Ravenloft on My Mind - Telegraphing When to Run

 I realize we're practically as non-Halloween as it gets (it'll be six months away at the end of April) but I've found myself fixating on horror monsters. I guess to an extent I've always been into them, despite being a total scaredy cat when it comes to horror movies. I discovered a series on YouTube produced by PBS called Monstrum, which is on the "Storied" channel. This one's about the Dullahan, the famous headless horseman of Irish myth, which inspired the Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

There's only so many days in the week, and I don't see my Ravnica D&D campaign ending any time soon (I'd say at our current rate we've got at least a year left in it,) so any actual Ravenloft campaign I run is unlikely to start any time soon.

Ravenloft, being a D&D setting, presents a challenge. D&D is all about heroic empowerment. I've often thought of fantasy as "horror except the heroes can fight back." This isn't a perfect definition given that there's plenty of horror in which the heroes do fight back - I mean, Dracula ends with them staking the bloodsucker and saving Mina Harker.

But I do think that, typically, in horror, the protagonists have to rely on ordinary human bravery and ingenuity to fight a supernatural antagonist. Even that's not always true, though: in Stephen King's works, for instance, there's often benevolent supernatural forces at play as well that can give the good guys an edge. Of course, I've often thought that King's works are more often in the realm of dark fantasy than horror, and the truth is that it's all a spectrum rather than discrete categories.

As a DM, you sometimes want to communicate to the players that a monster is there to be fled, not to be fought. And nailing that communication in a way that doesn't then take them out of the narrative (such as literally saying "this monster is too tough for you, so you should run") is tough.

This happened with my Sunday D&D game, in which I am a player.

For reasons outside the game, we started our Spelljammer game well over a month ago and had a huge gap in the middle of our starting adventure - we were going into the basement of a space bodega to figure out where these hostile oozes were coming from. Journeying below, we found an old disused karaoke bar and then a door with access to the sewers, along with a Grick that had burrowed in there and was essentially like the urban legend of a pet alligator that had been flushed down the toilet. The Grick was friendly to us, but the source of the oozes (most of which were too small to be a threat) seemed to be coming from the sewers itself.

And then we didn't play for about six weeks.

So, when we finally continued playing, we went out into the sewers proper and found three patches of kind of swamp-slime. I shot one with a firebolt, and then they came to life as some kind of swamp-monsters. (I just realized when looking up a monster I thought might be similar to them on 5E.tools that I actually looked up the literal stat block, so I'm going to avoid looking further). Anyway, we assumed this was just "the next combat," and the first round went very well for us - only one monster was close enough to get an attack off on the first round and rolled a natural 1, while our party got three critical hits. When those three crits didn't take down the first monster, I started to get the sense that we were in trouble, but by then, they were all in melee and we had a kind of cascade - the druid went down, and then the cleric got her up, only for her to go down again. Then, the cleric went down.

Our DM expressed shock that this was the way the fight had been going, and that she really expected us to have run, but by the time we realized that was what we needed to do, we had the two characters capable of healing (my artificer was out of spell slots) unconscious and a lot of bodies blocking the exit.

Ultimately, while not a TPK, the cleric wound up rolling a natural 1 on a death save after having already failed once - and right after she had painted her new mini!

Given how very early in the campaign this is, our DM has said that we'll have some leeway here - the cleric is a doctor, and my artificer is a city employee, and so we figured we have enough connections to get someone who can revive her.

So, how did that happen?

(As a note: the DM's job is a difficult one. You want to provide your players with a challenge, but a surmountable one. Technically nothing is stopping you from roasting your level two party with an ancient red dragon if your only goal is to "beat them," but then, well, no one will want to play in your games anymore. Some DMs like to hit the party with a tougher challenge while others like to play a little softer, and some players want to feel they've really earned their victories by pulling it out by the skin of their teeth while other players play for that power fantasy and to feel awesome. Calibrating all of that, with different tastes at the same table, is not easy.)

So, the DM told us at the table that she did not want this encounter to play out this way. She intended for us to realize the creatures were too much of a threat for us, and that our main priority from the start of initiative should be to run the hell away.

And we, as a group, have shown that we will do that in some circumstances (even when she doesn't intend it). In our previous campaign, we ventured underground into a mysterious grey dragon's lair. But we also had a teenager, a five-year-old child, and a friendly kobold of indeterminate age (but who acted like a child) that we were trying to get to safety. The dragon's thunderous breath weapon went through walls, and killed the kobold. So, as a group (I was a major advocate of this,) we decided that the danger here was too great given our charges (oh, we eventually got the kobold revived, even though all that was left after the breath attack was bones) and so even though I think she intended for us to fight and kill this dragon (and we probably could have,) and possibly even uncovered an important story clue, as players we proved that we were not pure murder-hobos who would just kill monsters regardless of other factors.

