Planar Observations

[Amoenotep]

i don't know..i might have found an "I win" button.

[Lorkar1]

OOOoooOOO!!! I know I know!!! The I win button is...
Tasha's Hideous Laughter...it causes blood amniotes to lose their jellicular structure.
Now that would be wicked having planar creatures having an achilles heel of some obscure spell or weapon. Might give noobs the edge since they dont know they aren't supposed to use certain weapons or spells against some things.

[cely]

i don't know..i might have found an "I win" button.

Gah, now I'm racking my brain and it's all your fault!
Is the Blood Aura considered a melee attack? If it is, I'm wondering if Death Armor and Mestil's Acid Sheath would be effective against the Blood Amniotes.
Also, from looking at the combat log, the Blood Aura does magical damage. So perhaps Gnome Battle Robes might help with their 20% Magical Damage Immunity. Although I'm not sure if walking into HoD with +3 robes is the smartest thing to do.

[Amoenotep]

the blood aura was shown and explained to a player in game...they got to see first hand how the multiplicity works and what not to do. if that info gets passed around maybe the blood amniotes won't be such a daunting task.

[Binkyuk]

having never fought one take this with a pinch of salt, but logically the solution should be to buff 1 or 2 of the highest DPS fighters in the party to insane heights of prowess and send them in. Everyone else stay out of the aura.

[P. Fricebottle]

Just curious but has anyone tried healing the damn things? I am thinking on the whole HoD thing where everything is "dead" and amoenotep is clearly trying to say something albeit obliquely. Does the Amniote store the damage it does before it splits? If so then healing spells ought to absorb the damage. I would think flesh to stone might be helpful too as well as cold based attacks or maybe someone needs to summon a Bill Cosby to eat it.

Gary -BB- is a pure cleric with healing domain. Amniotes seem to have a complete magical immunity, I tried casting an implosion to check their fortitude one time and the combat log only shown Immunity: Magic. So yeah, you have to take them down through physical means. Magical Immunity = Immunity to Heal Spells. I've never seen a Mass Heal damage one.

Now, theres another way that works to completely solve the aura problem (or so I've heard) but Gary was a cleric. Not a mage. Its a spell called Gust of Wind, it sweeps away the aura and you don't have to worry about it. Which means no more multiplication problems. However, this is only if you have a mage handy.

The non-mage way, as Amoenotep so obviously put it at this point, is to just send minimal numbers to kill them while the others stand outside of the aura. We've all seemed to figure this one out by now. I think the problem isn't ignorance as much it is too much responsibility. You can't expect all the players to know this. Therefore, you're going to have an occasional group in HoD that can unexpectantly crash the server. There needs to be a limit of how much they can split into in a certain amount of time.

[Celorn]

Now, theres another way that works to completely solve the aura problem (or so I've heard) but Gary was a cleric. Not a mage. Its a spell called Gust of Wind, it sweeps away the aura and you don't have to worry about it. Which means no more multiplication problems. However, this is only if you have a mage handy.

. o O ( or bard )

The non-mage way, as Amoenotep so obviously put it at this point, is to just send minimal numbers to kill them while the others stand outside of the aura. We've all seemed to figure this one out by now. I think the problem isn't ignorance as much it is too much responsibility. You can't expect all the players to know this. Therefore, you're going to have an occasional group in HoD that can unexpectantly crash the server. There needs to be a limit of how much they can split into in a certain amount of time.

Yeah..this usually happens, spread them out and kill them individually.. the problem is that they're aggressive and if 2 of them charge at the party, they can multiply before anyone has a chance to back up. As I said, last time we went there with a large party, we handled the situation... the multiplication was good since most of the party was benefiting from the extra xp...

[Aarkon Draco]

air gensai also have a gust of wind token

[P. Fricebottle]

Alrighty, we took a party all the way through HoD and into the Negative Energy Plane yesterday so I'll report my observations.

I'm going to say this straight-up, we had a good party. We had two clerics, a bard, and a dwarven defender going through HoD. We killed the Lich King, we also had the pleasure of meeting (and killing) some of Leona's bodyguards. Along with some Elite War Machines. Then we killed Draco, we had some trouble but with 4 people we did pretty good with one or two casualties (which were rezzed).

Then when we took the portal to the Nexus we lost our cleric, but we picked up an additional bard. The Negative Energy Plane lived up to its reputation, its pretty darn hard. I think Metis was the DM on at the time, she probably saw me get hit with 4 Hellballs in a rapid succession. However, that was our fault for attracting too many. But it does show that retreat is not much of an option, because if a Xeg-Yi spots you, you're knocked down by a Hellball.

However, heres a creature summary

Tri-Lochs: Anti-Magic creatures, they didn't pose a problem for us because I used a double axe and was buffed up quite a bit. If you can dish out the damage, you shouldn't have any problems with these.

Evolved Undead: Pretty balanced, they're your ordinary undead. Except they beat the living crap out of you if you're not careful. However, these didn't pose too much of a problem we couldn't handle it either.

Death Archer: If you can get them in melee, you are fine. As long as you focus on it, you're going to be safe from its Death Attacks and such.

Xeg-Yi: Here is where we had the problems. They have good to decent xp (around 177 xp at level 39 of so), but I'm not sure if thats worth it. We had trouble hitting them with 60+ AB (bard song + aura + tons of buffs), they shoot hellballs, and I don't know if they were the ones doing it but I kept getting dispelled and spell failure (not like the spell failure affected me much).

Death Giants: Same as Xeg-Yis, even when you do hit them you're not dealing much damage. Now, three of us were dwarves so we had +4 AC vs. Giants which was nice, but didn't keep him from beating down on us with his huge Dire Mace.



We had gone there before, except the last time we had a wizard instead of an additional bard. We did better that time. However, this goes to prove you need an extremely organized party to do that plane. Which raises the question, when is enough enough?

I mean, gathering a party and working together is fun but when does it get to the point to being a chore? I mean, its common sense we're going to need a cleric. An absolute need from HoD onward. Bards are a must too. Then you need a damage dealer to hurt anti-magic creatures like Tri-Lochs. A wizard made it do-able as well.

But its to the point of impossibility of anybody short of a team of experts. To make up for that, theres got to be something there that would encourage people to gather a party and do it. Definitely not the drops, nothing drops. Nada, zip, nothing. Xp isn't worth it, if you have a party that can do Negative then you're probably getting faster Xp at HoD or Pos.

[Nolan Silvermoon]

as to the amniotes, ive have tried gust of wind on them and yes their aura does get negated and ive also have been able to knock them down with the spell also for a short peiord of time. no aura no split