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[JayDubya]

Would you agree with heavy blade Str paladin with those other party members and those stats, though?

It seems to be the best use of everything, though I had heavily debated going Fighter.

I think being able to "Low Nova" a little bit is important in a 3 man (well, technically, one man) group, so going pure defender seemed right out. With a proper 5 man group, or bigger, oh hell yeah, Dwarf Fighter or Goliath Warden, purely defensive either way.

With this setup, the cunning Gnome Bard probably ain't going to be killing anyone so that leaves the Rogue and maybe me if I spec for a little bit of DPR. Also, the Paladin will give a modicum of healing support since Bards aren't great at healing without burning some feats.

If he lives long enough to get Champion of Order, ignoring him will be doubly painful, since he'll get to, like a Fighter, take a free swing at anyone he has marked that ignores him. With a fullblade, that'll be pretty righteous. With Heavy Blade Opportunity, that could - situationally - be just wrong.

* * *

I did briefly consider a Dragonborn or Half-Elf Chaladin => Justiciar though. Just pump Cha and Wis as much as possible for a super divine challenge, nab a shield, and maybe worship Amaunator for the bonus radiant damage.

Problem? Bard. Too much overlap - we don't need another face.

I will say this, though. With those stats, I've got at least a +2 to all defenses, then +1 to all class bonus from Paladin, then +1 to all from Human. That's pretty nice.

 

[slayn]

The problem I would see with a chaladin is that aren't some of their better moves ranged attacks? And now you are provoking opportunity attacks when attacking? So if going paladin, I think strength is totally the way to go.

If it is only going to be the three of you, I'm not sure how I feel about a paladin. In my 5 man team, a single warlord for healing has been more than sufficient so far. Perhaps we just haven't been pushed, but the paladin's healing hasn't been useful at all.

A 3 man party should require even less healing I would think. What about somethign like a battlerager fighter? I imagine a fighter should be able to out damage a paladin, and your temp hp is acting like healing for you for all the hits you'll be taking.

What about like a Goliath Battlerager fighter for :
Str 17, Con 16, Dex 14, Int 11, Wis 14, Cha 13

Or, if you are really worried about damage output, tempest fighters are defenders that can often outdamage strikers. In the d&d optimization boards, I think tempest fighters are still the highest damage class.

 

[JayDubya]

Even with power attack and a blood claw weapon, though, I don't see my Fighter outdoing the autocrit trick in terms of nova on demand.

As for healing, I don't know, I just don't like being limited to only two heals per fight that are weaker than even an Int Warlord would pull out.

I tried building a Tempest & Battlerager Fighter, but I was really, really unimpressed with the results. Maybe they get good at higher levels, but it feels like they're very unimpressive at first, or I just don't know what to do re: feats and power selection to make them impressive.

Goliath Battlerager's going to stay up longer like the Energizer bunny, but his damage output won't be anything special; well, I could ignore the invigorating powers in favor of the stuff out of the PHB and get some good hits in.

Human or Half-Orc or Longtooth Shifter Tempest Fighter has some nice at-will damage each round with a +1 double sword, but the early encounter and daily powers aren't too hot.

Oddly enough, I think the fullblade Paladin is going to be the heaviest damage dealer for these first few levels anyway. I could probably get the same output with an Avenger, and I would, but the party needs a Defender.

A Human Great Weapon Fighter with the FB also works pretty well - it's less of a Nova build and more of a "I slap Villain's Menace on you, and then I power attack you to death with my Bloodclaw weapon" thing going on.

Funny, here I thought Paladins had poor DPR, but when I mark something, then holy strike it, I'm looking at a solid [W]+6 damage, and if it's a low level undead, that's [w]+11.

Things are going to change rather abruptly after L3 comes around though - a Fighter gets devastating with Rain of Blows if they have the right weapon specialization.

And if you let that Tempest guy become a high-Wis Pit Fighter, yowza.

 

[slayn]

Probably the fighter damage just doesn't kick in early on.

I think the secret tends to be using multi attack powers pulled from a combination of fighter, ranger, and barbian multiclassing and static static bonuses from equipment and such. So that stuff like level 6 iron armbands of power deal more like 10 damage instead of 2.

[w]+6 ain't bad for a defender. I think leaders are the ones with crap damage. But its still defender damage =)

Because it will always be hard for anyone to compare to the 2d12+1d8 at will damage of a ranger.

The autocrit power is incredibly powerful though. The things I can do if I had something similar for my warlock. At level 2, I still managed to do 34 damage + -5 to the enemies attack rolls in one turn without using a daily, but that required the use of an action point.