So, I think that she probably already figured we weren't just going to assume every monster was there to be fought.

Another major factor that complicated this was that first round of combat. The one monster that got to make an attack missed, and as I told her after the fact, I had assumed the swamp monsters were some low-CR creature, like a re-skinned zombie. (Ok, I did cheat and look them up - they're CR 1, which is great for a level 1 party if we're fighting just one of them, but not three). So, rather than seeing one of our party members get hit really hard, instead we just assumed that these were easy enough to deal with, and that, like so many adventuring parties, we'd clear out the shop's basement on our first little adventure and be fine. The misimpression we'd gotten from that first round is what the DM mainly thought was the reason why things went poorly.

But, to be honest, I think that, if anything, that was a sort of minor factor.

A bigger factor, I think, was that there had been such a gap of time between sessions. I spent both of my spell slots on the first fight, because I assumed, since we were level 1, we'd probably only have one fight that day. And I figured that any other fight would probably be balanced for level 1, meaning that the expectation would be that I'd only be using cantrips anyway. With the massive gap between sessions, that notion that "we're prepared for what's down there" sort of got reinforced because I didn't even remember that first fight that well (I honestly can't remember if there were any other initiative rolls).

But I think the biggest factor at play was telegraphing how tough these monsters were.

When we encountered these creatures, it wasn't even instantly clear that they were creatures at all. But when they rose up and became clearly things we would be fighting, there wasn't any instant clue that these weren't the kinds of low-level, easily-defeated creatures that even a level 1 party could normally assume to be fightable. We started that fight at full health, and while I had been somewhat liberal with my spell slots, the rest of the party had reserves (indeed I think everyone else was full up).

So, while I think our DM had in mind that these things would show how scary they were on the first round by doing a bunch of damage with a single hit (they hit for 2d6+2 - that I didn't get by looking it up, but because she told us) and that would be our indication that we should run for it.

The problem, though, is that that's unreliable: first off, the first attack missed, and by the time we knew how hard they could hit, we had all three on us. Second, sometimes the damage rolled was low - I got hit by one for 5, which means that she must have rolled a 1 and a 2 on the d6s.

So, what was meant to be a fun, scary thrill turned into a desperate fight in which a party member died.

How, then, would you avoid this?

One way (the boring way) is to simply make every combat encounter balanced and beatable. But that forces you to leave out a fantasy experience. I mean, no one thinks Fellowship of the Ring would have been better if the Fellowship had stuck together and taken down the Balrog together. I'm far from the first person to describe the Fellowship as a D&D party, but I imagine Gandalf as a DMPC who the "DM" wanted to remove from the party, giving him a super epic way to do so by having a CR 19 demon show up when the party was like level 4. (We're all agreed a Balor is just a Balrog with the serial numbers filed off, right?)

If we look at that scenario and interpret it as a D&D combat encounter, you can almost think of it as "ok, the party has fought a troll and a bunch of goblin minions - an encounter that was fairly taxing, especially after Frodo got crit and went unconscious before he could get some healing. The party is at diminished resources and needs a rest. And then, after all that, while they're already feeling down, you have this massive demon show up. But just in case the players think that they're supposed to fight the demon, you have the super-powerful NPC who has been traveling with them explicitly say 'this fight is beyond all of you,' thus making it clear that this is a chase, not a fight."

So, ironically, this classic of fantasy literature does this danger-telegraphing in the most blunt-force way possible: just having a character tell the party to run.

But let's say we don't have a Gandalf there to tell them.

Here, I think it's really tough. In the Curse of Strahd game I'm in (was in? We haven't had a session since last summer, but in theory we could pick it up again) we did the intro Death House adventure that takes you to level 3 before the adventure proper begins. The climax of the adventure has a Shambling Mound show up if you don't sacrifice someone to the powers controlling the house. And a Shambling Mound is CR 5 - in theory way too much for a party that's level 2.

So, this is truly supposed to be a "just run" moment. But our party didn't. And, well, a few lucky rolls and some good tactics and... we just killed the thing. Now, the remainder of Death House has a lot of environmental features that encourage you to run - the whole house starts violently shaking and spinning blades appear in all the doors (it's actually safer to Kool-Aid Man yourself through the walls, which summons swarms of rats, but they're less of a danger than the spinning blades).

There's plenty of foreboding hints that this is a monster that you're supposed to run from, but... well, we didn't, and we weren't really punished for it either.

And that means that this is always going to be kind of tough. But let me suggest another possible way to hint that the monster is beyond the party.

