Blackwater?

[Droolguy]

What level is this area? I am rolling through with a party level of 13 and literally every fight is a bossfight level accomplishment taking an entire army of summons and prebuffs once you get past the front door.

...and I mean that very literally, 10+ summoned creatures, alignment prot, bless, heroism, bear, cats, ...and on and on.

They are impossible to tank because they simply continually attack your back line until they die (literally charging through your tank to get to them), they have ridiculously high DR stacking (DR vs. Align + Elemental + Weapon type), and enormous HP and AC compared to the party.

[HydraLord]

Hi there.
Level 13 party is fine for the area, you should be able to do it. A couple of tips may be of help...most warriors of the device regenerate life, it should be suppressed by lighting attack (even low damage ones), or spells that drain statics.
Spells like slow and haste should help you a lot, for the damage resistance, you should be able to hava a spell called align weapon...i do not remeber what alignament do they have, but if they are lawful use chaotic, good you use evil, and so on...that should let you overcome the DR.
Usually the ones with tower shield are part of the front line...you may try to avoid them and head your damage delaers to the mages and assasains. I do not know if you use them, but blur, mirror image, and barkskin could be usefull to hold the line. Check on those characters with high dexterity values and the armor they have...heavy armor tend to reduce the potential AC (Armor class).
Summons are not to be able to vanquish most encounters on their own (at least from my experience), but if you summon before the engagment, you may use them as a wall while you charge on the damage dealers, mages, and archers.
Crowd control spells are important, spells like grease, entaglement and spike growth will hinder the enemy progress as you attack them from affar, or spread them enough to take them out by small groups. Delay poison communal, and cloudkill are excelent spells to work with.
If you provide with more information, like characters and classes, we may be able to help you further.

Hope this help
Have fun

[Mugiwara]

Yeah Blackwater is rough but L13 is about right. It is that dungeon where you start it for the first time and you are What? But it forces you to become a better player. The previous poster provides solid advise.

If you have archer types make sure to disable Deadly Aim and Rapid shot as these will eat into your to hit chance. If you are using melee builds relying on strength likewise disable power attack. And melee dex builds disable Piranha strike. Yes you will lose out on number of attacks and damage, but if you cant hit the enemy your damage is zero.

Also if someone has access to evil eye this helps greatly to both hit and blinding the enemies. That mug that summons desnans is great for the central chamber fight. You can also pick up some gear that gives your spontaneous casters access to electricity spells in this dungeon somewhere. Anyone that cause the status effect shaken will be useful ie from feats such as dazzling display. And if all fails touch attacks.

[Stink Bug]

Also, blackwater is optional. If you’re just not having fun with it, don’t torture yourself. I’m not sure if you can come back and do it in later chapters, though.

[grognardgary]

Other useful tips give your melee guys the feat that allows them multiple attacks of opportunity and place enough space between your front and back ranks so that in order to get to your back ranks, they have to accept an attack of opportunity, It should be obvious but use the formation key to try to tailor your formation to suit the encounters.

[AlexMBrennan]

If you have archer types make sure to disable Deadly Aim and Rapid shot as these will eat into your to hit chance.

If you only hit the on a natural 20 because everyone gets stupidly high defence bonuses then you are better off with the extra shot. Also mythic rapid shot removes the penalty.

[TamTroll]

that's the place where everthing is vulnerable to lightning, right?

[fox5s]

Originally posted by Stink Bug:

Also, blackwater is optional. If you’re just not having fun with it, don’t torture yourself. I’m not sure if you can come back and do it in later chapters, though.

Assuming you didn't trap yourself inside without enough UMD to open the front door to retreat.

Originally posted by TamTroll:

that's the place where everthing is vulnerable to lightning, right?

Yes. Though, a bunch of things (the minotaurs and maybe demons) still have resistance to lightning IIRC.

That place was rough for me as well. I got through it via Protective Luck tanking, using Hexes to reduce their to-hit and Cackle/Chanting to keep it all running. I had less issues with the humanoids than I did with the Minotaurs and Demons. That became a slog. I basically spent the first three rounds or so getting the tanks protected and giving the most dangerous things -8 to-hit while my DPS maybe got through a third of something's health. Maybe... Some summons to fill the gaps and absorb a couple hits while this is setting up.

Once everything is mostly stabilized, then I start with the -8 to their AC and start going through them one by one. Slowly. It was such a SLOOOOOOOOOG. >.>

The humanoids weren't half so bad. Same general tactic but i din't have to do the -8 to their to-hits and can move on to debuffing their AC and killing. And the DPS doesn't NEED that until the Tower Shield guys and by that point the fight is over.

