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Note that Daeren adds Creeping Doom to his spell list if he takes Second Mystery: Animal.
In summary: have Daeren cast Creeping Doom as many times as possible, and then initiate combat. Have Seelah use Mark of Justice on Creeping Doom, and watch the spiders destroy Playful Darkness, while everyone else keeps a safe distance. You'll also need to deal with the Shadows with Greater Heal, or channelling vs undead.
This works perfectly well, even on Unfair.
But you can wait just before chapter 5, you'll go to midnight fane again before returning to drezen and will be able to fight him again with 3 more mythic levels and several more levels.
Since the Beta of WOTR, there is a well-known bug who make the fight very easy when you exploit it by using "Creeping Doom" spell who summon swarms who can deal damage without the need of attack roll :
Creeping Doom :
This spell summons four massive swarms of biting and stinging insects. These swarms appear adjacent to one another, but can be directed to move independently. Treat these swarms as centipede swarms with the following adjustments. The swarms have 60 hit points each and deal 4d6 points of damage with their swarm attack. The save to resist their poison and distraction effects is equal to the save DC of this spell. Creatures caught in multiple swarms only take damage and make saves once.
As you can see in the end of Creeping doom description, normally, even if you summon 100 swarms, it should never deal more than 4D6 damage per round, but in WOTR, the spell is bugged and the limitation doesn't work properly.
There were so much complains about Playful Darkness being too strong, impossible to legitimaly beat him in highers difficulties, etc... during Beta and even more when the game was released. Owlcat never fixed this bug. i guess it's because the number of people who killed it at Ch.3 without exploiting this bug is abysmal.
But it's still possible to beat him at Ch.3 without exploit (and even without cheesing by taking advantage to the cliff close to where you pull him).
Personnaly, because he is not immune to some controls like Charm, i use littany of eloquence with Lann which allow me to charm him, making sure he'll do nothing for a dozen of rounds, it's more than enough to kill him on unfair by just auto-attacking him to death like it's meant to be :) (under fortune hex despite his super high AC, you'll hit once every 10 attacks)
You can find Lann's build here
There are other ways to beat him legit, he's vulnerable to positive energy, etc... Good thing about Lann's way is that it work for everyone (as long as you don't take Wenduag)
You can do it when you come back from the abyss, you'll get acces to heal (mass), who deal massive damage on him and you can use summons to absorb damage while Daeran and Sosiel damage him with Heal (mass).
The inspection option who allow you to inspect stats, immunities, feats, etc on all mobs is actually really nice. Pathfinder games are all about knowledge, identifying weakness of mobs and exploit thoses.
(Actually, the Fane in general has been VERY buggy so far, it's making it a real pain to play. Especially when one gets punished for actually playing well, such as when I whomped the High Preist of Bapomet and ran past him while he died In Walls to help the queen and as soon as the combat ended, the queen and company inexplicably went hostile.)
Playful Darkness' TOUCH AC is 34, and with spell resistance 36, even my main character isn't punching through half the time, and nothing hits hard enough. So spamming Heals from my casters is out (as at least one strategy suggested), because they'll never hit him. And he deals so much damage, there's no time to dispel. (And, of course, because the CL is so high, scrolls are useless.)
I have *three* mareliths from Soul Shear (I'm never going to have that again) and they don't last long enough, nevermind the other summons, nor is spamming blade barrier at all helpful.
(And it's not like I can change my load-out, since of course it won't let you back out. I'm not sure it'll even let me rest to load anything completely specific to this one fight...)
Frankly, his numbers are so cheese I am more than half determined to cheat right back and drop his stats to minimum because I'm that irritated.
(And again, this is a problem with OwlCat's "And suddenly boss that you can't possible beat without foreknowledge" game design which was just as bad in Kingmaker. I REALLY like Pathfinder, and mechanically, this stuff is right up my street, and overall, the game (s) are fantastic, but OwlCat are a collectively terribly GM for monster design.)
All this on top of likely missing the dragon quest, because it gave me no indication of how to get to it before starting the fane; all in all, the Fane has overall been the least fun part of the game so far.
The dragon quest is the one with the Red Dragon and Greybor right? If so you get a journal entry that you need to go toward a place which you can find on the campaign map. (However it has like 2 cheezy encounters as hell too, because you need to re-load until it is a certain one of your chars and not the dragon who starts the turn or it can be a TWP on level 10. Or this is one of those where actually the extended buffs mythic path can be useful.)
About the Playful darkness i remember took me like 6 hours to legitly defeat him. (Re-loading, re-speccing spells and the like.)
I played that time with AZATA route.
I just used mass summon and basicly LANN was like the only one who could damage the thing. I just mass summoned everything blocking him and that is it. (I did not even go optimized builds and just stayed pure.) At least he does not have greater cleave...
But I agree it is a terrible encounter.
Also it is hillarious but i think this time Seelah will be the one to kill it. She does currently every round to anything, no matter what i encounter 48 damage.
I just made her a weapon thrower, because...It is more worth it. Any time she misses something she deals her damage bonus to the enemy (Mythic path), however since if you use smite evil on something then also her charisma bonus is added as well. Currently I am on level 10 and she is my most reliable damage dealer, with not hitting...ANYTHING, above a Vrock. //If she hits i get like a d6-d8-d10 more damage but that is sadly not that much, since it is unreliable.//
Which really tells you a lot about the game.
