Arelith

How I love this place and hate to hate it.

The Burning Shores is one of the places that I find most memorable in the modules, and perhaps I'm biased in the early days that I was new to Arelith and only knowing it from distant whisper. There is a wonder in all that.

However, the Burning Shores suffer from a tragically annoying design in the mobs.
To list:

Everything has sneak attacks. Everything that doesn't have sneak attacks hits like a truck.
The damage and high AB of... flatly, everything in the burning shores means instantly that anything with low AC (below 55, if you can call that low) is going to be consistently hit, and anything that is consistently hit, is going to die very, very fast. I would list the mobs that deal high damage, but the thing is that everything deals high damage. The gargoyles, margoyles, magma giants, mephits, snappers, nothing hits below 50 flat points of damage.

Backlash. You cannot deal damage without taking more.
The most annoying part of the Burning Shores is, without much argument, the margoyles. These mobs autocast acid sheath at about CL 20, are tough, sneak immune, hit as in the point above, and have some DR, I believe.
You can say "durr, just breach them", but all the time you lose employing your standard and trusty arelithian beach wand is time the mobs are fixing on you, and the time you take simply breaching one margoyle, you'll find that there are other two or three... per spawn, that also need to be breached, and if you are going around, this means that before completing a lap by the Shores you are most likely to have burnt off your wand. Breaching is an option in some cases, but any dungeon that you have to run with a weavemaster on piggyback shooting breaches around is probably due to some rebalancing. (Did I mention that the margoyles recast their acid sheath occasionally? Well, they do)
What is the alternative to not breaching, then?
- Run away.
- Take five million points of damage, which from an IC point of view, is something you want to avoid.
-Craft the whole bug set for glorious acid damage immunity (yeah, no).
-Drag your elven archer death squad with you.
-Don't go to the Burning Shores. <--- winning choice.

Spell breaches.
The fire lords have them.
The azers have them.
The BLOODY half-dragon boss has them (and apparently also has it quickened).

Everything is tougher than it should be.
Not only everything hits hard, but everything is hard to kill as well.
Half the mobs have some manner of DR.
The mephits use improved invisibility.
Everything is stacked up in HP and saves.
The azers have higher AC than the rest of the mobs.
The worst offender of this last part are the fire snapper, that doesn't have any less than 550 of HP.

Resources and loot shortage.
I'm a sucker for treasure chests. They are the loot piñatas that have all sort of delicious goodies inside, and there is a massive lacking in them around the Burning Shores.
While there are more resources, with the new loot system I can only see zinc as far as the eye can see.


If this place had remotely the experience gain of The Ascent, this would be somewhat justifiable, but I don't get that much, and even if the experience was higher, this still feels like a place too annoying to run to be actually enjoyable to take a party through.

Burning Shores, more like Burning Sores, amirite?
. . .


I'll be over there.

Been there multiple times.

Unready it hurt. Then i bought imp invis wand and breach one.
It turned to easy walks. Maybe because always good party.

Cleric + Wm/DD/weave/wild mage and their various mix.

Never had issue there. Good xps. AC44+invis was enough. Regen spell meant minimum of kits used in party. These places are annoying hard. Most people are lazy and do not bother. We grinded Burning spires and adjancent regions (lowerdark) two months and only twice run into ozher party.

D'uh, Flower
Everything with a stocked party is easier, but that is not the point.

The point being that the Burning Shores are relatively harder and frustrating, whilst having a lower-than-expected experience ratio. When you compare them directly to the Ascent, which is literally just two transitions away, you end up finding mobs that, whilst still hard, are vastly less frustrating to deal with, and still give at least 33% more experience.

There are many cases around the server where the exp vs difficulty comparison shows random results. I think that's basically because in some places, the loot and/or resources 'compensate' for the challenge rating, which on a brief check, could look absurd. Also worth taking into account that perhaps your character's forte is simply not the burning shores.

Burning Shores and Spires is complete hell and I avoided it and still do save for one specific objective that we simply run past everything to do. Damage shields everywhere, high AC everywhere, full mobs of giant hitbox sneak attackers everywhere making it hard to -guard, and the odd set of fire giant shamans to top of off. Nope. Nope nope nope.

About the only tweaks that really need to be made to Shores are as follows:

Azer Royal Guards deleted; this mob exists to force poor AoOs into tanky dudes with biteback through use of unarmed strike. Replace with a tanky melee aura warrior if you want something that will threaten even AC-havers.

Margoyles deleted.

Lords of Fire, either flame shield removed or breach removed. One or the other is probably fine, but a damage shielding dispel bot probably shouldn't be a common mob.

The presence of high AC spawns is good. So is the presence of high AB spawns.

Water elementals do very fine in Burning shores.

Margoyles are weaklings with wand of breach spell.

Well as i mentioned we never had an issue. It all depends on party, how well geared it is, and on the class composition. It was very hard on early epics btu after not so much.

Even with two warlock-summoning Balors, the already mentioned mobs are simply not worth the time invested, I avoid fighting in the burning shores, soo... darkness/invis/sneak a path to the next transition and goodbye.

The fire giants hall and mines aren't that bad... if you have ancient water elementals or balors to summon and be the dispell bait.

