Spider Swarms with Evasion? yea totally not broken....

[AzureTheGamerKobold]

So whose bright idea was it to give the only weakness for a swarm immunity to AOE? or practically immunity... seriously WHO the hell designed this stuff? ugg and i was enjoying the game again only to slam into " lawl invulnerable swarm " seriously your encounter design team has no idea what they are doing...
/rant

[ArchAngel]

Originally posted by Cypou:

Originally posted by valky:

Thank you :) For a lot of player, that spell does seem to be non-existent and makes like 50% of the game much easier..I mean, I could probably stay for hours in a duel with a spider swarm as long as that spell is running and my weapon of choice is a broken knife.

Thank godness the game provides you not with weapons that have elemental damage.

..someone mentioned them first; Mandrogora swarms - if you think you've seen everything.

As a noob, i "discovered" it after this dungeon...or raher i thought it was akin to the bg neutralize poison spell... Its name is quite misleading : it doesn't "delay" poison it makes you ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ immune to it...

Now i can't imagine playing without it!!

Actually in BG there was a lower level spell Slow Poison that also basically removed it so you can say this Delay Poison works in spirit like BG did :)

[Plopinou]

Concerning the spiders, I didn't even knew they had evasion before reading it. Because the swarm died so easily with the enchanted weapons that I didn't even try to cast some AoE spells (due to the Delay poison spell).

So, unless you have a very specific party, you shouldn't have any issue with them.

[dfedwards2001]

Applying templates to standard monsters to increase their difficulty/CR is a very common and well established practice in PnP pathfinder. You can read all the rules in the SRD.

Now if your only experience is playing PnP adventure paths you probably haven't seen it much and there is a very basic reason why: adventure paths tend to use generic monsters only because you don't have to reproduce their full stat blocks which take up a lot of space in the printed books.

In this case the designers added a template to make the swarms more resistant to AOE. Now if you didn't have access to elemental weapons at this point this design decision would be a bit questionable. However, the game throws elemental weapons at you as well as giving you access to a NPC alchemist and several characters who have elemental cantrips which can sneak attack and don't allow saving throws.

Plus as stated above you can obviate all challenge entirely by simply casting communal delay poison.

The design is absolutely fine.

[Shadenuat]

I dunno man, when optimized Evoker/Sorc has to cast multiple 100 damage fireballs to get them it's kinda annoying. And not all weapon types get elemental damage. There is no spells like Firebrand or Enchant weapon to add properties to them. Not everyone loves gnomeprick either.

It's ok as a template for higher difficulties but seems like counter-intuitive to what Swarms are.

[SIlverblade-T-E]

note that Communal Delay Poison also makes you immune to your OWN and anyone else's Stinking Cloud and Cloudkill, folks!

(Note that Mind Fog is NOT a "poison" it's an enchantment and thus is NOT affected by Delay Poison)

anyone who hasn't discovered this yet...it's a superb trick ;)

Stinking Cloud is not affected by Spell Resistance (iirc)
and failed saves means all enemy can do is a "Move" action
yes it's a "fort" save so tough critters will save a lot, but, with high enough stats and Spell Focus Feats you should be able to make a lot of enemies unable to harm the party
thus it's a superb crowd control spell for when attacked by bunches of enemies, or those with low Fort saves, like Rogues, wizards etc

Undead are of course, immune to poison

also gives basic "concealment", 20% miss chance
all my melee folks have "Blind fighting" feat, hehe

[dfedwards2001]

Are they annoying? I guess. On challenging I killed them so fast with auto attacks they were little more than a nuisance.

But the claim is that the design is "broken" which is hyperbole at best.

[HeLLfire]

Originally posted by Cypou:

Originally posted by valky:

Thank you :) For a lot of player, that spell does seem to be non-existent and makes like 50% of the game much easier..I mean, I could probably stay for hours in a duel with a spider swarm as long as that spell is running and my weapon of choice is a broken knife.

Thank godness the game provides you not with weapons that have elemental damage.

..someone mentioned them first; Mandrogora swarms - if you think you've seen everything.

As a noob, i "discovered" it after this dungeon...or raher i thought it was akin to the bg neutralize poison spell... Its name is quite misleading : it doesn't "delay" poison it makes you ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ immune to it...

Now i can't imagine playing without it!!

Technically this spell should (the way i read it) only make you immune while it's up. Once the duration is done, any and all poison effects take effect immedialty (Fort rolls galore)

That is, unless you before that, cast neutralize poison which would remove all the poison that's being supressed from his\her system.

That's why Neutralize poison is a higher level.

[palathas]

Originally posted by Marcos_DS:

Originally posted by palathas:

Yeah, they kind of broke swarms. They are supposed to take x1.5 damage from AoE spells. They certainly don't get Evasion, I mean how would they even evade? They are a big blob of critters, not a single entity.

They would evade like any other creature, be quick enough to avoid damage. Can certainly see that, some spiders are crazy fast. Also, swarm is just the basic creature type. They probably don't get class levels, but instead use a template to add evasion. Couldn't find a "quick" template, but both agile(CR+1) and fey creature (CR+1) would give them evasion. They are the progeny of spider matriarchs, which are intelligent first world spiders, so fey would certainly fit...

Maybe if they had a hive mind. That's the whole reason they take extra damage from AoE attacks, they aren't evasive enough so they almost have a vulnerability to them.

[Mauman]

Assuming you're talking about the quickspider swarms in the womb....

They're a complete joke if you have any character with an elemental weapon (and why the hell would you not have those at this point?).

Also, alchemist bombs still end them well enough.