Rathos Bloodghost (Lvl 10 elite controller)
Jarmaag Fireseer (Lvl 8 artillery)
2X Bloodghost hunters (Lvl 8 soldiers)
3X Bugbear Stranglers (Lvl 6 lurkers)
We are:
Str-Based Gnoll Cleric (Lvl 5)
Human Assault Swordmage (Lvl 5)
Human Fighter (Lvl 5)
Dark Pact Drow Warlock (Lvl 5)
Artful Dodger Half-Elf Rogue (Lvl 3)
Fortunately we just got to Level 5 at the end of the session, so we can do some retraining and of course we have options on extra new dailies.
So, short of rigged dice or amenable deities, do we have any chance of surviving this encounter?
Otherwise, I think you might just have to get down on your knees and try and beg, flatter, bribe, and otherwise supplicate just to get away. But running is probably safer. I don't exactly know what kind of abilities Rathos has, so maybe that's impossible. Tough luck, then.
There's a reason why "veteran" sounds a lot like "better run".
So, yeah. Luckily the adventurer's in dungeons and dragons can run full-out for at least a few hours without fainting. I find that people tend to forget how useful that ability is.
Still looks like your best bet is to run. Nail them with ranged attacks when possible.
I think that might be quote worthy. I'll stash it away in my receptacle of sayings.
Got that "saying" from my dad. His own version of "the one who runs away gets to fight another day." And yeah, he's an ex-soldier-now-a-colonel-sort-of-cop.
Your biggest obstacle is going to be to have the stamina to make it through the fight. Since it sounds like you get to retrain, I would make sure any party member that can pick up some healing does so. Once the combat starts, I would target Jaarmaag first. He has the lowest AC and the lowest hit points. Jaarmaag's area attacks, and his ability to slow targets put him in the position to dish out the most damage early on. Ideally you'll be able to drop Jaarmaag in the first round, though you may have to spend an action point to do it. If your fighter can get Jaarmaag based and mark him, then the only attack Jaarmaag will be able to make without risking getting smacked is his piddly little dagger attack.
Once Jaarmaag is gone, Rathos's recharging stun attack is going to be the most taxing thing on the group. The problem is that Rathos's AC is high enough that you'll probably only be hitting him 25% of the time, and that's with combat advantage. Plus, Rathos has the ability to deal damage every time you miss him, which will be happening a lot. My suggestion would be to have the player with the highest reflex try to get himself between Rathos and the rest of the party. Also, if you've got any easy ways to slow or immobilize Rathos, that will buy you some time as well.
If you're able to keep Rathos occupied or at bay, then I would focus on the bloodghost hunters. They'll be the ones that will be wearing down your hitpoints the most. They have a good to-hit, and deal decent damage. Have everyone in the party focus on one, and once it drops, switch to the other.
If you're all still up at that point, you should be able to handle the rest of the stuff. If you're running low on healing, have your ranged attackers focus on Rathos, so that he doesn't get his free attack on a melee miss, and have the melee characters focus on the stranglers.
And let us know how it turns out.
The Fighter should take Rain of Steel, and he should activate it as soon as the encounter starts. In a long encounter like the one you're going into, the Rain of Steel damage is really going to add up by the end. As for retraining, if the fighter doesn't already have Comeback Strike as a level 1 daily, then he should retrain to that. Its Reliable, and gives him a way to self heal.
The strength based Cleric should take Weapon of the Gods. The power is a minor to activate, and the effect lasts the entire encounter, which means you'll have a lot of chances for the bonus damage to add up, plus the -2 penalty to the target's AC everytime the cleric hits will help a lot against the high AC targets. If the Cleric has a heavy thrown weapon that he's good with, he might want to consider putting the power on that weapon, so that he can plug away at Rathos from at range. As for retraining, the cleric should make sure he has Cure Light Wounds as his level 2 utility. Another retraining option is to make sure he has Healing Strike as his level 1 encounter. (Just make sure that he uses it against a target that he has a very good chance to hit, so that the healing potential of it isn't wasted.)
For the Swordmage, Lingering Lightning is probably his best level 5 option... one because its a ranged attack, two because it lets him attack up to three targets, three is does ongoing damage, and four it targets reflex. As for retraining, there's a few decent options in Arcane Power. Ward of Brilliance as a level 2 utility would give the Swordmage a chance to negate one of Rathos's stun attacks. Or there's Unseen Gauntlet as a level 3 encounter which would give you a chance to immobilize Rathos for a turn.
As for the Warlock, if he absolutely wants a dark pact power for his 5th level daily, then Twilight of the Soul is the best bet, due to it being reliable. Hunger of Hadar might be a tad more useful, though, especially if the party has any means to immobilize a target, or to push, slide, or pull a target. As for retraining, Otherwind Stride in combo with an action point and Hunger of Hadar can deal out a decent amount of damage is you can get a lot of enemies trapped in the burst. The Warlock should also save his racial cloud of darkness power as a means to protect a comrade that is hurt bad and hit by Rathos's stun attack (which is bound to happen at some point.)