 

[JayDubya]

Well, I thought about it, and that Goliath Battlerager has some stuff going for him, actually.

Put him in Chainmail, give him a Maul, and take that Goliath Great Weapon Prowess feat, and you're in business.

That's already a flat +4 damage on every hit, before you add in Str or enhancement bonuses; you're getting +3 THP everytime you get hit, you can use that racial encounter to soak damage, and you're dishing out a lot.

Just take the one invigorating at-will power, and then take the 2[W] and 3[W] options, and mauls do 2d6, so you're looking at, let's see here.... on Lasting Threat, you're looking at 6d6+8. Not too shabby.

He doesn't have the nova option of 40+2d12 once per day, though (or 28+2d12 every other fight).

 

[slayn]

and the quest continues, in the very south-east:

Spoiler

We found the kruthyk (sp?) lair. I think the setup for this was pretty neat, but our DM said he botched it pretty bad. Mid battle, he forgot about the pit traps that are present in the lair, and not always but often forgot about their aura. He also just rolled poorly. So we cleaved through these guys much more easily than we should have.

and in the north

Spoiler

We also went back to the entrance and went north and killed the hobgoblin torturer. Nothing exciting there.

Jaydub, I'd say when you guys run into this, be extra mindful of the details in the encounter we had last night. I'd imagine it makes things a lot more interesting if the DM gets everything right.

One thing I'm curious about, it seems like the path we took was simply a dead end. Not even a quest (that we found anyway). What's to stop a party from skipping that entire area and going straight on, thus missing out on exp and loot? Won't they get butchered when they fight the higher level encounters that I assume are deeper in and are under-leveled?

 

[slayn]

In terms of damage for your fighter, I think you need to ask yourself what you think is more important. Nova, or consistency.

For consistency, what I would do is look at how much damage the fighter class you pick can do over the course of 5 rounds. The paladin might have that nova, but if the fighter can still outdamage him by the 5th round, then against a solo with 400hp, the fighter is going to be better. Or, if all the enemies are right at the cusp such that even with your nova it takes 2 shots to kill a monster then the damage is semi wasted.

Consider the scenario where a monster has 70hp. Your paladin can nova for 50, and then does 19 damage per hit.

If the fighter can achieve 35 damage/hit then he's better off. And for this monster, the fighter would have to do less than 24 damage per hit before he is worse off.

That is a pretty contrived example, granted, but I just mean I wouldn't value a single round of nova damage as all that great, unless your nova is so powerful that you can one-shot a high level enemy.

 

[JayDubya]

One thing I'm curious about, it seems like the path we took was simply a dead end. Not even a quest (that we found anyway). What's to stop a party from skipping that entire area and going straight on, thus missing out on exp and loot? Won't they get butchered when they fight the higher level encounters that I assume are deeper in and are under-leveled?

Yeah, there are dead ends. I mean, my party already found the stairs down. Clearly, they know that all other paths are either dead ends or at best, are only going to lead to more stairs down. There's good content to go through remaining on the top floor, with good rewards. But I mean, if they want to just charge on down, that's their prerogative.

* * *

Anyway, so we started that new campaign last night. The DM actually bumped my stats up to a 16, 14, 14, 14, 14, 12 after looking at what the others rolled. Fine by me. Also, I had done the math and had been considering a battlerager fighter, but man, am I ever glad I stuck with Paladin.

We didn't have any details on what we'd be facing, but it's apparently some kind of vampire plaguing a region east of Athkatla (the main city in BG2). I'm guessing at level 2 we won't be facing a L11+ Elite, so it may be a custom template; or maybe something out of Open Grave.

In any event, our first fight was against famine hounds and rot hounds - they attack vs. reflex and do necrotic damage. Kaze's playing the HO Rogue, she ran up front first (mistake) and got a little shredded. They really couldn't hurt me with Lifegiver Plate on, and with my at-will that does radiant melee damage coupled with Divine Challenge, I pretty much tore them to ribbons.

Didn't take any damage the 2nd fight either. Haven't used any daily powers or surges or Lay on Hands yet. Looks like I picked well, for wholly tangential reasons.

 

[slayn]

nice,

Yeah the paladin build was solid to begin with, but with a stat bump and fighting any kind of undead, sounds like you are going to cause a lot of destruction.

I wish I had those stats, that works for anything now =P
via racial modifiers, any class could have 18 in primary, 16 in 2ndary, and basically qualify for all feats automatically.

 

[JayDubya]

nice,

Yeah the paladin build was solid to begin with, but with a stat bump and fighting any kind of undead, sounds like you are going to cause a lot of destruction.

