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Oct. 18th, 2021
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Oct. 18th, 2021 10:55 pmWe need to talk about how bullshit the Shrine of the Three fight is in Wrath of the Righteous.
So the villain of this area wants to create a world where combat is more “tactical,” right? You have to think your way through rather than just use overwhelming force. So she fights you in a maze full of traps that are super hard to disarm. As backup, she summons three kinds of demons:
1): “Vanguards” who can teleport, and like to jump straight to your casters for sneak attack damage.
2): “Snipers” who fire shot after shot after shot, all of them incredibly accurate. In a pinch, they can teleport too.
3): “Coordinators,” who you will learn to despise. They’re around the same size as the hallways of the maze, so you often can’t get past them unless you can either kill them or teleport. They have concealment, Mirror Image, and absurdly high AC, so just hitting them is a chore. They can heal themselves multiple times. They love spamming a move that makes all of your characters fall flat on the ground for multiple turns if they fail a Will save. And when they finally run out of spells, they can claw you to death surprisingly fast.
The enemies never run out. No matter how many you kill, more and more keep teleporting in. In order to stop them respawning, you have to flip a bunch of levers that are scattered all over the maze. But you can’t get to the levers, on account of the traps and the walls and the gigantic Coordinators who park themselves in your way and refuse to move. And even once you pull the levers, you still have to deal with the demons who already ported in and want to rip your face off.
This isn’t “tactical.” This is fucking Tucker’s Kobolds. Overwhelming force is the only thing that will get you through before the snipers shave off all your HP!
Look, I actually liked the backer quest where you fight hive-minded cyborgs. If you think “guns don’t belong in D&D,” I have bad news about Murlynd the cowboy wizard from 1st edition. But between this and the “Deal With the Devil” quest in Kingmaker, I think the devs need to exercise some degree of veto power over backer quests.
(Also, the quest was originally bugged so you didn’t get any quest rewards.)
So the villain of this area wants to create a world where combat is more “tactical,” right? You have to think your way through rather than just use overwhelming force. So she fights you in a maze full of traps that are super hard to disarm. As backup, she summons three kinds of demons:
1): “Vanguards” who can teleport, and like to jump straight to your casters for sneak attack damage.
2): “Snipers” who fire shot after shot after shot, all of them incredibly accurate. In a pinch, they can teleport too.
3): “Coordinators,” who you will learn to despise. They’re around the same size as the hallways of the maze, so you often can’t get past them unless you can either kill them or teleport. They have concealment, Mirror Image, and absurdly high AC, so just hitting them is a chore. They can heal themselves multiple times. They love spamming a move that makes all of your characters fall flat on the ground for multiple turns if they fail a Will save. And when they finally run out of spells, they can claw you to death surprisingly fast.
The enemies never run out. No matter how many you kill, more and more keep teleporting in. In order to stop them respawning, you have to flip a bunch of levers that are scattered all over the maze. But you can’t get to the levers, on account of the traps and the walls and the gigantic Coordinators who park themselves in your way and refuse to move. And even once you pull the levers, you still have to deal with the demons who already ported in and want to rip your face off.
This isn’t “tactical.” This is fucking Tucker’s Kobolds. Overwhelming force is the only thing that will get you through before the snipers shave off all your HP!
Look, I actually liked the backer quest where you fight hive-minded cyborgs. If you think “guns don’t belong in D&D,” I have bad news about Murlynd the cowboy wizard from 1st edition. But between this and the “Deal With the Devil” quest in Kingmaker, I think the devs need to exercise some degree of veto power over backer quests.
(Also, the quest was originally bugged so you didn’t get any quest rewards.)