Especially since you can get in certain fights into those roll streaks, where your guys just roll 4 or below for a longer period of time, meanwhilethe enemies roll 16+ all the time, while they already have 40+ AB and AC. My animal companion currently can have like 45 AC, and even with that the chances of being hit is more than 50%.
(I also stayed pure classes on all characters. Which the game does not really prefer, as most characters get better if you multiclass them.)
there are cheese methods also as noted. some extras to add. iirc his reflex saves are not amazingly high. you can target that. he is undead. channel pos energy. possibly even go right with casting heal on him directly. pillar of light.
seelah's mark of justice. a massive damage and hit bonus to your entire party.
sosiel. impossible domain into community. guarded hearth. a massive to hit, and saving throw bonus to your entire party. giving your entire party +20 to hit, helps a bit..
cave fangs..
any multihit spell with mark of justice. battering blast. I don't think you have hellfire ray yet.
body block with tons of summons. azata treants, mug, ring of shadows, etc.
evil eye. dispels.
No, Dusk of Dragons, the one that some bloke wants to go go with him too. Icon on the map, no route to it, and so far west from any obvious point that I assumed it didn't unlock until a later chapter.
That combat, I didn't have trouble with at all, actually. Firstb time Soul Shear summoned a marelith, not a babau, actually.
There have been three combats so far I got annoyed enough to zero-difficulty - the swarm-spam with whatshisface the walking insect swarm, the Rift Drakes (because no-save Slow that doesn't correctly only counter haste is stupidly brokenm and that ones 50% on Paizo for having it and 50% OwlCat for not correctly implementing it) and in DLC 2, the swarms in the theatre, because swarms vrs 2 level 1/2 characters can go frack off (and I picked eldritch archer, because I had no idea again I needed to look at a walkthorugh).
(I mean, it's not EVEN like I am not prepared to look at walkthrough during normal play probably far too often (since i ate making informed decisions, but some of monster design feels like it either expects me to constantly replays like it was a game from the 80s/90s or read the entire metaphorical module first...)
I don't have kind of patience. One of the very fastest ways to get to to go "sod this for a game of soldiers" is to make me do something repeatedly.
That said, I am at the moment considered throwing up my arms, writing the last few hours off as a bad job and go do the Dusk of Dragons and the end of the Treasure Island stuff first, maybe inch me into level 15 before I start (so slightly more spells).
And maybe it won't be so buggy the second time.
I HAAAATE that. Seeing the way the game rolls, I remain unconvinced it doesn't actively cheat the rolls, since the reverse never seems to happen.
I took two mercs at the start (Lich so I wanted some undead people at the outset) and (along with the MC) at something close to what I let my players have on TT. (So very good stats.) On custom difficulty (though probably closer to core) full enemy crits, 100% party damage, AI enabled etc. Thus the party is MC elementalist wizard (ascendant acid), THF glaive-lady, Cavelier 1/Cleric x with Sabre-toothed tiger animal (as tank and striker, not mount, since that took his claws attack out), Lann ZA 11/Demonslayer Ranger x, Carmellia (straight Shaman, tank/buffer) and currently Arushlae (Slayer) and an archer/bard skeleton minion.
Most of the time, the combats are pretty easy with the set-up and for the last stretch, no-one has even taken much damage. And then there's "and now your characters are one-shotted." One feels like there should be room between the two.
Or, at least, if you're just going to straight up give them made-up stuff, at least make it *interesting.* For my TT games, I (spam) something I call the defiant template, which basically increments a creature's hit point into a block, and it can spend one of those blocks to get rid of the encounter-ended status effects. So it last long enough (in theory...!) to make the combat interesting, while simultaneously still letting the players feel like they're making progress. As even if a Save or suck doesn't work, it still significantly contributes. Which feels better than just whiffwhiffwhiffwhiffwhiff which you get on OwlCat's equivalent or the Final Fantasy Death Spell Effect (i.e. anything it works on isn't worth using it on) and all the immunities. If I was to DM that encounter, I'd likely have given him say. five times as many hit points (in this game's context), but defences significantly lower (AC maybe 10 points lower, for example). *Even if the effect was largely the same in the long run,* it would FEEL better to play to be doing SOME damage.
It is, ultimately, the fact that it's cheap difficulty by High Numbers (on the easiest numbers to artifically inflate) that annoys me most, not that its a super boss. If it was a more legitimate opimisation-hell monster, I'd feel a bit better about it, but the flat "has big numbers because" just vexes me as a DM. It doesn't feel like it's *earned* being hard, if you see what I mean?
Prolly, the best advice. In my four runs, only once did I successfully beat him outright and that is against my alchemist. You can access the midnight fane at any time through the barracks.
Heck, my useless demon skald had to cheese it even though I was already in act 5.
When I saw how many buffs he had on him I was like... ohh yea, this gonna hurt.
And I also noticed he still had 50% concealment after all buffs were debuffed but I think that is just due to his innate ability since he is a shadow. I think I hit him with glitterdust and my team of outflankers kicked his teeth in.
But I agree, 60 AC, not sure what I would have done without corrupt magic.