It was the only place so far that I've been forced to break my self-imposed rule of no resting in dungeons. I'm rationalizing it because I left and rested outside ONCE. :P

Yes, they charge the back line initially. However, you can five foot step away the true squishies and as long as your tank/offtank is in their face, they shouldn't follow. And if they do, that's the new target to focus fire.

[Super Cosmic Space Magnet]

It's a pretty monstrous place as compared to the other areas available when the messenger comes in to tell you about it, yeah.

[Hassohappa]

The humans and salamanders are pretty straightforward. The humans in particular have terrible will saves so slumber or w/e disabling spells makes pretty short work of them. The demons are definitely the most obnoxious and felt way out of line with the other enemies in the area. It was weird to me though, the first fight you have with demons is probably the hardest. I don't think there are any other packs of them that are as large as the first one you'll come across.

You just need to stack several effects at once to get decent chances to hit the demons through their AC. Flanking with the Outflank feat, bardic music for Inspire Courage, the cleric Community domain for Guarded Hearth, tripping gives +4 to your melee hit chance, inspire rage if you have a skald along with Lethal Accuracy gives a lot of hit to melee, general spell buffs like Good Hope. There are tons of things you can do to up your chance to hit which means that sometimes on harder difficulties you need to employ several of them at once.

For the boss You can use Dimension Door to teleport through the barrier and just kill him immediately.

[Hassohappa]

Oh, I also wanted to add that the biggest complaint I had about the zone is that it is horribly designed. Way too much backtracking and too many different annoying mechanics for blocking off door access in a game that isn't' designed for it and whose map has no way to make notes on it or anything.

I spent about 15 minutes just looking around for the freaking circlet you need to deal with the purple barriers because I happened to miss the little box in a corner it was stuffed into. That's Ok for some random loot but you shouldn't do that with an item needed to progress.

[fox5s]

Originally posted by Hassohappa:

For the boss You can use Dimension Door to teleport through the barrier and just kill him immediately.

Yeah, I started that fight thinking I could farm the adds a bit for extra exp. But realized early that it wasn't gonna be doable (my kill speed was too low) and just hiked Camellia around to all the things. Would have been nice to have spare spell slots for Dimension Door but it worked out fine. :D

And OMG the Blindness from Sunburst kicked my arse! Even affects Undead. SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOG. >.>

[RedwoodElf]

Of course on my latest run, I was Lich path, so I just repurposed every Tower Shield guy I came across and used them to tank the rest. They have fast healing disabled by electricity, and almost nothing in there actually attacks with electricity, so it gave me a basically unkillable army of tanks (some of which were armed with electric weapons, and I just made sure to kill any opposing enemies with those and add them to my troops)

[Victor66]

Originally posted by RedwoodElf:

Of course on my latest run, I was Lich path, so I just repurposed every Tower Shield guy I came across and used them to tank the rest. They have fast healing disabled by electricity, and almost nothing in there actually attacks with electricity, so it gave me a basically unkillable army of tanks (some of which were armed with electric weapons, and I just made sure to kill any opposing enemies with those and add them to my troops)

I am a lich and IDK how to do this. Is this an ability that comes after level 13?

[Green Spartan]

Originally posted by Mugiwara:

Yeah Blackwater is rough but L13 is about right. It is that dungeon where you start it for the first time and you are What? But it forces you to become a better player. The previous poster provides solid advise.

If you have archer types make sure to disable Deadly Aim and Rapid shot as these will eat into your to hit chance. If you are using melee builds relying on strength likewise disable power attack. And melee dex builds disable Piranha strike. Yes you will lose out on number of attacks and damage, but if you cant hit the enemy your damage is zero.

Also if someone has access to evil eye this helps greatly to both hit and blinding the enemies. That mug that summons desnans is great for the central chamber fight. You can also pick up some gear that gives your spontaneous casters access to electricity spells in this dungeon somewhere. Anyone that cause the status effect shaken will be useful ie from feats such as dazzling display. And if all fails touch attacks.

pft...my party is lv 10....no wonder i got kicked in the nuts ..

[fox5s]

Originally posted by Victor66:

Originally posted by RedwoodElf:

Of course on my latest run, I was Lich path, so I just repurposed every Tower Shield guy I came across and used them to tank the rest. They have fast healing disabled by electricity, and almost nothing in there actually attacks with electricity, so it gave me a basically unkillable army of tanks (some of which were armed with electric weapons, and I just made sure to kill any opposing enemies with those and add them to my troops)

I am a lich and IDK how to do this. Is this an ability that comes after level 13?

Repurpose is a 5th level Lich spell. If you are an arcane caster and merged your spellbook, you should already have it available. If you aren't or didn't, you'll probably get access to it around... MR 5 or so? Not sure.