This one does, unfortunately, require a bit of precedent to establish.

Let's say your big scary monster the party needs to flee is going to be a troll. Trolls can be pretty scary to a low-level party, in part because their chance to hit is pretty high (they have a +7) and if the party doesn't have access to certain damage types (or Chill Touch, aka the bane of any DM who wants to use regenerating monsters) but they're also enough of a "standard fantasy monster" that players who haven't memorized the Monster Manual might not think it's that unusual to have a group of level 2 players fight a Troll.

So, this technique is what I call the "gruesome scene." Let's say that the party has fought ogres - a creature that, outside of any specific fantasy property, is more or less interchangeable with trolls (other than the "internet troll" concept). Ogres are CR 2 - tough, but certainly less tough than a Troll (and without any form of regeneration). If the party has fought an Ogre before, and hopefully someone in the party has been hit with their Greatclub attack (which does 2d8+4 - not a small amount of damage for a level 2 character) they'll know that an Ogre is a pretty significant monster to fight at their level.

So, when the party gets near the troll, here's what you do: litter the area with ogre bodies. Indeed, on a mechanical level, the standard ogre doesn't have any fire or acid damage, so a Troll would inevitably win in a fight against a group of ogres. But showing that this troll killed all the ogres and, perhaps, is even eating one of them (to make it really clear the troll is the one that killed them,) you can get across the power differential, and hopefully convince them to run.

As a DM, you don't want to "railroad" the party, but you can sometimes drop hints as to what they should do. One option is to make it very clear that there is, say, an exit from the room or chamber they're in that the monster can't fit through. You can mention this until someone suggests they use it, but you need to be careful to make sure you're never telling them to use it, but more suggesting that they can use it.

I want to make it clear that my friend who was DMing for us is a fantastic DM, and my critiques here are just using this week's experience as an example of for a really challenging thing for a DM to pull off. I do think there's another factor at play here, which is the problem with levels.

Level 1 characters are insanely squishy. Even in the best circumstances, things can go pear-shaped very quickly. For example, my Artificer, at level 1 (we leveled up after that fight) had 10 hit points. Fairly reasonable - it's a d8 class with +2 to Constitution. Now, a standard Goblin, which is one of the absolute most classic monsters to fight at level 1, has a scimitar and a shortbow, both of which do 1d6 damage, and the Goblin gets to add its dexterity modifier of 2 to both. If a goblin rolls a natural 20 and then rolls 6s on both dice, that level 1 character will go unconscious. This could happen before that character gets a turn in combat.

Is it likely? No. But the point is that level 1 characters are extremely fragile. It's hard to even make a monster that can't knock them out with a lucky crit.

As such, I think that basically any fight is one in which the players are going to have to trust luck and be very careful about in those levels. And so, sending a high-powered monster against them that they have to flee is just too risky. They need to have a little flexibility (namely higher HP) in order to have the time to both register that the fight is beyond them and also have the time to get away.

But, I also get why you want to do this at lower levels. In a popular D&D actual play campaign (I won't say which to preserve the surprise for those who see it) the party is six level 8 characters, and before the final boss fight, the DM contrived to force them to sacrifice spell slots and some of their HP in order to save NPCs that were important to them. He then threw an Adult Red Dragon at them - which is CR 17, and thus would, according to Xanathar's, be a "balanced' fight against them if they were level 12.

And, while that fight gets dicey as hell, they ultimately prevailed (technically it required the Cleric to keep rolling death saves after they had stabilized, and lucked out with a natural 20 to pop up to 1).

So: as players get to higher levels, you can be really shocked as to what they're able to do, especially if they play tactically well.

In other words, by the time a party hits tier 3, I'm not sure there's any one monsters you could send against them that is tough enough that they'll A: really need to run from and more importantly B: that they will think they need to run from.

In a way, I think the best thing you can do is find reasons for them to run from combat not because they fear for their own safety, but because there's someone else they need to protect. A group of hardened D&D adventurers will see a dragon and go "yeah, we'll be fine as long as we spread out so only one of us gets hit by its breath," but if the party is motivated to protect someone or stop something else from happening that the dragon is just a distraction for, you can potentially get them to retreat in other ways.

Malenia and Placidusax Down

 Well, I think I got lucky. On Malenia's second phase, she did a second dive to the ground and lotus bloom. While this is devastating if it lands, the attack also leaves her vulnerable (from a distance at least) for several seconds. That delay was enough to give me the window to take her down to almost nothing, and then Black Knife Tiche's damage-over-time ability finished her.

You get a whopping 500,000 runes from beating Malenia, which even at my quite advanced level was enough to level me up a couple times (I had a lot of spare change, so I went back and did the old Prayer Room farming route to fill out the next level).

