TOPIC: How could we have done better?

I'm not too sure if it was just our experience or something we were doing wrong or just dumb luck but in final room of Underdark combat. The first thing that happened was our entire group took damage down to half our lives. Each attack from the mind flayer one-shotted a member of our group (this is normal difficulty mind you).

It took us a round of combat to realize that ranged attacks and spells were not working. We only ended up getting another 2 rounds of combat in (3 total) before the 12 minutes were up. It's hard to tell being in the moment if it was our slowness or the DM's slowness that caused the lack of combat rounds but our pucks sat at the end of the board for a good 2-3 minutes while the DM was talking with spell casters or healers. I don't want to criticize his job cause maybe our strategy of working with the DM was incorrect and there is a way to make things quicker so spell casters can get spell casting out of the way so the DM can be freed up to calculate damage and give us our sliders back.

I had fun either way and never have cared much if I survive or not but it seems to be the trend of TD lately to make the final combat room near impossible or at least very difficult. And whatever it was (our fault or the DM's) that prevents us from getting more rounds of combat in I'd like to see if anyone has some ideas on how to speed that up. We never seem to have trouble in other rooms and are able to easily get 6+ rounds of combat in but the last 2 years the combat seems slower in the last rooms.

The mind flayer was a tricky fight - you had to stun him (other methods may have worked, but I know stun did for sure) to keep him from shifting around the room (that's why the DM was rolling the die for a 50/50 chance to hit him.) I read on another thread that some parts of mind flayer could be hit no matter what, but with the parts that were 50/50 I don't know how a group any difficulty could have figured that out.

The 50% damage was from a psychic blast that could only be blocked by the Amethyst Ovoid UR. I'm glad to see a new mechanic used, but there should have been some leeway for a Normal group. Was his only attack the 50% HP psychic blast? I can't remember - if that was the case, it seems like a lot but would only kill you once you got to 1 HP (Ex. 4th lvl Rogue would at full health would go 18 > 9 > 4 > 2 > 1 > Dead).

Line up, slide, get out of the way, grab your puck, repeat - communicate with your team what you used and if it hit or not. That's really all you could do.

joshua baessler wrote: Was his only attack the 50% HP psychic blast? I can't remember - if that was the case, it seems like a lot but would only kill you once you got to 1 HP

No after each of the 3 rounds of combat he rolled a die and did some attack (not sure what type if it was psychic or not) and one-shotted at least 2 of our party members doing like 19 damage I think it was.

joshua baessler wrote: Line up, slide, get out of the way, grab your puck, repeat - communicate with your team what you used and if it hit or not. That's really all you could do.

And this is what we do in other rooms but it seemed like it was taking the DM a long time to converse with the 3 casters so we slid and waited for 2-3 minutes before he would calculate damage and slide them back to us. Not sure if there is a way to speed up the process of the casting as this is what seemed like it was taking up the most amount of time before the DM would calculate the damage from the pucks.

Matthew Naikelis wrote:

joshua baessler wrote: Was his only attack the 50% HP psychic blast? I can't remember - if that was the case, it seems like a lot but would only kill you once you got to 1 HP

No after each of the 3 rounds of combat he rolled a die and did some attack (not sure what type if it was psychic or not) and one-shotted at least 2 of our party members doing like 19 damage I think it was.

joshua baessler wrote: Line up, slide, get out of the way, grab your puck, repeat - communicate with your team what you used and if it hit or not. That's really all you could do.

And this is what we do in other rooms but it seemed like it was taking the DM a long time to converse with the 3 casters so we slid and waited for 2-3 minutes before he would calculate damage and slide them back to us. Not sure if there is a way to speed up the process of the casting as this is what seemed like it was taking up the most amount of time before the DM would calculate the damage from the pucks.

speed it up by dont doing the beed/planner/leaf tests etc...those few points are not worth it(in my group anyway..we do more damage sliding than the few points you can get on those)

After the psychic blast his individual attacks dealt 20hp each (on normal). We also only had three rounds in that room but id guess about 80% of our attacks missed so we never had a chance.

lazlo_hollyfeld1985 wrote:

Matthew Naikelis wrote:

joshua baessler wrote: Was his only attack the 50% HP psychic blast? I can't remember - if that was the case, it seems like a lot but would only kill you once you got to 1 HP

No after each of the 3 rounds of combat he rolled a die and did some attack (not sure what type if it was psychic or not) and one-shotted at least 2 of our party members doing like 19 damage I think it was.

joshua baessler wrote: Line up, slide, get out of the way, grab your puck, repeat - communicate with your team what you used and if it hit or not. That's really all you could do.

And this is what we do in other rooms but it seemed like it was taking the DM a long time to converse with the 3 casters so we slid and waited for 2-3 minutes before he would calculate damage and slide them back to us. Not sure if there is a way to speed up the process of the casting as this is what seemed like it was taking up the most amount of time before the DM would calculate the damage from the pucks.

speed it up by dont doing the beed/planner/leaf tests etc...those few points are not worth it(in my group anyway..we do more damage sliding than the few points you can get on those)

Agreed... Of course my elf wizard is combat based, so I'm not casting much anyways.

lazlo_hollyfeld1985 wrote: speed it up by dont doing the beed/planner/leaf tests etc...those few points are not worth it(in my group anyway..we do more damage sliding than the few points you can get on those)

Yeah unfortunately all the casters were not part of our GenCon group so I couldn't exactly tell them to ignore the test and take the lower damage.

Still had lots of fun, just wish I didn't feel like the challenge was speeding up the combat process because a large portion of that is not in our control.

Area attack spells worked as normal. Handy Bardic Lore check told me that and how targeted spells wouldn't work, but our group didn't have any good AoE damage spells at hand.

Much was learned. Making adjustments for next year.

Matthew Naikelis wrote:

lazlo_hollyfeld1985 wrote: speed it up by dont doing the beed/planner/leaf tests etc...those few points are not worth it(in my group anyway..we do more damage sliding than the few points you can get on those)

Yeah unfortunately all the casters were not part of our GenCon group so I couldn't exactly tell them to ignore the test and take the lower damage.

Still had lots of fun, just wish I didn't feel like the challenge was speeding up the combat process because a large portion of that is not in our control.

My group, myself included, were novices doing a Normal run. We didn't pick up on the fact that ranged weapons and spells were useless. We wasted a lot of time that could have been used to fight. Our Dwarf Fighter managed to get in a good number of hits, but we were nowhere close to defeating the enemy when time ran out.

At the end run table, the staffer told us that there was a 7% completion rate for Underdark. We felt a little better after hearing that, but were still disappointed.

Only sliding spells were useless. Single target spells had a 50% miss chance. Area of effect spells worked normally.