As for the Rogue, it looks like he's only level 3. I'd have him pick up Low Slash as his level 3 encounter. It targets Reflex, which will give him a better chance to hit, and it lets him slide a target. Ideally he'll use it in conjunction with the Warlock's Hunger of Hadar zone. As for retraining, Sneak in the Attack as a level 2 daily might come in handy, or Blinding Barrage as a level 1 daily. If the Rogue's to-hit is low, though, Precise Incision might be better as a level 1 daily, since it targets reflex and is a 3[W] power.
Also, not everyone is aware of it, but you can make a DC 10 Heal check as a standard action to trigger another adjacent character's second wind. You can do this even for a player that's below 0 hit points. Once the cleric runs out of healing, if one of your main damage dealers, or key defenders goes down, and he hasn't used his second wind yet, it might be worth having another player try to trigger it, even at the cost of a standard action.
Good thing of hunger of Hadar is that its effect every turn autohits, so itsa good. It might slow to a chuggy halt, but you could win it..
Try a diplomatic approach and look for a non combative way out of the predicament. If you can't find one just make sure you're not the last one in initiative and that you can outrun at least 1 party member
1) Fight & die
2) Run and maybe die
3) Stand back and let the dumbass PC take the fall
4) Let the dumbass PC take the fall while the rest of you run
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#####F#S
######C#R
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Good Luck :fight!:
PS Finally I got the diagram right
Rathos Bloodghost (Lvl 10 elite controller)
Jarmaag Fireseer (Lvl 8 artillery)
2X Bloodghost hunters (Lvl 8 soldiers)
3X Bugbear Stranglers (Lvl 6 lurkers)
We are:
Str-Based Gnoll Cleric (Lvl 5)
Human Assault Swordmage (Lvl 5)
Human Fighter (Lvl 5)
Dark Pact Drow Warlock (Lvl 5)
Artful Dodger Half-Elf Rogue (Lvl 3)
Fortunately we just got to Level 5 at the end of the session, so we can do some retraining and of course we have options on extra new dailies.
So, short of rigged dice or amenable deities, do we have any chance of surviving this encounter?
You should be able to do fine, tho I would be unhappy if I was the half-elf since being underleveled is lame.
Find a bottleneck, stick the fighter and swordmage there. Preferably in a way that monsters can only attack from the front.
Proceed to kill the weaker monsters. They won't miss much.
Focus-fire them. Don't just attack what's in front of you. You'd be surprised how many PCs I have had as a DM who play worse than the AI in the first Warcraft.
Conserve dailies and APs for the big bosses. Focus-fire them. Don't burn everything on one turn or you won't have enough for later, if one guy doesn't look like he has much HP left (mentally keeping track of at what point he became bloodied helps) then use an at-will.
I've thrown worse encounters vs PCs and they have survived. I had a double-attacking double-power flesh golem vs level 11s with a dozen or so level 11 spectres and nobody died.
The swordmage and fighter duo have already been assigned. The cleric, and the warlock are there for support, but since the cleric is strength-based... I'm assuming he's a battle cleric. It's obvious. This will be a very tough battle regardless of the outcome, but hope you have things figured out before your next session. One more thing, does your cleric and warlock have enough healing spells? For the first ten rounds at the least, you guys are going to be punching bags.
And I hated every minute of it.
At the start of the combat, we were facing three bugbear warriors, two bugbear stranglers, Rathos himself, a dragonborn gladiator, and Jarmaag. The battle plan we'd been running simulations against fell apart rather quickly due to placement, but when our human fighter charged Jarmaag and got him in a corner, we figured we had still had a chance.
Then our GM had Jarmaag offer a brief battle-truce to gang up on Rathos.
None of us fought the idea. I took the offer because it was a better way to get everyone out alive. The warlock's player didn't fight it because OOC she realized that the GM was going to do a kill instead of a capture scenario. The rogue's character wouldn't have fought the idea, and the gnoll's player is not really deep enough into role-playing to have much of an opinion.
I was looking forward to playing a new character I'd designed, with nice mechanical crunch and fun plot hooks if he killed my my current PC, which I expected. Or I expected losing, getting captured and then trying a jail break-out, or winning a glorious battle against every criminal there and being able to tell the story as a true hero. Instead we helped one set of criminals backstab another criminal, and then let the betrayers run because the only two people who would care enough to take them out as well were too burned out and upset to really handle more of the situation IC.