Having beaten Malenia, I realized I had left another secret, extra-hard boss unchallenged, and went to Crumbling Farum Azula to face down the Dragonlord Placidusax. The route to this boss is easy to miss, and honestly on about half my attempts I died just trying to jump down to the floating platforms that led to him.

The intro to his fight is super-cool. You lie down in a fragment of one of those big arcs found around Farum Azula and time sort of reverses, rebuilding what was once clearly a great city, and you are put in this utterly, utterly massive arena where this two-headed (apparently once three-headed) dragon sits, motionless, hovering in the air until you get close enough to aggro him (kind of like God-Devouring Serpent/Rykard).

I'm sure this fight is absolutely devastatingly difficult if you do it before going to the Haligtree. And it wasn't easy (well... until I figured out the best spell for it). The first phase is not too bad, but then he starts to disappear, teleporting around (not quite as frighteningly as Lorian in Dark Souls III - there's a much bigger telegraph for dodging his post-teleport attacks) and does these dive-bombs that I'm sure are meant to one-shot you if you fail to dodge. But I have 40 Vigor and after him, I'm now level 150, so if I was topped off, I could survive one of these dive attacks (they're not the most difficult thing to dodge, though).

With Black Knife Tiche again helping me out (though she went down on my successful attempt) I tried a series of different spells. The old Comet Azur death star technique works ok in the first phase, but phase 2 he's moving around far too much.

And then, I tried trust old Rock Sling. The range and, more importantly, the delay between casting the spell and its rocks going off, combined to make it very effective against this teleporty dragon (also, having gotten used to using Stars of Ruin as my bread-and-butter spell, I came to greatly appreciate how little FP Rock Sling cost in comparison). I actually managed to stagger him twice, and ran up to get a critical hit with my Moonveil.

I'm given to understand that these two are the extra-hard secret bosses of the game, so I kind of expect things to be relatively smooth sailing from here. Again, I've never gotten one of these games before they had the DLC available, so I'm debating whether I want to actually finish the game now or wait the better part of a year for some DLC content to be announced and then released. Or maybe I just want to finish the damn game (in fact, if it weren't for DLC, I'd probably have beaten Dark Souls III by now).

Anyway, feeling accomplished getting those bosses down.

Class Analysis: Barbarian

 All right, we're getting started on our class analysis posts with the Barbarian, which, apart from the more recent Artificer (who I'll be covering after we finish the originals, probably,) is the first, alphabetically.

To touch on the Barbarian, we need to look at two broad categories: flavor and mechanics. The former is highly subjective, but the latter is also somewhat subjective and somewhat a question of math.

The inspiration for the Barbarian must be Conan the Barbarian, the pulp novels from the early 20th century that helped to popularize the fantasy genre and also were a huge inspiration for Gary Gygax and his collaborators, who viewed the self-interested heroics of Conan as a more direct model for D&D than the altruistic actions of the heroes in, say, Lord of the Rings.

And when we think of Conan the Barbarian, we usually think of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the 80s film adaptations - bulging with muscle and very little covering said muscle. We actually get some of the mechanics from this imagery: Barbarians don't wear armor, despite being front-line melee fighters. Indeed, there is historical precedence for this; the ancient celts would sometimes charge into battle fully naked, painted blue, to intimidate their foes (indeed, in the books, Conan - whose name is rather Irish, which you can compare to a certain veteran late-night host who is also very Irish - is meant to be vaguely Celtic, or proto-Celtic - rather than Germanic).

The term "Barbarian" was used originally by the ancient Greeks to describe, essentially, any foreigners. The word was onomatopoeic, based on the idea that foreign languages sounded like people saying "bah, bah." (I don't know if it has anything to do with beards - though given that the Greeks were pretty into beards, I think that's unlikely. It was the Romans who encouraged shaving). In the context of Greek and then Roman civilization, the term came to mean "uncivilized." In our post-colonial world, the notion that imperialist systems are "civilized" while the people they colonize are "savages" or "barbarians" is, of course something that scholars have been reexamining and deconstructing.

Of course, this makes the term's use for a character class kind of odd - it's basically an epithet thrown at outsiders. Still, the image it conjures - of chaotic brutes wielding violence, usually against a more "civilized" foe - ties the class into the concept of unbridled aggression, which then sees representation in its central class mechanic: Rage.

Indeed, I think that the use of Barbarian as a class name sort of redefines the word: rather than designating a particular culture or group of people as Barbarians, the class defines its members as people who channel their Rage as a martial technique. You could have a fancy Noble character who is a registered member of the dominant social group, but if they channel their Rage as their means of adventuring, they're a Barbarian.

