Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 xellos100 Feb 24, 2010 14:38:37	I played in this mod last night.  The DM ran it pretty well, but the last encounter was nearly a TPK. Show We start the last encounter with the bad guys winning initiative and dropping an immobilize power on us.  It missed one person the first round, recharged on the second round, and then hit everyone.  Then three leveled up, pre-errata needlefang drakes came up and started eating people.  The only person in the party with an at-will area attack was a monk (who is nearly auto-hit by pull down) suffered a critical hit of 26 damage, followed up by a high damage roll that knocked him unconscious.  After that, it all went downhill.   Even thought the cultist moved away from the altar, he somehow completed the ritual in round six, failing the mod for us.
#2 Madfox11 Feb 25, 2010 3:44:33	More discussion here: community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/758...(spoilers)
#3 Ore Feb 25, 2010 15:22:24	*SPOILERS* That is a tough battle but, yes, errata is essential. That fight goes well beyond fair if the swarms are done with the wrong rules. If it makes you feel any better you can't stop the portal from being opened. Defeating the cultists in time does determine who gets sucked in though. I assume by "fail the mod" you mean the raven-haired girl was pulled in, right? Even then, you didn't really fail, that is just the direction the story took.
#4 Black_Egg Mar 02, 2010 23:45:36	Even post-errata, I find those little blighters to be TPK machines. The errata did very little to them.
#5 elder_basilisk Mar 03, 2010 1:24:59	Yeah. 4th edition swarms are nearly as bad as 3.5 swarms--worse in some ways. And they are a terrible kind of monster to scale with. Every character eating three or four attacks at the start of every turn is very different from having every character eat one or two attacks at the start of their turn. If you have more than one "attack at the start of turn" aura monster in an encounter, it can get really unbalancedly ugly and what is worse, the difficulty scales far more quickly than the contribution of the supposedly offsetting PC.
#6 Madfox11 Mar 04, 2010 2:49:32	Show While preparing IMPI1-7 I noted that the cultist needs to be at the altar and spend a minor action to perform the ritual. If that action is not spend, the PCs get 1 round extra. It is also true, that regardless of success, the portal opens. If the PCs failed it sucks up the sacrificial victim. If the PCs were successful, it just sucks up the cultists. Mind you, on retrospect that section could have been written in a clearer fashion.
#7 Hibiki54 Mar 04, 2010 12:04:01	PCs just have to priorities. Not all encounters require you to bash all the baddies to save the day.
#8 Keithric Mar 04, 2010 15:50:12	Even post-errata, I find those little blighters to be TPK machines. The errata did very little to them. The errata actually made them about half as effective. It was a very big deal. The trick is they used to be worth more than three creatures each, so they're still a little on the high side. _Far_ more manageable though.
#9 Ore Mar 04, 2010 16:26:05	I am running this module again very soon and I am thinking about ways to improve the final encounter. My first thought was to remove one or two of the swarms but I need to check to make sure they can still earn maximum experience for the module. I am also considering moving them around and having a couple hold back until the PCs cross over into the cultist's side of the encounter map. *ponders*
#10 chitzk0i Mar 05, 2010 14:09:02	I am running this module again very soon and I am thinking about ways to improve the final encounter. My first thought was to remove one or two of the swarms but I need to check to make sure they can still earn maximum experience for the module. I am also considering moving them around and having a couple hold back until the PCs cross over into the cultist's side of the encounter map. *ponders*  It'll probably be fine as long as you use the errata to the swarms and be sure to describe how the cultist is making an ongoing effort to finish the ritual.
#11 sithobi1 Mar 06, 2010 3:47:16	PCs just have to priorities. Not all encounters require you to bash all the baddies to save the day. Given that when I played this, the DM essentially told us that the only way to save the girl was to kill everything...well...
#12 Ore Mar 09, 2010 6:41:01	It'll probably be fine as long as you use the errata to the swarms and be sure to describe how the cultist is making an ongoing effort to finish the ritual.   Oh yeah, I did a good job of that the first time I ran it and the players did well (see above) but I am just thinking of ways to make it a better encounter in general.  Within "DME" of course. Yes and no, Sithobi1. Yes, you need to defeat the cultists but there is more than one way to do that and there are ways to buy your party more time. One of my players threw himself onto the girl's body on the altar using himself as a living shield (allowing the enemy to hit him instead of the sacrifice). So he took a little bit of damage and I awarded the party more time to accomplish their goals (an additional round of combat before the finale). Looking at the encounter setup I am thinking about moving 1 or 2 of the drake swarms to the back of the grotto allowing the party a round to establish themselves before all of the swarms descend upon them. That might ease things up just a little bit.