by myself".He couldn't.We stepped in to save them, but this was an easy battle.  Star was the bard with hypnotic pattern who took out half of them.Another day of traveling put us in contact with a sizable patrol.  My DM was going with intent of my primeval awareness in looking for giants, so I didn't know about all the bugbears with them.  This was again several Hill Giants and Ogres, more spread out, with a sizable bugbear force.Star of this one was the monk who did a one-turn solo kill on one of the ogres, burning though all of her Ki with Fists of Flame with extra damage and a flurry of blows.  That was good to watch - against a favored enemy or with hunter's mark I do a lot more damage then the monk usually, and with spending the feat on Crossbow Expert I'm keeping up with her 3-4 attacks per round.  And I hit more often with Archery fighting style and a +1 hand crossbow.  So I'm glad she's started pulling out her cool abilities because that's what's going to make her special.  And she gets them all back after a short rest.Again, UA Ranger abilities that came into heavy play:  archery fighting style, advantage on init, advantage first round of combat against those who haven't gone, extra attack, favored enemy, ranger skill list, spellcasting (hunter's mark and darkvision), and can't forget primeval awareness.  Horde Breaker, very useful in earlier sessions, wasn't big this one, but that's the only ranger feature that hasn't gotten a workout.End of this session just crested us to 7th.  We've been ignoring several side quests that feel on the meta-side designed to get us magic items and XP, so I think the DM has been using my primeval awareness to feed us more "random" encounters to get us to a minimum survivable level for the places we're going.  I'm happy to hand him that opportunity.For completeness I'm going to look around at multiclass options, but I think I'm staying UA Ranger the whole way to get the experience and report on it.</blockquote>

Verification