Let's get into mechanics:

Barbarians are one of the more limited classes in terms of the kinds of rolls they can play. Every Barbarian is a melee combatant. While not strictly the "tank" of the group. Barbarians do have some subclasses that emphasize the ability to draw foes to attack them. With the resistance granted by Rage to the three "physical" damage types and the Barbarian's d12 hit die, along with other class mechanics that encourage the Barbarian to have high Constitution, the class encourages Barbarians to play the tank role.

Let's break the class' abilities into three categories: Offense, Defense, and Other.

Offensive:

Rage gives you bonus damage - while it's not a huge amount, it does add up, adding 2, and later 3 and then 4 to your weapon hits.

Reckless Attack makes it easier to hit (and crit) against your targets. The downside is that you open yourself up to being more likely to get hit - but we'll see why that's not always such a big deal when we get to the Defensive section.

Fast Movement is arguably an "other," but mobility on a pure melee class does mean you're less likely to spend a whole turn just getting to the enemy.

Extra Attack is pretty obvious.

Instinctive Pounce was introduced in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, which, like Fast Movement, makes it easier for the Barbarian to get up to their foes. Again, this isn't strictly a damage increase, but it does make it more likely you'll be able to make contact with the enemy on your first turn.

Brutal Critical makes critical hits a bigger deal for Barbarians - which ironically doesn't really synergize with Rage. It does, however, encourage the use of Greataxes, which in almost all other circumstances are inferior (slightly) to Mauls and Greatswords.

Primal Champion lets you push your Strength to 24, which, among other things, makes your attacks more likely to hit and also increases your damage (a raging level 20 Barbarian is going to get 6 more damage per hit just for being a Barbarian).

Generally speaking, I think that a Barbarian's offensive abilities are fairly simple and straightforward. Rage being a limited resource creates the class' most obvious tactical challenge, though Reckless Attack can also be a tricky trade-off. Other than these, though, in most cases you're going to have a pretty clear order of operations: hit things.

I'd argue that Barbarians are one of the simpler classes to play because of this, but I don't think that's a bad thing - D&D needs a mix of simple and complex classes, and I think subclasses are another area you can play around in to give players options on complexity.

Defensive:

The d12 hit die translates to, on average, one more hit point per level than a Fighter, Paladin, or Ranger, two more than most classes, and then three more than Sorcerers and Wizards (and of course double that for level 1). If you roll for hit points, a Barbarian has the widest possible range.

On top of that, though, Unarmored Defense allows Barbarians to lean into Constitution even more. While you won't want a negative to Dexterity, you can more or less push Constitution as your secondary (or even primary) stat, as it will help you both in terms of hit points and armor class. That being said, if you're using the Standard Array, and arranging to get either +2s to Con and Dex at level 1 or a +3 to Con and a +1 to Dex, and then you use all your ASIs to get Con maxed after Strength, you'll cap out at an AC of 16 - though you'll hit 18 with the Primal Champion bonus at level 20. Now, there are magic items like Bracers of Defense, of course, and you can wield a shield. In fact, at level 20, you'd have the equivalent AC of a Fighter wearing nonmagical plate armor - though they would have likely hit that point at level 8 or so. A Barbarian who rolled god stats could theoretically cap Strength, Con, and Dex, and thus wind up with an AC of 22 (or 24 with a shield) at level 20, but that's pretty unlikely.

Of course, the reason Barbarians still work as tanks (on top of just having very high HP) is that Rage cuts most damage they take from attacks in half. Against foes wielding most weapons, the Barbarian effectively doubles its health as long as it can Rage. Given that bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage are extremely common, this makes it very hard for a Barbarian to be taken down in combat - but it does leave them vulnerable to other kinds of damage. (I don't want to get bogged down in subclasses, but this is why the Totem Warrior who picks the Bear totem at 3rd level might be too powerful).

Relentless Rage takes the unlikely scenario that your raging Barbarian has hit 0 hit points and makes it yet harder to actually take them down: allowing them to make a Constitution saving throw (with which they are proficient) and potentially stay at 1 HP. And this ability doesn't even have an official "cooldown," instead just getting a higher DC that resets back to 10 when you finish any rest.

Danger Sense gives Barbarians advantage on dexterity saving throws against things they can see. Given that they're going to likely sacrifice some dexterity in favor of constitution, this helps them survive fireballs and other common dangers.

Persistent Rage lets you keep your rage going even if you haven't been attacked or attacked something, which is great to maintain such an important feature when you're, say, using your action to drag an unconscious party member to safety or otherwise doing something tactical.

