Dragon wing spam counterplay

Moderators: Forum Moderators, Contributors, Suggestion Moderators

Locked
User avatar
Lorkas
Posts: 3903
Joined: Mon Sep 08, 2014 3:14 pm

Dragon wing spam counterplay

Post by Lorkas » Sat Nov 11, 2017 6:23 am

This mechanic is great as an opener, when the dragon swoops at your party and you have to either scatter to avoid the landing gust, have large (sometimes impossibly large) fort saves to avoid the effects, or be a shapeshifter in a form that's just flat immune. Seeing this ability one time in a battle is great, maybe multiple times if the dragon is actually moving around.

When the dragon is standing and attacking, not moving around, and just chain-spamming wing blasts with the combo of fort KD + damage + regular attacks, it just isn't really fun. It's the wrong kind of challenge IMO, since there's no real counterplay to it at all--it's simply "be the right char or die". It would be nice if the code were revised so that dragons use their wing blast attack only when moving around the battlefield, and not constantly while attacking in melee.

Alternatively (or perhaps alongside such a coding change), I suggest that a spell-based counterplay option be introduced. I think a good candidate would be Stoneskin (and perhaps Greater Stoneskin for consistency, but not premonition).

The way I see it working is this: stoneskin offers immunity to wind blasts (Gust of Wind spell and also dragon/wyvern/etc wing blasts), but on a failed save, the amount of damage that would be applied to the character is instead applied to the stoneskin. It would work more or less like spell mantle for dragon wing blasts--if you have even 1 HP left on your stoneskin, the wing blast is absorbed fully, but the stoneskin fades.

This means that the stoneskin will keep you on your feet, but only a number of times limited by the damage you're taking, before you have to recast it. Taking 20 as a typical damage applied from a dragon's wing blast, it means that stoneskin from a wand would absorb 3-4 wing blasts before a new charge must be expended, and stoneskin from a level 10+ caster would absorb 5 or 6 on average, depending on the exact damage calculation used by this spell. Greater stoneskin, at the same damage value, would absorb an average of 8 from a level 15+ caster or 6 from a scroll. In practice, these values will be lower, since the dragon can chip away at this protection with regular attacks as well (as can any minions it has around).

Basically this offers one more option (at a cost) for dealing with one of the most frustrating mechanics on the server.

Locked