I wish I had those stats, that works for anything now =P
via racial modifiers, any class could have 18 in primary, 16 in 2ndary, and basically qualify for all feats automatically.

Yeah, he said the two catches were a) that the other players had to agree and b) that I couldn't change around what I had already picked.

Though if I were him I would have given me the opportunity to make the mistake of switching from Paladin.

 

[slayn]

That would have been evil :lol

Maybe your DM wanted you to be a paladin, because he wanted to see a paladin beating up undead. And that stat boost was an extra incentive to make sure you stuck with it.

 

[JayDubya]

Well Slayn, the party's cleared out the entire Western side of L1, and cleared the fight with all the planks and ladders and ramps in the NE.

5 areas / fights left on the first floor. Man, you really do need to have a D&D group meet every week if you ever want to get anywhere. It'd be nice to get all that done in one session, but I don't imagine it would be.

At our current rate, we won't be done with Keep on the Shadowfell for like, two months, and we've been doing it for some time now.

Also, strangely, they're almost L3. Which isn't supposed to happen yet.

* * *

As for Ariston, my Paladin, I find myself wanting to plan him out all the way through Epic. It's actually kind of hard to do. If I can fit in multiclassing with Fighter or Warlord, I will.

 

[slayn]

We finished off everything on L1 except the places west of the entrance. A random encounter when we tried to rest in the dungeon just put us over level 3. So yeah, we're ahead of where we should be.

We feel pretty over powered. Some of the stuff in the SE was a little more brutal, but anything against goblins has been rediculously easy. In the past 3 encounters combined, I think our team as a whole has taken maybe 10 damage.

Also, I have decided the author of KotS hates warlocks. There have been 0 magic items useful to a warlock

edit:
is keep really that big? We've been going along now at 2 encounters/week and it doesn't seem like there should be *that* much left for it to take 2 months.

 

[JayDubya]

That's because they didn't make a Warlock pre-gen, dude.

The loot not only assumes 5 players, it assumes those 5 players are very, very specific things.

Your DM has to look at what he has and adjust accordingly.

 

[slayn]

He probably won't bother because everything in the module, at least thus far, has been very useful to the party, if just by chance.

And he's extremely in our favor when it comes to selling stuff. So I imagine he expects us to sell stuff we find that we don't want and buy/comission that which we do. But the only town in the module is not capable of selling magic items.

 

[JayDubya]

I haven't had to adjust too much. We have 6 players, so I've had to add some extra loot parcels, and I typically add more bad guys to each encounter.

 

[chapel]

I thought this was cool and definitely in the interest of what we do here.

http://hackaday.com/2009/05/26/dice-o-matic/

 

[slayn]

That is pretty awesome.

My dm actually made his own dice rolling tower just recently. Although his is made of cardboard.

 

[slayn]

We went back to town and did the thing that happens then.

Apparently our dm changed it quite a bit. He felt we had been steamrolling everything much too easily.

Spoiler

For the graveyard encounter, he made a new wave of minion skeleton things spawn every round until we disabled the ritual that was creating them. And when the wizard of the party moved into the circle to start disabling it, he had absolutely everything focus fire on her.

So we had to try and keep the her protected while also picking off enough minions to keep up with the spawn rate so that we wouldn't become overwhelmed.

It made it pretty exciting.

 

[JayDubya]

We went back to town and did the thing that happens then.

Apparently our dm changed it quite a bit. He felt we had been steamrolling everything much too easily.

Spoiler

For the graveyard encounter, he made a new wave of minion skeleton things spawn every round until we disabled the ritual that was creating them. And when the wizard of the party moved into the circle to start disabling it, he had absolutely everything focus fire on her.

So we had to try and keep the her protected while also picking off enough minions to keep up with the spawn rate so that we wouldn't become overwhelmed.

It made it pretty exciting.

Yeah, my party's freaking L3 already and they haven't done that yet. They're about to. They finally finished the first floor of the dungeon - they did the torturer and Balgron the Fat last (supposed to be first, supposed to be L1). To make the encounter as written any sort of challenge, I sprung both at the same time.

I do see a problem, though. Frankly, I don't think they'd leave the dungeon if I didn't force the issue. :lol

I like what your DM did there, actually. I'm considering spicing up a few key encounters, myself. Particularly the last one.

 

[slayn]

Pretty much the only reason we went back to town was that the ranger was out of arrows. Without that we might have never left.

 

[JayDubya]

Pretty much the only reason we went back to town was that the ranger was out of arrows. Without that we might have never left.