Essentially, I think the idea is that a Barbarian should only go down very rarely in combat, though they are highly reliant on Rage. A Barbarian that runs out of Rages is going to be significantly, significantly less effective (my Ravnica game is currently near the end of a long dungeon and the Barbarian has run out of Rages, and I almost feel guilty - though the final boss does a lot poison and force damage, so it wouldn't necessarily help that much).

Other:

This category is, I think, very important for the more combat-oriented classes. Spellcasters often have all sorts of spells they can cast to affect non-combat situations, and I think it's important that brawlers also get some ways to flex outside of the battlefield.

Barbarians don't get a ton of these.

At level 3, though only as an added feature from Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, they get Primal Knowledge, which gives the proficiency in one, and later another skill from the Barbarian skill list. This actually winds up giving them just as many skill proficiencies as Rogues, though it takes a while to kick in. Skill proficiencies are actually a pretty important part of D&D, and this is also a great way to shore up the Barbarians out-of-combat capabilities - you might not be super-wise, but if you grab proficiency in Survival, you might be a much more useful tracker/navigator. Indeed, with this feature, you're going to get a majority of Barbarian skills.

Feral Instinct is, actually, a combat ability, but I don't know if it falls neatly into offense or defense. You get advantage on initiative rolls and you can basically ignore surprise if you go into a rage.

Indomitable Might is a nice bonus where if you roll below your strength score on a strength-based ability check (I'd interpret this to include Athletics) you can just use your score instead. By this level, that'd mean you probably can't roll below a 20, which reinforces the Barbarian as a titanically strong individual.

Analysis:

Here's the tough thing: Rage is very, very important to the Barbarian. Many class features and a lot of subclass features only function while you're raging. As such, you need to be very careful in planning out how often you use the ability (at least until you hit 20).

This also puts you a bit at the mercy of the DM. To be sure, this is true with any long-rest-recharging ability, including spell slots for most spellcasters. While only a couple of base features require you to be raging to use them, subclasses often require rage to do nearly anything. Half of the Berserker's four subclass features require it. The Totem Warrior, who just gets more features, is a little less dependent (Totem Warriors also get a lot more out-of-combat stuff). For popular post-PHB subclasses, the Zealot has 3 out of 5 of its features require you to be raging, and the Ancestral Guardian 3 out of 4 require it.

So, if I were to propose a tweak to the Barbarian, I'd allow more features to work regardless of whether you're raging or not.

I think Rages should be a resource to be managed, and the challenge means there has to be a chance to mismanage it. But I think that tying everything to a resource that you can use only a few times a day until you hit level 20 can make it feel like the class is gutted if you run out.

This got... way more in-depth than I think I initially intended, and so I think I might re-think how I do these posts for future classes. (Spellcasters are going to be extra tough given that their spell list is very important to defining their capabilities).

Malenia Ain't Messing Around

 So, apparently I'd already gotten to Malenia, the ultimate boss of Miquella's Haligtree/Ephael. I think she more or less represents the "Nameless King" equivalent of Elden Ring - a secret boss hidden behind another secret boss, with an extensive "dungeon."

Malenia has two phases - the first is "Blade of Miquella" and the second is "God of Rot." The biggest thing that complicates this fight is that she will heal a little bit each time she hits anything, which effectively increases her HP and can erase progress you make. As a ranged sorcerer, the main thing I tend to have to look out for is this kind of blade-storm ability she does repeatedly that is very hard to dodge out of.

So far, I've gotten her down to about 1/3 of her health in the second phase, but attacks become harder to dodge and generally, by this point, she's carved through whatever spirit ash I've been using, giving me less interference to get distance and pelt her from afar (she also has a long-range attack in this second phase). Ironically, the Scarlet Rot status effect only really becomes a factor in phase 2.

I've tried two main spirit ashes - the Mimic Tear, with which I just hope the tear will shoot off stuff like Meteorite of Astel to knock her down or Black Knife Tiche, who often does knock her down and also hits her with nasty DoTs. My own spells tend to be Ranni's Dark Moon, which I try to pelt her with enough to inflict frostbite, and then I go for Stars of Ruin as my main damage spell.

It's a tough fight, but it ought to be.

"Dragonflight" Looking Very Likely to Be the Next World of Warcraft Expansion

 So, some genuine leaks (not like "I got this from my roommate who works at Blizzard" but "this was found in the code of a Blizzard website") have turned up regarding World of Warcraft, and it looks like the next expansion will be Dragonflight.

The leak seems legitimate. Most players have been speculating that the next expansion would finally have us visit the Dragon Isles, a location that has been teased since vanilla, though ironically the original depiction was more Old God related than Dragon-themed.

But these things can change.

