Felon said:
Sure you're not crossing threads here? I didn't see where KM specified a given level or class. Either a warforged or dwarf could just as easily be, for instance, a wizard. So there's one huge assumption pulled out of thin air.
Energy drain, disease and poison are all, fundamentally, boosters to a melee combatant monster.
There are situations where some other creature type will make use of them, but fundamentally you're talking melee.
The bottom line here is that you're found a conveniently general way of sandbagging the entire example as it relates to the actual topic (warforged immunities), and not only this one but any other thread that comes along about a race or potentiall broken class design.
Sure - it's a general argument that if you're saying "These immunities are too good", you can point out "but everyone has those immunities/those immunities are of limited value". In this case, I'm responding to a monster someone else brought up, no doubt because it has a high CR and the warforged is immune to a few of it's attacks. The point is that by the time anyone is fighting one of these things, it's not all that serious a threat anyway, so saying that it isn't a serious threat to a warforged is basically saying warforged are just like anyone else.
Why does an ambush necessarily warrant a higher CR? Why is a high level party necessarily aware that a nightcrawler is about to come bursting out from under their feet at any given instant? Why won't they have expended resources towards other priorities or used them up in other encounters?
Because it costs them a negligable amount of resources to say "what will we meet today?" High level parties tend not to have random encounters, sleep in places that are assailable or run into situations blindly. It's just one of those things about high level play, that goes hand in hand with pit traps no longer being a viable method of damaging them.
So we're basically left with only the option of coming up with another monster, which you'll then in turn blithely dismiss by stating it can only be encountered in one of two or three conceivable scenarios and assert is rendered moot by the unlimited resources that any high-level level party will have at their disposal (assuming they're not incompetent, naturally).
My whole point is that at high levels, immunities are widely available, usually effective and normally in place. Racially gained immunities at high level are generally a lot less valuable, unless they're immunities to the sorts of things that high levels hinge on.
Immunities to poison, sleep, disease and energy drain are good at low level, and far, far less useful at high level.
As a contrary example: an immunity to detection spells would be ludicrously powerful at high levels, but near useless at low levels.
All very true--at 18th level, there are scant few irrevocable conditions. And for that matter, a party is supposed to be able to dispatch a creature with CR equal to their average party level with relative ease. But in the meantime, the character still got bonked with all the penalties associated with the energy drain for at least the duration of that fight.
In that case, there's a lot of other, similar effects that will do the same to a warforged, and level-draining undead are hardly the most populous (or fearsome) monster type. You're far more likely to meet something else that you're not immune to.
Unless the DM has decided that level-draining undead are the core of his campaign... and in that case there's more than one archetype that he has to take into account, because they're being marginilized.
And the trick of DM'ing high-level parties is getting them to bleed out enough resources that they do get into situations where they'rre not at peak form, so it doesn't become a simple matter of handing the players a Monster Manual and telling them just to pick whatever monsters they want to fight that night. And if they choose to fight some CR 18 "goon" monsters, I guess we can just skip the fights because they'll all be lead-pipe cinches, and move on to awarding treasurre and XP.
Actually, from what I've seen in story hours, the trick seems to be to spring things on them that they're not expecting, use innovative and unusual tactics, build your bad guys with the same "lets get the hell out of here" tricks that you expect your players to use if they're confronted with something they can't handle, divide and conquer the party, and never expect a simple brute monster to really do much at all.
And most importantly of all - expect repetition to result in very quick and simple fights.