So, overall, those areas are for a party with specific fortes, epic summons, high AC/high AB meleers & continous healing, arcane archers, pure flames (darkness, ball lightning, ice storm)...

The acid sheaths on the margoyles seem excessive, given how they never spawn alone and everything hits hard already.

I'd wouldn't mind guiding groups there, it's a learning experience in an epic area.

In addition to your list, Dragons also do well at the Burning Shores...


How odd.


It did make a bit more sense when all the reflexive damage out there was fire, however.

The margoyles are easily the worst part of the burning shores. They spawn in groups, have good AB, have that damned acid sheathe every single time, and hard sneak attacks. So you have three options.

1) Waste a ton of kits, since you're going to take as much damage swinging at them as you will just standing there waiting for the shield to drop(thats a lie, if you have less than 60AC, you'll just die if you remain flatfooted). You will practically be burning a healkit for every single time your character swings, more than that if you aren't a WM. Its not fun to swing, swing, healkit x4, swing, healkit x2, swing, healkit x2, swing swing, healkit x3 etc. Its also not cost effective.

2) Use a breach wand 3-4 times per engagement while eating all those sneak attacks and waste a ton of kits. This is incredibly cost ineffective.

3) Simply never go to to burning shores, because it was never worth it, and is especially not now with the new ore changes, with zinc and lead everywhere. This is the best solution, frankly. The only way to win, is not to participate.

Burning shore is bad if not prepared. Margoyles are easy if ready for them. Worst parts of the Burning shore is trying to get there for the first time. Also like the shadow plane it seems as if almost everything there has a sneak attack. But I have always enjoyed exploring there.

Totally no issue with Margoyles.

AC 44+
Improved invis
Regeneration spell on

Can handle even your 4 at once.

Use darkness wand and it's a cake walk.

Cleric + ANY meeler and even on early epics you handle burning shore with easy. all you need are 3 spells.
Spell breach wand. Darkness wand (optional, makes it so easy), improved invis wand.

flower wrote:Totally no issue with Margoyles.

AC 44+
Improved invis
Regeneration spell on

Can handle even your 4 at once.

Use darkness wand and it's a cake walk.

Cleric + ANY meeler and even on early epics you handle burning shore with easy. all you need are 3 spells.
Spell breach wand. Darkness wand (optional, makes it so easy), improved invis wand.

A cakewalk perhaps for a cleric who can burst heal damage with the heal, mass heal, and gresto spells. For those of us not able to heal oodles of damage on a whim, the burning shore is much more difficult.

That's the way every dungeon/area is, some will have an easier time and others are going to find it more difficult. It's a place you need to plan beforehand for.

I would change the shadow planes outside of cordor first. Level wise it's all over the place, fighting wights only to have cloakers appear behind and spam sneaks etc.. Shadow wolves yet you go inside the tower and fight pretty powerful vampires etc.. I have never figured out exactly what level the forest of weir area is suppose to be for.

Sab1 wrote:That's the way every dungeon/area is, some will have an easier time and others are going to find it more difficult. It's a place you need to plan beforehand for.

I would change the shadow planes outside of cordor first. Level wise it's all over the place, fighting wights only to have cloakers appear behind and spam sneaks etc.. Shadow wolves yet you go inside the tower and fight pretty powerful vampires etc.. I have never figured out exactly what level the forest of weir area is suppose to be for.

From experience I'd say low-mid 20s

Burning shore do well for balanced party.

On what do you wish places be based for? On individual characters?

I rarely if ever waste spells you mentioned there. I duck behind meeler who deals good dmg, set regen on us and use water elemental. We miss only few kits.

But i am able to deal with it on my own with elemental, wands.

Flower, instead of going hoarse repeating yourself, refer to the first time I answered this observation of yours.

I also play a character that can handle the shores alone, but even then I find that the difficulty/reward ratio of most of this section of the modules could be altered a little to offer a challenge in a less annoying way, and more reasons to visit the Shores than simply getting Abudan's key.

Iceborn wrote:Flower, instead of going hoarse repeating yourself, refer to the first time I answered this observation of yours.

I also play a character that can handle the shores alone, but even then I find that the difficulty/reward ratio of most of this section of the modules could be altered a little to offer a challenge in a less annoying way, and more reasons to visit the Shores than simply getting Abudan's key.

I believe the work put into that would do more good put to re working Arelith forest or Myon.

Could also just make the area more oppressive and difficult then put a better chance of reward at the end for people willing to slog through it.

flower wrote:I believe the work put into that would do more good put to re working Arelith forest or Myon.

I agree, similar tweaks as have been done to Benwick and Wharftown would also benefit Myon

-XXX- wrote:

flower wrote:I believe the work put into that would do more good put to re working Arelith forest or Myon.

I agree, similar tweaks as have been done to Benwick and Wharftown would also benefit Myon

thinkingemoji.jpg

-XXX- wrote:

flower wrote:I believe the work put into that would do more good put to re working Arelith forest or Myon.

I agree, similar tweaks as have been done to Benwick and Wharftown would also benefit Myon

Ouch, but also, lol.

Too soon

They'll probably still be fine, considering you can still shape into red and be fire immune, and have 60+ ac and 40+ AB, both of which are more than enough to succeed at the Shores.

If you struggle then, it's not a problem of dragonshape being too weak.