TOPIC: E3 Room 7 feedback (SPOILER)

Ok... I just wanted to say that was the best final boss room I've ever seen in TD! So damn awesome!

The payoff of the group activity of reading the scroll that was picked up early in the dungeon... loved it.

The voice acting was great, and banter between the two characters was more interesting than your typical monster that talks only to the party.

Our friend Mr. Mind Slayer was acted perfectly to line up with the dialogue and also react to what the party was doing.

Blackthorn... wow... so impressive. I knew the temple was named after him, of course, but I was expecting the Mind Slayer at the end instead... not both! And then for him to be so bad-ass looking, AND flying, that was a great "oh shit" moment!

Finally, the DM did an amazing job with both running the combat and flavorful descriptions!

I could not have asked for a better conclusion to the story arc. Fantastic job to all involved.

Yup!

Also, when we ran on Saturday morning there was also a scroll on the wall in the room.

Our party split and 1/2 read on the wall and 1/2 read the one we got in room 1 - and we got 2 rounds of surprise attacks!

Hmmm... guessing that both of you ran on Saturday. I ran it on Thursday morning with a group of new players. After me, the next most experienced player had made two dungeon runs. While they were new and found the experience exciting, my take was very different.

1) The group ahead of us didn't leave until I entered the room, saw the other group, turned to my group (still in the hallway, held up my hand and said WAIT! in a loud voice. The DM in charge, pushed the other group out, read the intro and then started the combat. This caused my group quite some delay in getting started.

2) I tried to encourage people with sliding as quickly as possible; however, as they were new and filled with questions, I couldn't bring my myself to shout orders like a drill sargent. I didn't want to ruin the experience for them. I answered as many as I could between slides etc.

3) The instance the final buzzer went off, the GM turned to my group and said that we were all dead since we hadn't beaten the monsters. Just before he sprinted off, he mentioned that we would have won if we had had one more round.

4) We were a bubble group (meaning no group behind us). The DMs knew this because we carried a placarded that read "BUBBLE" on it and it was handed to every DM we handed the card to. Given that there was another DM in the room, I felt like the second DM should have given us another melee round to make up for the time the group ahead of us cost us.

Now, after all of the other players in my group had left to get their pulls, I told the EC what had happened and he agreed with me. He gave me 3 extra treasure pulls to make up for it.

I chatted with about 30 other players about Infernal Redoubt (E3). Of those I talked to:

28 died
29 didn't like it, especially the last room
28 thought the last room was too hard on normal
1 thought that the entire dungeon was too easy (on normal)
1 thought that the nightmare run he had just made was normal for nightmare

From what I could see, most people that I talked to didn't like Infernal. Swamp and Path seemed to be much more liked. Odin got mixed reviews. The ECs that I talked to were fantastic folks that took an interest in what was being said. They didn't blow us off or treat us like children. Most of the DMs were pretty cool (except as mentioned above).

I am glad that you guys had fun though.

My group went Friday at 10 am.

It might have also mattered how you split things up.

We focused on the mindslayer in the surprise rounds, and it only got one attack in.


Blackthorn we were a bit lucky on - as his belt of skulls was all 20s so he was easy to damage even though he was flying.

If you didn’t focus on one or the other, it could have been very tough.

It’s so weird - I think the two frost giants last year were more difficult on hardcore than the end of e3 on nightmare.

I ran through E3 on Thursday morning, and was so sad to see that none of the audio for the monsters, nor the animatronics for blackthorn were working. I'm super sad that I missed seeing it because everyone has said that it was so cool. Hopefully I'll get to run E3 again at Origins so I can get the full experience!

My early run Friday was waaaaay too fogged out (and absolutely bananas in the last room) but once the fog was in check a bit (roughly 2-3 hours later), it was absolutely clear how awesome the animatronics and billowing smoke body was, and I always love the mind flayer costuming.

I think blackthorn might have been my favorite presented monster I’ve seen in TD.

If maze got cast would it sendboth monsters away or just one of them?

jon wrote: If maze got cast would it sendboth monsters away or just one of them?

Maze is a single target spell so you could use it in the last room if you wanted to continue to focus fire one of them.

FatalDrakkon wrote:

jon wrote: If maze got cast would it sendboth monsters away or just one of them?

Maze is a single target spell so you could use it in the last room if you wanted to continue to focus fire one of them.

Our group did just that to great effect this year.

Picc wrote:

FatalDrakkon wrote:

jon wrote: If maze got cast would it sendboth monsters away or just one of them?

Maze is a single target spell so you could use it in the last room if you wanted to continue to focus fire one of them.

Our group did just that to great effect this year.

It was fun

From my experience the easiest way to complete this room was have spellcasters do their thing to both and 90% of the others focus on the mind slayer while one or 2 heavy hitters go for the crits on Blackthorne. Our Epic group finished combat very easily this way. I was playing barbarian in this run and in 3 rounds of crits Blackthorne died (also due to spells) and the rest of the group finished the mind slayer that round as well.

My group enjoyed E1 and E2 more then E3. But the final boss fight was great. We ran it on Nightmare, and even with 3 people being possessed, we managed to bring both of them down. And it seemed more annoying then actually hard, as the players who were possessed were pissed they couldn't do anything.