This past session was all about strategy.
My group has found that grappling spell casters is usually the best strategy, if they can keep hold. They had successfully played it out with the Alhoun in the last session, so they did it again with the Death Knight. Why fight a fully powered enemy when you can drag them into an anti-magic zone. My fault really, it was a different strategy on my part, not really intended to be part of the Alhoun/Death Knight fight, just the one after that. But, I didn’t take strategy into account when I built this dungeon, and I really should have done. Lessons learned.
The next strategy was the Alhoun’s survival. He’d made a deal, so he kept the zombies at bay for the Death Knight fight. He gave the party a hand-drawn (read: poor) map to the Dracolich, and also told them not to look at the monsters in the next room they could not avoid. This really hampered my strategy in this fight, but it made the most sense from Oblyx’s point of view, to help them succeed.
In those last two fights before the Dracolich, I did remember not to group the monsters up so badly. Give the party several lines to fight, so they can’t just blow them all up at once. In the final fight, waves of zombies, instead of all at once. Though I probably should have done one more wave, but the darkness was a more effective tactic.
The Dracolich fight tactics went a bit better for me. Breathe on them, get away from them, call for zombie reinforcements and raise waves of zombies. Occasionally just go ham on whoever was standing nearby. I didn’t kill anyone, that’s never my intent anyway, but I did manage to put a few people down in this fight. So, I feel like it was actually an appropriate challenge level for a big fight for the party. The whole dungeon was built to get harder and harder, and use their resources. Except that they took a long rest before the final floor, I think I did a good job of it. It was a lot of fights to get through without a rest, I was just never sure where they were going to do it.
The party has very much worked out their fight strategy at this point. All the necessary buffs, how to support the fighters. Balancing faerie fire, bless, inspiration, synaptic static, and other such things. It is really hard to challenge them in a fight, but I think I’ve learned a lot going through all this.
Just a few more adventures to go. Some backstory clean-up if they want to. A far-off cultist and medusa that may be being cleaned up by others. And the final destination: save the children, save the world. I have so much work to do on that.