Community

community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/758...

Played this mod for the first time this weekend.  Despite using old damage expressions, it's still tough.  Somehow we got corraled into a PC start box for the final encounter, and all the recharges hit.  I think we still might have succeeded, but the game store was going to close up, and the leader gave up on the encounter right around the time the first "remove-from-play" attack was employed (and not until the 2nd or 3rd round - restraint!).  We had to...er...fall back to a more defensible position.

I kind of feel like the reflavored Minotaur Shaman needs to be fixed, though (even though we got through that encounter OK) - just because there was a typo in the Compendium at the time, doesn't behoove the author and the editors to allow it through, since the primary source had conflicting text.  But, this is me complaining about a 2-3 year old mod, when the campaign has more pressing concerns.

I had a good time with the NPCs/RP-elements, though.  Not sure I would recommend this to everyone.

Er, I wouldn't say all the recharges hit.  Just BBEG's "no, I think I didn't get hit" one.  That one hit every frigging time (cause I rolled it at the table). The others I mostly prerolled, and tried to avoid too much bunching up.

That said, there are a lot of pretty darn swing-y reroll powers.  Enough that I think stasticially one of them will recharge "too often" (Including the "No I didn't get hit" power, I count 3 to 4 powers that, if they recharge multiple times, can lead to an overly challenging encounter.  And since some of those are recharge 5+ (all of them?  Away from module) that seems like >50% odds that one of those powers will recharge "too much")

And yes... I should have sat down to basically redo the whole thing in large part before hand.  (W/o the shaman's "at-will", the 1st combats way too ... nothing.  So it needs to be made fairer, and then also MM3-ized.  Pretty much the same for most of the other encounters)  Sorry about that.

The one time I ran this, the Wizard got off a single round of actions in the entire mod. She spent the rest of the time dead or banished.

I don't think it will get run again any time soon.

I love this mod; alongside SPEC1-3p1, it is one of a very small mods that actually provide a tactical challenge.

Agree with Fardiz -- DALE 1-6 is one of my favorite mods in all of LFR. It has a well-designed skill challenge with RP elements thrown in, plus a story where the PCs make significant decisions and have the change to impact the development of the campaign world. That final combat can be very swingy, though, both based on recharge rolls and on how prepared the party is for the challenge.

Spoiler: Show

Thanks for pointing out that the damage expressions are still pre-MM3 -- will need to point that out to the next run.

--
Pauper

Remember that part of MM3-izing is reducing crowd control, in addition to increasing damage.

WTF, still talking about this mod's difficulty?

Just be lucky you were not the ones playtesting it. As it is now, it's just a roleplaying mod. LOL

I played this once before, and it was pretty hard, as I recall.

I do have one question about Encounter 4:

Spoiler: Show

At the time of the module's creation, the compendium listed it as "at-will".  It was playtested as "At-Will" and released in the same way.

Of course, the card had it as  recharge 5+.  The compendium was in error.  So they fixed it in the compendium (I suspect heavily this module was relevant in bringing attention to the issue).

But I do believe the stat block in the module is as-intended.  (And that stat block is also kinda lame.  Take away the creatures nice trick, and the encounter falls apart into mush.  I think they need to have an appropriately powered AoE for the encounter to function.)

This is one of those adventures where it is important to make the knowledge
check about the monster, to know that you need to take down that one first.