The warlock's player feels trapped because she was looking forward to role-playing either the consequences of a loss, or the triumph of a true villian-vanquishing. She's multi-classed as a paladin of Pelor, as an in-charater way of trying to fight her inner darkness, and the backstabbing is not something that she can feel proud of. Nor is the outcome really useful as a roleplaying tool, because my character is the only one she can discuss it with, and even then only out of session because otherwise we're wasting the group's time.
I shouldn't have accepted Jarmaag's offer. But I don't know what else I could have done, considering that the GM didn't plan ahead and would have only resolved it otherwise by killing us all. It's a hollow victory, and I feel as if all four hours of the session were a waste without any kind of future to build off of.
So. We won.
And I hated every minute of it.
At the start of the combat, we were facing three bugbear warriors, two bugbear stranglers, Rathos himself, a dragonborn gladiator, and Jarmaag. The battle plan we'd been running simulations against fell apart rather quickly due to placement, but when our human fighter charged Jarmaag and got him in a corner, we figured we had still had a chance.
Then our GM had Jarmaag offer a brief battle-truce to gang up on Rathos.
None of us fought the idea. I took the offer because it was a better way to get everyone out alive. The warlock's player didn't fight it because OOC she realized that the GM was going to do a kill instead of a capture scenario. The rogue's character wouldn't have fought the idea, and the gnoll's player is not really deep enough into role-playing to have much of an opinion.
I was looking forward to playing a new character I'd designed, with nice mechanical crunch and fun plot hooks if he killed my my current PC, which I expected. Or I expected losing, getting captured and then trying a jail break-out, or winning a glorious battle against every criminal there and being able to tell the story as a true hero. Instead we helped one set of criminals backstab another criminal, and then let the betrayers run because the only two people who would care enough to take them out as well were too burned out and upset to really handle more of the situation IC.
The warlock's player feels trapped because she was looking forward to role-playing either the consequences of a loss, or the triumph of a true villian-vanquishing. She's multi-classed as a paladin of Pelor, as an in-charater way of trying to fight her inner darkness, and the backstabbing is not something that she can feel proud of. Nor is the outcome really useful as a roleplaying tool, because my character is the only one she can discuss it with, and even then only out of session because otherwise we're wasting the group's time.
I shouldn't have accepted Jarmaag's offer. But I don't know what else I could have done, considering that the GM didn't plan ahead and would have only resolved it otherwise by killing us all. It's a hollow victory, and I feel as if all four hours of the session were a waste without any kind of future to build off of.
Wouldn't Jarmaag and Rathos have gone at it after the offer even if you refused? Rathos would probably have been pretty POed. That would have freed up the group to take out the rest of the gang in the meantime and then hopefully finish off the victor. Thats how I see it anyway.
Lots of hooks, obviously your character is dissatisfied with how this played out, so obviously you will be looking to take out Jarmaag and his gang at some point. How are you going to do, what's your plan? What resources can you muster? Can you do it quick enough to catch him before the power transition is complete, while things are still off balance a bit? Lots of stuff to build on.
I'd also let your DM know of your complaints though, maybe he doesn't know you and the other players thoughts here.
The GM knows at this point that my spouse was unhappy, though I'm not sure if he picked up on my discontent.
I understand your feelings, and I've been in those situations before. You wanted to accept one of the two possible outcomes of the event, but a third shows up and it leaves you dissatisfied. Not quite a hero, and not quite a martyr.
How does your character feel letting the criminal get away? Maybe it's eating at him, and he actually begins to show it in character. Perhaps he's more serious, or becomes very pessimistic in the event turned out. Maybe he wants to look for a challenge to redeem himself. Your character might take a bite out of a quest too big for him to chew, in a blatant act of self-gratification. Your character might track down the criminals and bring them to a grim and bloody demise.
There's a lot here to work with, and you've got to understand that the DM didn't want you guys to die. He tried to ease things up for you, and you didn't want it, but it's here and you guys should try to use it.
I think you should bring the discontent to the table, and try to work with it.
I understand your feelings, and I've been in those situations before. You wanted to accept one of the two possible outcomes of the event, but a third shows up and it leaves you dissatisfied. Not quite a hero, and not quite a martyr.
How does your character feel letting the criminal get away? Maybe it's eating at him, and he actually begins to show it in character. Perhaps he's more serious, or becomes very pessimistic in the event turned out. Maybe he wants to look for a challenge to redeem himself. Your character might take a bite out of a quest too big for him to chew, in a blatant act of self-gratification. Your character might track down the criminals and bring them to a grim and bloody demise.You've got the issue down exactly! That's actually the course of action that my partner and I were debating, too, though for different reasons; her character would be looking for some wrong to right as a guilt response. I'm actually more annoyed at how the GM pulled the fight because last week I warned him about how I reacted to GMs who weren't willing to kill me; I took every risk and stupid chance I could, taking advantage of the plot armor. A big, practically unwinnable quest would make IC sense and OOC enjoyment for both of us.