Owlbears... on steroids! AND METH! AND COOOKE

[thegingerine@gmail.com]

Just arrived at the Bridge Over the Gudrin River, level 5 party. Explored a little, fought the local beasties (no sweat), and found my way up to a plateau with two Owlbears. Being familiar with the Pathfinder ruleset (understatement), I decided to take them on after pumping the rest of my buffs. About 6 rounds in, everyone is dead. D-E-D dead. I reload, and sort through the combat log, and LO! They have a +20 to hit! 1d6 PLUS 18 DAMAGE. A BASE ATTACK BONUS OF +14! HAHA! Quite the joke, I suppose. Just for fun, I looked up "The First Owlbear," a mythic creature. ITS BAB is only +10. A normal owlbear should have a BAB of +4. Now, I'm playing with the "Challenging" ruleset, however I've turned the enemies down to "normal" difficulty (I didn't want arbitrary numbers added, nor do I need everything I fight to be "advanced" to enjoy the run...) SO I guess, unless someone important reads this and realizes, "Hmm, maybe we SHOULDN'T have turned two CR 4 creatures into a CR 12-14 encounter," then all I can say is, BEWARE THE (owl)BEARS!

[Pathfinder]

Are you sure you find only normal Owlbear? Not enraged Owlbear or anything like that?

[thegingerine@gmail.com]

I am absolutely certain that both creatures are named, simply, "Owlbear."

[Amardarial]

Owlbears are fodder by 5th level, are you using crowd control? Tanks? By level 5 I was killing 3-4 at a time no problem. (Haste is a wonderful thing!)

[thegingerine@gmail.com]

I'm well aware of how to prepare and execute competent tactics. My point, for those who fail to see it, is that the two Owlbears I found, in that specific map, may well have been overlooked by the developers, or otherwise given quite improper stats. No "regular" owlbear should have a BAB of +14, or a damage bonus of +18. That changes the creature from a solid CR 4 (two of them combining for a total of CR 6, an "average" difficulty in the tabletop game for a party of 6 fifth level characters) to CR 10 (each), or higher. You may have found other Owlbears, and they are most likely correctly balanced with proper stats. However, your anecdotal experience fails to address the very specific situation I've described. Travel to the map, climb the hill, and examine the combat log. Or don't. If I knew where to find the "Hey Devs, you guys may have fucked up!" thread, I'd post there.

[Pathfinder]

Hmm, so they are special encounter placed in the game. Yes, if you have played AP you have seen there are "not normal" versions of the monsters. So it is not that developers have been "mean" but it is more that they have done they work and during your game you most likely figure out why there are some "odd" monsters who have some odd stats/skills what are not normal. Allso why there are kind of plenty of them.

[ghilteras@gmail.com]

Looks like some mobs have insane +hit and AC because there is no real AI..

In case you have not noticed, the monsters just attack the closest enemy without any tactic except a preset set of abilities/skills they rotate. So if you would just apply the SRD stats with these dumb monsters you would wipe them in a heartbeat. They never engage your casters or your ranged opponents regardless of the monsters actual intellect so with normal stats you would just buff up the tanks and wipe them with DPS characters. Seems the devs could not make a better AI so to be able to provide with challenging encounters they just beefed some mobs stats to ludicrous levels. The enraged owlbears are one of those, but there are many many other examples.

In tabletop of course it's different as a smart GM can make it work with much lower stats because he knows what to do with monsters and how to use them and react to counter player moves so that they are a real challenge. But since this game has no AI and monsters just charge you everything is dumbed down to insane +hit bonuses and AC.

The problem with this approach is that it does never feel like beating the game when you win because in the end combat is just about luck. A raging owlbear can annihilate your party with a couple of lucky crits, but if you realod you could just own it easy (same fight) if you crit it a couple of times instead.

The game feels like a parody of Patfhfinder. The Paizo tabletop is renowned for its strategy and combos, whereas here all these crucial components are stripped down. All is left are super strong dumb monsters you have to mine down hoping they don't crit the hell out of your party.

If you ever played Divinity Original Sin you know what real tactic and challenge feels like and why this game is so much different (not in a good way).

[Mirrinor]

What does CR mean?

[Senko]

What does CR mean?

Challenge rating as I recall in the pen and paper rating its an indication of what level the average party of that level will use 1/4 of their resources to defeat. So a CR4 encounter assumes that a party of characters who are level 4 will use 1/4 of their resources (spells, items, daily abilities) to defeat it. Lower level groups can still beat them it'll just be harder and of course this is average party so a more highly optimized or badly optimized groups can have an easier/worse time.

[Lyaran]

Looks like some mobs have insane +hit and AC because there is no real AI. In case you have not noticed, the monsters just attack the closest enemy without any tactic except a preset set of abilities/skills they rotate....

That is just plain and simply wrong. They start attacking the nearest character but they switch to casters. Maybe i play a different game.