We literally just have one word to go on, but it's a fairly evocative one. Dragonflight refers to the "families" of dragons - Bronze, Red, Green, Blue, and Black. Dragons are, naturally, the quintessential fantasy monster, but WoW has always had a kind of unusual relationship with them, in that its dragons were all originally good. Thus, for us to have evil dragons to fight, there have been contrivances to "corrupt" them - the Black Dragonflight was tainted by the Old Gods, the Bronze Dragonflight are hounded by their own future selves (also seemingly driven insane by the Old Gods, though in a more time-paradox-y way). The Green Dragons are susceptible to the corruption of the Emerald Nightmare (again, Old Gods) and thus we sometimes have to put them down when they go crazy. The Blue Dragons are interesting in that their brief turn to villainy did not involve any sort of magical corruption - Malygos just woke up from a 10,000-year catatonic stupor and decided that mortals using magic was no longer sustainable, and he'd forcibly hunt down any magic users, and got his Dragonflight to serve this cause.

Among the Red Dragons, I think the only times we've fought them has been when individuals are magically enslaved and not in control of their actions.

Cataclysm, which released 12 years ago, was theoretically the big "dragon" expansion, though in practice I'd say it had more to do with elementals and Old Gods. It ended with the four other aspects (Kalecgos stepping in for the recently dead Malygos) to ensure that Deathwing's defeat and destruction was utter and absolute. This fight also led to the disempowering of the dragonflights, making them mortal (and also supposedly infertile?)

There were some dangling threads though: one that I've always obsessed over is that Murozond - the future, corrupted version of Nozdormu (who also confirmed what we had suspected about the Infinite Dragonflight - that they were future versions of the Bronzes) was killed in the End Time dungeon, but I think it's pretty noteworthy that he died in a future that no longer exists - and also, we have no idea how much he had done before that moment in his own timeframe. For all we know, the Murozond we fought there had already accomplished all he had intended to before traveling to that time. Indeed, perhaps by having us kill him there, somehow he "locked" his fate so that we can't actually kill him in his "past," which remains our future.

Basically, I think Murozond would be a pretty good big bad for a dragon-themed expansion.

We'll be getting the official announcement later this month, but this looks pretty legit.

Respeccing Arcane

 So, my tank-based paladin character ran into a couple problems: while you certainly can block boss attacks if you boost your brass shield with barricade shield, the fact is that playing that defensively isn't great for bosses who move quickly or have odd hit-boxes. It got frustrating.

So I respecced him (three times this playthrough, though the first two were just so I could do Goldmask's quest in Leyndell and then spec back). And I've gone all in on Arcane dragon communion.

Dragon spells require faith and arcane, and there's a special seal you can get (it's in a deceptively large dungeon past the stonesword key door you pass at the very beginning of the game before you emerge into Limgrave - mostly it's tough because of those instant-kill chariots) which is the Dragon Communion Seal, whose Incant bonus scales with both Arcane and Faith (more of the former).

Why go with Dragon Communion? Because you can melt bosses.

Most of the dragon incantations have a long wind-up and then you can channel a breath attack for a few seconds, totally draining all your FP in the process. The thing is, these do massive amounts of damage, and some give nasty status effects. Most elements can be picked up, and then after you kill specific dragons, you get an upgraded version (somewhat more costly, but I think they do more damage).

Essentially, bosses become less of an intimate dance of death than having you stand there and try to burn them down before they can kill you. It's not fool-proof, though: you're immobile while channeling the spell, and while you can take down a boss fast, it's likely going to get a couple hits in there, which as any veteran of these games will know can mean death.

The more powerful dragon communion spells get unlocked after you kill the dragon who's spell it is, and you need to purchase them with dragon hearts at one of two locations: one is on an island off Limgrave (you have to go through the seaside cave with the demi-humans... which, by the way, is a term I think really needs to be unpacked) and another is in southern Caelid (I think you might have to use the latter for the later ones).

Anyway, what I've tended toward is using breaths that inflict status effects and then follow up with one that does straight damage. Frost and Rot are both pretty good - I got the Rot breath running on the Fire Giant and it let me spend more time avoiding his attacks while his health ticked away. Frostbite I think has myriad nasty effects on foes (I think it slows them, for one thing, which helps give you more time).

It's funny, I think that spellcasters in Elden Ring have a real viable strategy using powerful channeled spells. I've been using Meteorite of Astel on my sorcerer, which is profoundly imprecise (even on a big boss only half or fewer of the projectiles actually hit the thing) but the damage is utterly staggering.

