The topic I don’t want to further hijack Chad’s thread with is the desire to have an area, or really areas, that can provide a challenge to a fully geared out epic group. Right now if you’re going ‘adventuring’ in the end game more often than not you’re going on a loot run.
Nothing wrong with that and I’m not criticizing it. I partake!
Also I’m not being critical of the server in general. We do have DM events, and just random DMs hoping in and throwing extra challenges at a group out of the blue. All Father used to do this on a semi regular occasion to a group I used to run with and it was some of the most fun times I’ve had gaming. But both of those types of DM interaction can be few and far between depending on your hours and woe to the poor UD toons begging for some loving
So my idea would be to add some epic areas that have multiple challenges for epic groups. And the following are some suggestions along those lines...
1) Cheesing the zone line. If the encounter area is too small it’s easy to just zone out when things aren’t going well, heal, rebuff, and zone back in to fight a still injured and drained opponent. The pit fiend encounter at the bottom of the Nashkel mines is very much that, where as the UD pit fiend will chase you across the map if you decide to cut and run. Definitely makes a difference, until you get to the point where you can wreck either of them as a group or solo, which brings me to...
2) Encounter design. The standard ‘boss encounter’ in the server is one powerful encounter, usually alone but something with a few henchmen who are little more that a nuisance, a la the Balor or Frost Giant King. The strategy is always the same, have you’re tank draw focus while they’re either healed of just heal themselves (in looking at you Favored Souls) while everybody else cleans up the henchmen then focuses on the big guy. That dynamic might change pretty dramatically if you have three balors, Frost Giant Kings, dragons, etc to deal with. Until, as was pointed out in the aforementioned thread, you figure out a strategy to deal with them and are able to prepare ahead of time since boss encounters are always static. Which brings us to...
3) Do they have to be static? Suppose you will have 4 spawns but each could be a balor, a pit fiend, a Frost Giant king or a dragon? So you never know what the makeup of the group you’ll be facing is? Maybe it’s 4 pit fiends and you need fire immunity. Maybe it’s 4 white dragons (oh the horror) and you need cold immunity. Or a Frost Giant king, a Balor, a black dragon and a white dragon. Now it’s all over the place in terms of what you need.
For the record, yes it makes no sense to put those creatures together and I’m not advocating for that specifically, just using them as an example.
You could also have randomly spawned minions in the mix to keep everyone in their toes. Speaking of which...
4) The area itself should be designed to wear a group down a little. No resting and powerful spawns to chip away at resources while you work your way to the main encounter. This harkens back to old school PnP where you can’t just pop tent in the middle of a dungeon and suddenly you’re 100%. The area should be a gauntlet so the accomplishment is more than beating a single encounter.
5) But what does it matter if there are no real stakes at 30 anyway? If you die just respawn. A point Steve brought up in the former thread and it’s a good one. Something I’ve puzzled over a bit. Here is my solution...
You have to pay the ferryman, or caravan or portal opener or whatever, 25000gp to enter the area. One of the end chests, assuming there are a few, will have 25k per person in it. So if you succeed you don’t lose the coin. And if you don’t... 25k isn’t the biggest hit in the world, but it’s still a meaningful hit, even if you’re rich already.
Anyway it’s an idea. I’m sure it can all be improved on.