If you fought all those Skeletons guarding Sir Keegan's tomb, there's essentially no way he could have run out of arrows! :lol

Each minion had a bow and a quiver.

Nah, I plan on spicing that next encounter up to make it something more memorable.

I think I'm going to completely rewrite things. What happened in your game is certainly a good idea. There's some other good ideas in Dungeon magazine.

My players, read at your own risk:

Spoiler

My biggest grump about this module, and virtually all the others put out, is that they're not brave enough to introduce the villain before the end. Kalarel has to show up before the end and he needs to kick some ass.

If the villain can't interact with the heroes at least once before that, it's pretty lame, because it's just some unknown evil dude. I've always made it a point to have strong recurring villains in my custom adventures. Besides, the guy already has a cheater's amulet that teleports him directly to the rift once per day...

 

[slayn]

If you fought all those Skeletons guarding Sir Keegan's tomb, there's essentially no way he could have run out of arrows! :lol

We only just got to that tonight so she was out of luck!

Apparently we just *barely* succeeded in passifying Sir Keegan. I wonder what it would have been like to fight him (I'm assuming thats what happens if he doesn't believe you).

 

[JayDubya]

We only just got to that tonight so she was out of luck!

Apparently we just *barely* succeeded in passifying Sir Keegan. I wonder what it would have been like to fight him (I'm assuming thats what happens if he doesn't believe you).

My party had a "bases are loaded" thing with him, too, so it all came down to one roll.

As for Keegan himself, he's probably the first creature I saw where, if fought, I'd expect a TPK.

 

[slayn]

Was out of town for a few weeks but not it is time to get into some D&D!

Having completely cleared out the first floor, we have mooved on to the 2nd floor. The

Spoiler

hobgoblins

that appear on this floor are at list a little bit of a step up. But after only one encounter on this floor we are almost level 4. Wasn't this module supposed to be level 1-3?

Did the authors of this module suck at math?

edit:
You guys still alive? We just hit level 4 which means I finally get to experiment with this multiclass stuff.

Its kind of interesting because the combination I'm going for (warlock/sorcerer) seems to have not been done at all. I have seen no builds for it online nor even suggested. I keep wondering if maybe there is a glaring flaw I'm not seeing or what.

I'm thinking by picking and choose the best the two classes have to offer, I will be able to dis out the damage of a sorcerer along with the status effects of a warlock. All the while without splitting my feats or attributes in the slightest by focusing on charisma and using a pact dagger as my single implement.

Unfortunately I don't get access to the good stuff until later, but I can't wait to try combining things like an empowered hunger of hadaar. Increasing an already nasty warlock 3x3 cloud of death into 5x5 sounds so awesome.

 

[slayn]

Tonight, we finished Keep on the Shadowfell. So, final opinion of someone completely new to d&d.

It was alright, but had too much focus on charing forward and smashing face. Not to say I don't like the combat, I do, and I don't even like roleplaying. But it just sort of seemed to become a slugfest without direction.

I've quickly become convinced that every 4th edition encounter needs a gimmick. This can be via terrain, some sort of time sensitive thing, a monster that changes over the course of the encounter, whatever. But slugging it out with hobgoblins in an open room gets boring. Keep did not have enough gimmicks.

To me, the highlite encounters of the module were: irontooth, burial site, first encounter of the keep, goblin archer encounter in the NE section of floor 1 of the keep with the platforms and bridges, blue slime, graveyard encounter. Note that none of the encounters in the 2nd floor of the keep make my list. Gelatinous cube was ok and might be really good for another party, but was nullified by our party really quickly.

The final encounter started off interesting but became kind of static after the first few rounds. A common problem I'm seeing in the herioc tier is that once you get past your encounter powers and utility powers, and everyone is reduced to at-wills, battle quickly becomes much less interesting.

There also needs to be more breathing room for exploration and puzzle solving and whatnot inbetween battle. The trap room sort of tries, but falls flat because

Spoiler

intelligent thinking is a harder and less efficient solution rather than just standing back and blowing shit up. The entire room could be "solved" in 5 seconds by a ranged attack declaring "the entire party will stand back while I stay next to the door and shoot everything until it is destroyed.

Still a fun game though and I'm looking forward to whatever our group decides to try next.

 

[XT Vengeance]

That feel when the PCs kill the big bad in their first encounter with them, especially due to 4 crits from only one character, and all the others missing. The RNG is a fickle master.

Luckily it is star wars, and all they did was shoot off half of the inquisitors jaw. Thankfully it is salvageable, as I spent more than a month fleshing out the Big Bad for this arc.