Taking my Dragon Paladin (as I'll be calling him now) to the Haligtree, I kind of rushed through the early parts and got to Loretta. Using the Mimic Tear, I waited until my doppelganger got her attention so I wouldn't have to concentrated on dodging and then I unleashed Rotten Breath followed by Borealis' Mist and then Smarag's Glintstone Breath, and she went down pretty smoothly (after a couple attempts, to be fair). I did the same to the version of Astel in the Yelough Anix Mine, and I'm looking forward to bringing this to Mohg (though I haven't actually gotten Moghwyn Palace unlocked yet on this character).

Now that I'm in Ephael, Brace of the Haligtree, I'm kind of in farming mode. My raw (pre-Silver Tear helmet) Arcane is, I think 50 at this point, and I have 30 Faith. I'm hitting a bit of a point of diminishing returns, but higher Faith will let me get some of the high-level Incantations that I can't currently use. Arcane also, I think, affects the secondary attributes of weapons with things like bleed on them, so I'm running with River of Blood as my main melee weapon, which both has a bleed buildup effect and also does extra fire damage that scales with Arcane.

The first area of Ephael, after the Prayer Room site of grace, is kind of absurd for farming runes. The enemies are not hard and each drops like 2.6k a head, which means that when I've gone forward to just get a couple more to fill out a level, I usually wind up sitting on 15k "spillover." Looks like the Dragon Paladin is catching up with the Sorcerer.

One thing also about building up his faith (I've been kind of alternating) is that at this point, I think he's basically got the stats to do what he had been doing before I respecced him anyway (maybe not as much dexterity). So, if I want to get the Brass Shield and Treespear out again, I should be ok.

I don't know what level players are expected to be before they beat the game, but right now I think I'm fine with just pumping things up until it becomes excruciating to level, and honestly, when you hit Ephael, that ceiling gets way, way higher.

D&D Class Analysis

 In 2024, we're going to get new versions of D&D's core three rulebooks. At that point, 5th Edition will be ten years old, but WotC has also been a bit cagey on whether they're officially calling it 6th Edition, 5.5 Edition, or what. What they have said is that the books will be backwards-compatible with all the pre-existing 5th Edition content. That makes sense: 5E has been D&D's most successful edition ever, and has brought in a whole new generation of players. Likewise, a lot of veteran players have generally been positive on the edition (which feels super rare in this era of elitist gatekeeping - not to say that D&D doesn't have such elements in its community).

So, to a large extent, there's an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude that WotC appears to be taking with the game.

And I think you could apply that logic to 5th Edition in general - the basic premises and even the modular elements. The classes cover a lot of bases in terms of fantasy archetypes, and I think that building subclasses for the existing classes instead of going back to the drawing board to make an "Avenger" that's "like a Paladin, but its own whole new thing" has made it easier to add new stuff to the game without breaking the successful, functional rhythms that allowed 5th Edition to work in the first place. We've only gotten one full new class, the Artificer, which fills a niche that other classes couldn't, really.

There is, of course, a lot more to the PHB than just classes. The PHB is really the main rulebook of D&D, though the Monster Manual and DMG are both very useful. But classes are the biggest defining element of your character.

I did a massive review of subclasses a few months ago, and I don't really just want to retread the same territory (something I think I'm guilty of on this blog sometimes). Subclasses have been used to empower classes that needed help - the Ranger, as found in the PHB, leaves a lot to be desired (the Beast Master gets a lot of flak, but I think the Hunter is also underwhelming). The problem, though, of making more powerful subclasses (like the Gloomstalker, for example) to make a class more attractive is that issue of power creep.

To be fair, in this style of game, it's very hard to keep everything finely tuned to be perfectly balanced. And beyond that, "balance" might mean very different things depending on the style of campaign you run. Most of my friends are actors, and so we generally get really into the RP elements of the game. But there are players who really think of D&D as more of a strategy game. They don't want to delve into a complex relationship with that one shopkeeper, but instead just want to roll their good Persuasion check to try to get a discount.

What I want to try doing, over the next several posts (that aren't about Elden Ring,) is to go through the classes in the PHB and look at them without their subclasses (I'd been thinking of going in-depth on the PHB subclasses, but I think that's redundant with my earlier posts) and see what they could use.

We aren't going to be fully ignoring subclasses, to be clear. Some classes really get transformed by their subclass choices (the newest one, the Artificer, being perhaps the most transformed by them) and that needs to be addressed. But I want to look at the overall structure, the flavor of the class, and what I think the class needs to deliver the fantasy it's meant to fulfill.

I'm going to try to go alphabetical here, which does mean we're starting with the class I've played the least: the Barbarian. (I might visit the Artificer once I see the ones from the PHB, but my general thoughts at the moment are that the Artificer needs the least revision at this point.)